Advancing a case for critical realism in forensic mental health scholarship and practice with youth convicted of sexual offences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose Critical realism presents a philosophical and paradigm shift in forensic mental health scholarship and practice with youth convicted of sexual offences, which addresses current deficits in the risk management approach. Through universalism and essentialism, the dominant risk management approach classifies diverse youth by criminal behaviour and risk through predictive algorithms with a failure to account for history and oppression. In contrast, critical realism addresses identity, environment and adolescent development in practice with youth convicted of sexual offences while providing explanatory depth and a focus on social justice. The purpose of this paper is to provide an alternative perspective through critical realism and address deficits in the risk management approach with youth convicted of sexual offences. Design/methodology/approach From a critical realism perspective, this paper critiques the applicability of the risk management approach with youth convicted of sexual offences by addressing tensions in the existing scholarship and practice. This paper provides clinical examples and practical application of critical realism to ground the conceptual perspective. Findings The authors argue that critical realism provides a critical alternative to tensions in the existing scholarship and practice with youth convicted of sexual offences through the addition of context, explanatory depth and a focus on social justice. Practical implications Intersectionality and developmental life course theoretical perspectives offer nuanced contextual approaches to incorporate complexity and diversity into practice with YCSOs. Explanatory depth through critical realism urges scholars to go beyond empiricism to the deeper structures and explanations for a phenomenon. A focus on social justice includes analysis of history, power and oppression in scholarship and practice with youth convicted of sexual offences. Quantitative criticalism is an example of an emerging theory that informs methods which emphasize social justice. Practice recommendations include moving beyond conceptualizing culture as a responsivity factor alone to the incorporation of diverse knowledges and ways of being. Desistance scholarship and practice approaches that include narrative redemptive scripts are examples of approaches consistent with critical realism that focus on strengths and intersectionality theory. Originality/value Critical realism is an under-utilized paradigm within forensic mental health, which is heavily focused on the dominance of the risk management approach. In scholarship and practice with youth convicted of sexual offences, a critical realism perspective adds context, explanatory depth, and a focus on social justice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.120 | 0.114 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.212 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.028 | 0.041 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.040 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.032 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".