Rewriting the Divide: Child-Centred Participation and Theoretically Informed and Evidence-Based Intervention Design

This paper contributes to debates on problematic, dominant criminological narratives by foregrounding children’s own accounts of the support they need to thrive, informing ongoing efforts to support their individual and moral development. Drawing on community-based, participatory focus groups and individual and small-group interviews with 58 children aged 10–17 attending youth centres in Cambridge (UK), the study departs from deficit-oriented, adult-led explanations that frame children primarily through risk, mental disorders, or criminalisation. The findings rework prevailing criminological intervention approaches in two ways. First, using reflexive thematic analysis, the study centres children’s lived knowledge to identify trust, belonging, voice, agency, relational consistency of care, emotional support, and autonomy as central to what makes interventions trustworthy, accessible, engaging, and effective, whilst overly didactic, rigid, or authoritarian approaches were identified as key barriers to participation and effectiveness. These accounts move beyond adult assumptions about children’s needs, showing that effective support is grounded in relational, dialogic, autonomy-supportive environments rather than deficit-oriented models. Second, the paper argues that centring children’s perspectives is necessary but not sufficient: interventions must also be theoretically informed and evidence based. Rather than treating participatory and evidence-informed approaches as competing paradigms, the study offers data supporting their integration, combining child-centred qualitative insight with theoretically specified explanations of behaviour. Implications are discussed for the ongoing development of the school-based SATNAV:Compass youth intervention programme. This reconstruction of recommended intervention design approaches retains the strengths of existing traditions whilst addressing their limitations, offering a direction for future intervention research and practice.