Intersectional social work responses to criminalisation and criminalising systems

Patrick Williams and Lauren Wroe

Chapter 7 in Handbook on Intersectionality and Social Work, 2026, pp 91-103 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: We consider the intersecting role of criminal legal and children's social care systems as they affect the lives of racially minoritised children and young people. We root our analysis in the stories and narratives of minoritised young people, as a method to contextualise newly emerging datasets that demonstrate how policing and social work converge and drive the differential treatment and punitive outcomes for racially, socially, and economically marginalised children and young people. This analysis challenges the concealing platitude of ‘unexplained disproportionality’ in relation to punitive outcomes for racially minoritised children across both systems. Exploring the interplay of criminal legal and child welfare systems in the new terrain of social care-led crime work, we refocus our ‘intersectional’ analyses away from the vulnerabilities or risks associated with marginalised young people (an identity-informed intersectionality) and towards the intersecting systems that construct these young people as risky/in need, entering them into a range of coercive processes across youth justice and children's social care spaces.

Keywords: Children's Social Care; Criminal Legal System; Intersectionality; Risk; Racism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035324453
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