Proponents of social and developmental prevention start with the assumption that the conditions that give rise to crime and antisocial behaviours lie in the processes of human socialization through families and communities, as well as in social arrangements1 that limit the opportunities for human flourishing and for full participation in mainstream institutions like school and work (France & Homel, 2006). In other words, what matters for social and developmental prevention practitioners is making conditions better for raising healthy, prosocial children, from before birth to at least early adulthood.
In concrete terms, prevention scientists are concerned with reducing the impact on children and young people of a very wide variety of problems like family violence, harsh and inconsistent parenting practices, offending by parents, brutal, neglectful or discriminatory police practices, the absence of positive adult role models in the community, an individual’s inability to regulate emotions or to exercise self-control, negative peer group influences, community norms favourable to crime and drug use, and poor quality schools that fail to engage children and which limit educational achievement (Farrington, 2007; Homel, Lincoln & Herd, 1999; Piquero, Jennings, Diamond, Farrington, Tremblay, Welsh, & Gonzalez, 2016). These kinds of problems, which occur across all levels of the ecology of human development from the individual through families, communities and schools to large-scale social and political processes, are generally referred to as risk factors for crime. Risk factors are associated with an increased probability that a child or young person will begin at some stage to engage in antisocial behaviour and criminal offending, unless something is done early to reduce these risks or to strengthen protective or promotive factors that boost positive aspects of children’s lives and their social environments.