Youth Justice and Young Women

Last week’s announcements on knife crime, and the wider statement on modernising the youth justice system, feel like a genuinely positive moment. Not just because of the policies themselves, but because they are underpinned by long-term, more dependable investment in Youth Justice Services.

In his statement on building a modern youth justice system fit for the future, Jake Richards recognises two things that many in the sector have long known: that the system has made progress, and that the children coming into contact with it today face increasingly complex harm that requires a different kind of response.

What is less often discussed, however, is how gender shapes young people’s experiences of serious youth violence, particularly for young women and girls. Public narratives around knife crime still tend to centre on boys and young men. That reflects part of the picture, but it misses how girls often experience violence differently and more quietly.

Young women and girls can show up in serious youth violence by:

- Carrying knives for protection rather than status

- Holding or transporting weapons for others

- Experience threats involving knives within peer or intimate relationships

- Living with fear, coercion and control that never registers as “knife crime”

They are present, but rarely visible.

This also includes girls and young women who are in intimate partner relationships with young men affected by serious youth violence or knife crime, where fear, loyalty, coercion, and protection can shape behaviour in ways that sit outside traditional understandings of “offending” or “risk”, but deeply influence how violence is experienced and navigated.

This invisibility is not about a lack of commitment from professionals, far from it! It is about the systems designed to respond to what is most visible: arrests, possession, and public acts of violence. Gendered harm, especially where it overlaps with exploitation and intimate partner violence, is harder to capture unless it is explicitly looked for.

As youth justice reforms are rolled out, with a renewed focus on early intervention, reduced use of custody, and more confident funding, there is a real opportunity to ensure responses reflect the full reality of young people’s lives.

This feels like a moment worth holding onto. Not as an endpoint, but as a foundation we choose to build on, carefully, thoughtfully, and with those who are most often unseen in mind.