Understanding the Child Before Judging the Behaviour

By Lynda Gibbs KC (Hon), Dean, ICCA and Wendy Showell Nicholas

When a child enters a courtroom, it is an alien environment and one in which they assume they will be judged by everyone there who seems more familiar with that arena. That child may appear disengaged. They may avoid eye contact, interrupt, seem unable to listen, or react angrily when challenged. They may appear indifferent to what has happened or incapable of appreciating its seriousness. To those encountering them for the first time, the temptation is often to describe their behaviour as difficult, disrespectful, disruptive, aggressive, non-compliant.

That behaviour is the final chapter of a much longer story.

Our respective professional experiences - one in trauma-informed practice, TIP, social work and psychotherapy, and the other developing training for those prosecuting and representing children and vulnerable people within the justice system - have repeatedly brought us back to the same question. How well do we understand a child or young person before we decide what their behaviour means?

That question matters more than we might think because children rarely arrive in the criminal justice system untouched by everything that has happened before. In order to understand this fully, we must adopt a biopsychosocial model. Adverse childhood experiences are hugely impactful. For many children, there may have been trauma, bereavement, neglect or instability. High percentages of others have unmet mental-health needs, neurodivergence, communication difficulties or special educational needs and disabilities. Some children will have experienced repeated school exclusion, family breakdown, poverty, exploitation, violence or involvement with social care. Frequently these experiences do not occur in isolation. They accumulate horribly.

None of this means that harmful behaviour should be ignored or that children and young people should not be expected to take responsibility for their actions dependent of course upon their age. Understanding is not the same as excusing. But meaningful accountability requires us all to understand what we are asking a child to account for, what capacities they possess, what experiences have shaped their responses, what systemic issues have contributed to the child appearing in a court room and what might realistically help them behave differently in future. Children are more capable than adults of moving away from criminal behaviours and developing better strategies.

When behaviour communicates something we have failed to hear

Professionals working with children quickly learn that behaviour can often communicate what a young person cannot, or does not yet have the linguistic skills to, say.

A child who appears hostile may very well be frightened. A child who cannot remain still may be overwhelmed rather than deliberately disruptive. A young person who appears indifferent may have learned that detachment is safer than showing vulnerability. Someone who repeatedly fails to attend appointments or comply with instructions may have difficulties with executive functioning, anxiety, literacy, memory or organisation that have never been recognised.

Trauma experiences also affect the way children and young people perceive and respond to authority. Experiences of danger, instability or abuse can create heightened sensitivity to threat. A response that appears disproportionate to an adult observer may make much more sense when viewed through a child’s experiences.

This creates difficulties because systems are often designed around observable behaviour. Schools respond to disruption. Police respond to offending. Courts respond to alleged criminal acts. Health services respond to symptoms. Social care responds to identified safeguarding concerns.

The child, however, experiences none of those boundaries.

Their education, mental health, family circumstances, neurological development, relationships and behaviour all coexist. The services responding to them operate separately, with different thresholds, language, and resources. That is incredibly confusing.

The result can be that each ‘institution’ responds to one manifestation of the difficulty without any holistic responsibility for understanding and understanding the whole child. Bronfenbrenner captures this in his ecological systems theory as far back as 1979 and it was expanded and modified into the 2000's.

When unmet need becomes misconduct

Behaviour that might once have been understood as a welfare, educational or health problem gradually becomes reframed as a disciplinary problem and, eventually, a criminal one.

For example, consider a child struggling in school, or whose parents who do not bring them to school regularly (this could be for numerous reasons, DV, substance misuse, mental health issues or just neglect). The child begins falling behind and struggling and their behaviour becomes increasingly challenging. Sanctions often follow. That child may be repeatedly removed from lessons or excluded, which in turn disrupts their education and alters their social group. Their connection with education weakens. Their difficulties remain unidentified or insufficiently supported. They spend more time outside structured environments and become more vulnerable to exploitation or offending. This is much more of a problem than we realise or acknowledge.

No single event necessarily causes what follows in the scenario above. Nor is there an inevitable trajectory from exclusion from school to criminal justice involvement, but we know that the statistics are clearly demonstrative of a link. A British Journal of Criminology study (Cornish & Brennan, 2025) using matched-pair analysis of 20,000+ pupils found excluded children had roughly double the risk of a serious violence conviction within a year. The Chief Medical Officer's own annual report on child health described youth offending teams as encountering children who "have not benefitted from early intervention," with 43% of children on community orders having identified emotional and mental health needs. 

Each lost opportunity for understanding and intervention can narrow the alternatives available later to those children.

By the time such a child appears before a court, the justice system may be asked to respond to difficulties that have developed over many years that have become entrenched and categorised without any real context.

That should concern us all.

The courtroom is capable of determining questions of criminal responsibility and imposing lawful consequences. It is not designed to repair childhood trauma, diagnose neurodevelopmental conditions, restore failed educational relationships or provide sustained therapeutic intervention.

What if those underlying difficulties were recognised, and the justice system avoided repeatedly responding to their consequences.

Participation is not simply attendance

Our experience with vulnerable people in legal proceedings also raises another important issue: being physically present in a courtroom does not necessarily mean that a child is participating effectively.

The vocabulary of the justice system is unfamiliar even to many adults. For a child with communication difficulties, trauma, anxiety, ADHD, autism, learning disability or poor literacy, the demands are considerable, and therefore trauma informed practice should be a basic expectation in the courtroom and any other institution with which the child has contact.

A young person may be required to sit still for extended periods, understand unfamiliar terminology, follow competing accounts of events, regulate their emotions, remember advice, respond to questions and make decisions with potentially life-changing consequences. Their inability to do those things in the expected manner can itself be misinterpreted. Children are not mini-adults.

Effective advocacy in this sphere therefore requires more than explaining the law. Those representing children must be alert to communication needs, vulnerability and the possibility that conventional approaches to taking instructions or preparing a case may simply not work.

It means using shorter questions, allowing more time, checking understanding rather than asking whether something has been understood, using visual aids, taking breaks, modifying language or considering the environment in which conversations take place.

These are not concessions that remove responsibility from a young person. They are measures that make meaningful participation, and therefore meaningful responsibility, possible.

Prevention begins long before the courtroom

If, as a society, we genuinely hope that fewer children enter the criminal justice system, prevention cannot begin with the first arrest.

It must begin wherever difficulties first become visible.

That may be a nursery noticing developmental differences; a school recognising that repeated behavioural sanctions are not changing behaviours; a GP identifying anxiety or depression and taking steps to address it; social care understanding the cumulative effect of instability; or a youth worker recognising that a young person is being drawn into exploitative relationships.

The crucial question is not simply, “How do we stop this behaviour?” It is also, “What is this behaviour telling us about the child and their world?” That requires professionals to be curious and invested before becoming punitive.

It requires systems capable of sharing information appropriately - we know this is very challenging - and acting before difficulties meet increasingly high thresholds for intervention. It requires recognition that children may communicate distress through behaviour rather than words. It also requires services with sufficient resources to respond once the need has been identified.

Early recognition without accessible intervention merely produces a better documented unmet need.

A trauma-informed approach is not an absence of boundaries

There can sometimes be fear that trauma-informed practice means lowering expectations, avoiding consequences or explaining away harmful behaviour.

It need mean none of those things.

A trauma-informed approach asks professionals to understand the context in which behaviour occurs and to avoid responses that unnecessarily reproduce fear, or humiliation. It combines appropriate boundaries with an understanding of what will help a young person regulate, participate, learn and change. And the system is already beginning to develop in this way: it is the Youth Justice Board's own stated principle, Child First (2022), and the same public-health reframing sits behind Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit.

Accountability may be more meaningful when a young person understands what they have done, its effect upon others and what is expected of them. A purely punitive response may achieve immediate compliance but is unlikely to change the circumstances or thinking that produced the behaviour.

The question is therefore not whether society should choose between accountability and compassion. It is whether accountability without understanding is likely to achieve the change we say we want.

Understanding before responding

Perhaps the most important cultural shift would be a simple one: moving from asking “What is wrong with this child?” towards asking “What has happened to this child, what does this child need, and what will help them move forward?”

That question does not belong exclusively to therapists, teachers, social workers, lawyers or judges. It belongs to us as a society.

By the time a child reaches the criminal justice system, opportunities may already have been missed. But that does not mean that the justice system itself should stop being curious.

Every professional encounter with a child remains an opportunity—to recognise a vulnerability, enable genuine participation, identify an unmet need or interrupt a trajectory that otherwise risks becoming entrenched.

If our principal objective is to help young people change their lives for the better, the starting point must surely be to understand the child before we judge the behaviour.

References and further reading: 

[1] Service needs of young people affected by ACEs: UK qualitative evidence https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7467867/
[2] Understanding the prevalence of ACEs (Public Health Wales) https://phw.nhs.wales/files/aces/the-prisoner-ace-survey/
[3] No safe space: cumulative disadvantage, exclusion, offending and victimisation (Butler et al., Public Health, 2026) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033350625005633
[4] Exclusion from School and Risk of Serious Violence: A Target Trial Emulation Study (Cornish & Brennan, British Journal of Criminology, 2025) https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bjc/azaf015/8051126
[5] Timpson Review of School Exclusion, 2019 https://data.parliament.uk/DepositedPapers/Files/DEP2019-0527/Timpson_Review_of_School_Exclusion_May_2019.pdf
[6] Evidence Review: Poverty, Youth Crime and Violence (Youth Endowment Fund/UCL, 2025) https://youthendowmentfund.org.uk/reports/evidence-review-on-poverty-and-youth-crime-and-violence/
[7] A Guide to Child First (Youth Justice Board, 2022) https://yjresourcehub.uk/a-guide-to-child-first-youth-justice-board-for-england-and-wales-october-2022/
[8] Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists written evidence to Parliament https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/87008/pdf/
[9] https://ifs.org.uk/publications/effect-sure-start-youth-misbehaviour-crime-and-contacts-childrens-social-care
[10] "No One Knows": offenders with learning disabilities and learning difficulties (Talbot, Prison Reform Trust) researchgate.net/publication/232990964_No_One_Knows_Offenders_with_learning_disabilities_and_learning_difficulties
[11] Chief Medical Officer Annual Report, Chapter 12: Youth Justice https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a74ba66e5274a3cb2866b51/33571_2901304_CMO_Chapter_12.pdf
[12] Children's Commissioner for England: mental health waiting times press notice (May 2025) https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/news-and-blogs/press-notice-childrens-commissioner-calls-for-urgent-action-to-tackle-waiting-times-and-inequality-in-mental-health-care-for-children/
[13] Too Little, Too Late: Early Help and Early Intervention Spending in England (Action for Children) https://media.actionforchildren.org.uk/documents/Too_Little_Too_Late_Report_Final.pdf
[14] High thresholds for neglect delaying interventions (Community Care) https://www.communitycare.co.uk/content/news/high-thresholds-for-neglect-delaying-interventions-to-protect-children-find-safeguarding-heads
[15] Using the biopsychosocial model for identifying subgroups of detained juveniles at risk of re-offending https://capmh.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13034-021-00379-1

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Lynda Gibbs KC (Hon) Dean

Lynda was called to the Bar in 1993  and practised in criminal and family law on the Midland Circuit before embarking on a legal academic career. She became Dean of the ICCA ( Inns of Court College of Advocacy) n 2019 and leads post qualification and Bar training.

Lynda was appointed KC Honoris Causa in 2020 in recognition of her work to promote a fairer justice system for children and vulnerable people, and to improve Bar training. She sits as a fee-paid Judge in the Mental Health Tribunal.

Wendy Showell Nicholas

Wendy Showell Nicholas is a BACP accredited psychotherapist and organisational consultant with over 20 years of experience supporting individuals and institutions whose work carries an exceptional human cost.

Specialising in vicarious trauma, trauma-informed culture change, and professional resilience, Wendy works with legal professionals, healthcare leaders, social workers, educators and national policymakers across England and Wales.

Her work spans individual psychotherapy, strategic organisational consultancy, and national training programmes — integrating clinical insight with practical, evidence-informed approaches to culture, leadership, and wellbeing.

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