3 JULY 2026

Naming Social Work: Reflections on Racial Disproportionality in Child Remand

By Dr Caroline Bald (The Open University), Dr Danica Darley (University of Sheffield), and Prof. Fiona Dyer (University of Strathclyde). 

The TRYJustice Network exists to create space for conversations that rarely happen within the boundaries of a single profession or discipline. This June’s member meeting, focusing on the persistent racial disproportionality in the use of remand for children, brought together people with lived experience, practitioners, researchers and policy colleagues from across youth justice, criminology, education, restorative justice, violence prevention and social work. The richness of the discussion lay not in reaching consensus but in the willingness to examine a complex problem through different professional and personal lenses.

Our own reflections following the meeting centred less on the findings themselves than on the language through which they were discussed. Across the day, references were made to children’s services, social work, social care and local authorities, often interchangeably. Such fluid terminology is understandable within interdisciplinary discussions, yet it also prompts reflection on what becomes visible - or invisible - when professional identities are absorbed into organisational descriptions.

Across the UK four nations, these distinctions are expressed differently. In England, policy discourse has increasingly adopted the language of children’s social care and local authority provision. Scotland continues to speak explicitly of justice social work, locating it within wider ambitions for care experienced children through The Promise. Wales has embedded children’s rights and well-being within legislative and policy reform, while in Northern Ireland the integration of health and social care has maintained a visible statutory role for social work within children’s services. These are not only differences in terminology; they reflect different histories of professional identity, public policy and the relationship between care and justice.

Social care describes a system of support. Local authorities describe organisations charged with statutory responsibilities. Social work, by contrast, is a regulated profession with a protected title, a distinct ethical framework and specific statutory duties. Although social workers practise alongside many other professionals, including youth workers, teachers, educational psychologists, police officers, restorative justice practitioners and health colleagues, the contribution of each profession is informed by its own body of knowledge. Maintaining those distinctions is not professional protectionism. Rather, it provides greater clarity about responsibility, accountability and the perspectives that different disciplines bring to complex social problems. 

Viewed through a social work lens, discussions about racial disproportionality in remand inevitably extend beyond criminal justice decision-making. They encompass children’s experiences of poverty, racism, care, education, disability, neurodivergence, trauma, family relationships and community life. Social work has traditionally understood these not as competing explanations but as interconnected dimensions of children’s lived experience. The challenge, therefore, is not only to understand why some groups of children are disproportionately represented at the point of remand, but to consider the accumulation of experiences and decisions that lead to that point. 

The publication of the Ministry of Justice’s Youth Justice White Paper provides an important context for these discussions. Its emphasis on prevention, Child First principles and community-based responses reflects a welcome recognition that children’s contact with justice systems cannot be understood in isolation from their wider lives. At the same time, responses from organisations such as the Association for Youth Justice have highlighted the importance of ensuring that prevention does not become synonymous with increased surveillance or a renewed emphasis on parental responsibility without equivalent attention to structural inequality, community resources and children’s rights. These tensions were reflected throughout the discussions.

One of the strengths of the TRYJustice network is its genuinely interdisciplinary nature. Around the room were voices from youth justice, criminology, sociology, violence prevention, restorative justice, education, policy, advocacy and social work. We were struck by how often discussions about children’s lives are framed through the language of systems, services and agencies, while the contribution of social work itself can become less visible. When discussing calls for more data, it was felt to be redundant without addressing transparency of access to current systems data such as collation gaps or gatekeeping. That aside, we recognised a significant gap in child Gypsy, Roma and Traveller (GRT) data, in part due to underrecording.  

Social work occupies a unique position within the lives of many children who come into contact with the youth justice system. So too has social work much to address when it comes to our own albeit corporate parenting in relation to children in conflict with the law. The results of Scotland's Independent Care Review, The Promise, is an example of national commitment to making improvements for all care experienced children and young people.  A particular focus of the work of the Promise Scotland, the organisation tasked with helping to drive forward The Promise, is around improving the collection and use of data in order to improve outcomes and experiences of the care and justice systems. In 2025, the Black Promise was launched to highlight the barriers that exist for black and brown children and their families in Scotland, and to work collaboratively for meaningful change. 

Before a child ever reaches criminal justice systems, social workers may already be involved through family support, safeguarding, education, mental health, disability services, contextual safeguarding work, or care experience. We may already  have been involved in community or youth work cut increasingly to the bone; therefore social work has a unique opportunity to be present long before a criminal justice intervention occurs. We should lean into prevention as social justice values and be concerned not only with risk, but also with relationships, development, rights, welfare and belonging.

This perspective feels particularly important when considering disproportionality in remand.
The available evidence continues to demonstrate significant racial disparities in the use of remand for children, particularly for Black and Mixed heritage children. At the same time, recent inspection findings show that many children placed on remand have experienced trauma, neurodivergence, care experience, family instability and unmet support needs. Many spend only a short period in custody before being released back into the community - their time on remand serving only as disruption. 

As identified in the Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights (CRER,2025), there is a real lack of available data by ethnicity on key parts of the justice system in Scotland. Their findings highlight some areas of concern including disproportionate use of stop and search powers, and subsequent use of strip searching on black and minority ethnic children and young people. Viewed through a social work lens, these are not simply questions about criminal justice decision-making. There are also questions about public policy perceptions of childhood, inequality and access to support - such as seen through the lens of systemic racism. The role of social work seems vital here, leaning into our professional curiosity could lead us to think about what support was available to the young person before and after contact with justice services? We know youth work and community work has retracted year on year but what role does, and should, social work play in plugging these gaps? We also know that where provision exists, such as sports facilities, social barriers to access exist for some children. Thinking about accessing restorative justice opportunities specifically, we asked about whether the necessity of a guilty plea is in itself a barrier. We considered how risk is fundamentally understood and operationalised, let alone communicated.  We know the impact of adultification for example,  seen for example in age assessments or ageing out of care and evolving capacity, recognising children and young people are not static - their understanding develops through time, rather than being fixed due to their age. 

We discussed whose voices were heard? Thinking here too of the realities of child imprisonment leading to the introduction of PAVA spray as behaviour control. Who is seen as vulnerable and who was seen primarily as risky? Here too, we ask the role of social work in timed out care and the use of unregulated placements post-16 #KeepCaringTo18. These questions do not remove responsibility for harmful behaviour. Rather, they recognise that children’s lives are shaped by wider social contexts and that understanding those contexts is essential if we are serious about reducing disproportionality. And we are speaking about children. The main standout from the Ministry of Justice’s White Paper on Youth Justice was child first language running through. Albeit bookended by risking a return to parental blame and shame not long after recognising the contextual safeguarding risks resulting from poverty, mental health and violence.
 

The social work profession has long been concerned with the relationship between individual experiences and structural inequalities. Discussions about remand therefore connect directly to broader questions of poverty, racism, exclusion from education, care experience, disability, neurodivergence and community resources.
This was one of our key takeaways from the day. If we are to reduce disproportionality, we cannot focus solely on what happens inside the courtroom. We also need to look upstream. Social worker Stan Cohen’s well-known “upstream” analogy encourages us to ask why families are ending up in difficulty in the first place, rather than only responding once they have entered crisis or its accumulative aftermath. Applied to youth justice, this means paying closer attention to prevention, family support, community provision, education, youth work and social care alongside court processes and sentencing decisions. The cost savings of decarceration must be paid forward to those communities in need of respite. 

For social work, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is ensuring that our contribution remains visible within increasingly complex systems. The opportunity is to bring a perspective that connects justice, care, rights and relationships rather than treating them as separate concerns. 

The discussions at TRYJustice reinforced the importance of continuing these conversations across disciplinary boundaries. Addressing disproportionality in remand is not solely the responsibility of youth justice services, courts or social workers. It requires collaboration between all those who work alongside children and families. Though as these conversations continue, it is worth remembering that social work has always had something important to say about how societies respond to children who are struggling, excluded or marginalised. It also must hold itself to account for our history of poor care.

As youth justice evolves following the Government’s White Paper, clarity about language is more than semantics. The professions we name shape the knowledge we value, the responsibilities we recognise and ultimately the solutions we imagine. If social work’s contribution remains invisible behind organisational labels, we risk overlooking one of the professions uniquely positioned to bridge prevention, safeguarding, family support, community justice and children’s rights.

Perhaps one of the questions we should keep asking is not simply how we reduce disproportionality in remand, but how we strengthen the networks of care, support and belonging that make remand less likely to be needed in the first place. A whole system change towards valuing the whole human experience - the very focus of the TRYJustice network.