Introduction

When in autumn 2006 the government introduced plans for intervening at the perinatal stage and in the babyhood of children growing up in dysfunctional families (Cabinet Office, 2006), media discussions raised the spectres of foetal antisocial behaviour orders (‘fasbos’), and electronic monitoring companies forcing their way into the homes of large families and unmarried teenage mothers in order to ‘tag’ their toddlers. The influence of research on recent strategies for ‘stopping it before it starts’ is plain to see. At a Downing Street seminar on social exclusion, Blair (2006) pointed out: ‘There is now a wealth of empirical data to analyse. The purport of it is clear. You can detect and predict the children and families likely to go wrong’. In the context of issues debated in the present volume, and the recent ‘shift from a post- to a pre-crime society … in which the possibility of forestalling risks competes with and even takes precedence over responding to wrongs done’ (Zedner, 2007: 262), our misgivings in reaction to these developments in policy should be clear (see especially Boswell and Nash, Chapters 3 and 6 in this volume). Viewed pessimistically, the prospect of a society in which individuals are locked up for crimes that they have not committed, purely on the basis of prediction, as depicted in the film Minority Report (2002) seems to draw ever nearer. Yet, realistic concern about the possible drift of such strategies should not blind us to the existence and value of a substantial body of research into early risk factors associated with subsequent antisocial behaviour and early preventive interventions.

This research on early developmental risk factors and interventions is useful, not least because it helps in differentiating low-risk, ‘normal’ behaviours from the high-risk, more serious forms of the behaviours and vulnerability that concern us in this volume. Criminal career and longitudinal studies commonly identify different types of groups of young people who offend and pathways (trajectories) into and out of crime, each with distinguishing characteristics that can be traced back to infancy. Moffitt (1993) has famously contrasted ‘adolescent limited’ with ‘life-course persistent’ offending. This theoretical distinction accords with common knowledge of many young people who go through a phase of lawbreaking in adolescence but quickly grow out of it, in contrast to a minority who have a history of conduct problems from early childhood and who seem more deeply involved in a criminal lifestyle.