Mentoring Program Helps Justice-Involved Youth Build Accountability

Introduction

Justice-involved youth frequently carry the weight of complex trauma, insecure attachment, and adverse childhood experiences that impair emotional regulation and identity formation, raising their risk of continued antisocial behavior. Saladino and colleagues (2026) ground their work in mentalization theory, explaining that under emotional stress, traumatized youth often default to “hypomentalizing” or “hypermentalizing” states—oversimplifying or over-interpreting others’ intentions in ways that fuel reactive aggression. Rather than treating deviant behavior as a moral failing, the authors frame it as a disruption in reflective capacity. The Vis à Vis project, developed at the “Magna Graecia” University of Catanzaro under the European Researchers’ Night initiative SuperScienceMe, set out to test whether structured mentoring and group work could help justice-involved adolescents move toward self-awareness, responsibility, and restorative action.

Methods

The project used a qualitative, community-based exploratory design rather than standardized psychometric testing, a choice the authors say preserved a flexible, trust-building relational space. Twelve participants took part: five male justice-involved juveniles from a ministerial residential community and seven graduate mentors (85% female) from a forensic and criminological psychology program. Data came from case file reviews, staff interviews, and structured debriefing sessions across five phases, culminating in three days of experiential dyad and group activities organized around the progression “I,” “You,” “We.”

Results

The project unfolded across four core activities, each building on the last. In the first session, “Getting to Know Each Other and Building Friendships,” participants filled out an identity card disclosing their name, passions, fears, and dreams. Youth initially used humor and irony to deflect the emotional weight of the exercise, but the mentors modeling vulnerability “encouraged them to lower their guard.” The second session revealed that many youth could not generate a single adjective, positive or negative, to describe themselves. As one mentor put it, “The difficulty was not simply finding a word, but accepting that a positive word could belong to them.” When mentors highlighted traits they’d observed in the participants, the effect was immediate—one youth looked up in surprise and whispered, “You’re right… I had never thought about myself this way before.” The authors interpreted this as evidence that external validation from a mentor can bypass the harsh self-judgment common among these youth, at least momentarily. The third session pushed the participants to be even more vulnerable: participants held hands with eyes closed, and then wrote inside a traced hand outline what they’d perceived. One mentor described “a sudden surge of repressed anger, as if something bad had happened to me personally,” later realizing she was absorbing the youth’s internal state; the youth confirmed it, saying, “I can feel you’re becoming agitated because my own anger is passing through our hands.” The final activity had participants write letters to their past and future selves, then weave selected lines into a single collective letter, recorded as shared audio. One mentor summarized the closing mood as “a mix of pride and melancholy” due to their satisfaction with the finished product combined with sadness that the structured relationship was ending. Across every activity, mentors’ willingness to be personally vulnerable, not just present, was what allowed guarded youth to lower their guard, particularly when mentors offered positive reflections these teens couldn’t generate about themselves.

Discussion

The authors interpret the youths’ early guardedness as adaptive responses shaped by histories of relational trauma, consistent with the ACEs framework and with theoretical work linking cumulative adversity to impaired emotional regulation and identity development (Saladino et al., 2026). This reframing is important because a young person who won’t make eye contact or who deflects with humor isn’t necessarily uncooperative, but may be protecting himself using strategies that once kept him safe. The authors give particular weight to narrative reconstruction as a mechanism of change. By writing to their past and future selves and hearing their own words woven into a collective letter, participants engaged in exactly the kind of integrative storytelling that mentalization theory identifies as necessary for repairing fragmented traumatic experience. This connects to Maruna’s (2001) work on desistance from crime, which argues that lasting behavioral change depends on constructing a coherent self-narrative that no longer centers on offending—a process the authors argue mentoring can scaffold, though it cannot substitute for. 

Implications for Mentoring Programs

Based on these outcomes, programs working with justice-involved or trauma-exposed youth should consider explicitly preparing mentors to model vulnerability as youth responded most strongly  to moments when mentors disclosed their own reactions, named traits they had genuinely observed in the young person, or admitted discomfort themselves. Programs might build structured self-disclosure prompts into mentor training rather than leaving this to improvisation. Programs aiming to build accountability and future-orientation may need to first address youth self-esteem and self-perception, since a youth who cannot see anything positive cannot construct a non-deviant future identity. While the hand-holding exercise produced some of the project’s most powerful moments of attunement, it also created hypervigilance and resistance. Programs adopting similar techniques should ensure mentors receive specific training in recognizing and managing dissociative or defensive reactions in real time. Finally, programs should plan deliberately for the emotional weight of ending a mentoring relationship as even short-term, structured mentoring can create attachment bonds that matter to these youth, and that transition or closure rituals deserve programmatic attention.

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