scholarly journals ‘Just another policy document?’ Can a protocol end the criminalisation of kids in care?

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-42
Author(s):  
Kath McFarlane ◽  
Emma Colvin ◽  
Andrew McGrath ◽  
Alison Gerard
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Justice System ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Care Providers ◽  
Policy Document ◽  
Out Of Home Care ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
Home Care Providers

This article examines the New South Wales Joint Protocol to Reduce the Contact of Young People in Residential OOHC with the Criminal Justice System (2016 ) from the perspective of residential out-of-home-care providers, police, lawyers and departmental staff involved in the child welfare and criminal justice systems in New South Wales.

Care-criminalisation: The involvement of children in out-of-home care in the New South Wales criminal justice system

2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 412-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kath McFarlane
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Home Care ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Out Of Home Care ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Children's Court ◽  
Children’S Court

This article discusses the involvement in the New South Wales criminal justice system of a cohort of children in out-of-home care. The paper reports the findings of a four-year research project that investigated the relationship between the child welfare and justice systems as experienced by a cohort of children in the New South Wales Children’s Court criminal jurisdiction. Analysis of 160 case files identified that children in out-of-home care appeared before the Children’s Court on criminal charges at disproportionate rates compared to children who were not in out-of-home care. The out-of-home care cohort had a different and negative experience of the justice system, entering it at a significantly younger age and being more likely to experience custodial remand, than children who had not been in out-of-home care. While both cohorts shared many of the risk factors common to young offenders appearing before the Children’s Court, the out-of-home care cohort experienced significant additional disadvantage within the care environment (‘care-criminalisation’), such that living arrangements designed to protect them from harm instead created the environment for offending. The paper concludes by arguing that a paucity of research exists regarding the drivers and dynamics of care-criminalisation and that more research is needed to explore the criminogenic impacts of a childhood spent in out-of-home care.

scholarly journals Imposed Stories: Prisoner Self-narratives in the Criminal Justice System in New South Wales, Australia

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maggie Hall ◽  
Kate Rossmanith
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
South Wales

This article examines the ways in which offenders are required to provide very particular accounts of themselves and to self-narrate in confined ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in the New South Wales justice system, it explores how the stories that offenders are made to accept and tell about themselves often bear little relationship to their own reflections. It analyses how, despite the expectations of judges and prison authorities, these self-narratives are not products of an offender’s soul-searching concerning his past actions and experience; rather they are products of an official legal narrative being imposed on an offender whose capacity to own and enact such a narrative is already seriously compromised.

The Prosecution of Child Sexual Assault: A Survey of NSW DPP Solicitors

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judy Cashmor
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Sexual Assault ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Full Advantage ◽  
Justice System ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Child Witnesses ◽  
Child Sexual Assault ◽  
South Wales

Over the last decade, there has been a number of changes in the law and in courtroom procedures in relation to the prosecution of child sexual assault. These changes were intended to ease the restrictions on the admission of children's evidence and to make the experience of testifying less stressful for child witnesses. Court statistics on the outcome of child sexual assault prosecutions and the results of a survey by the NSW Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) of prosecuted cases of child sexual assault in New South Wales were examined to throw some light on the way such prosecutions and the child witnesses involved were dealt with in the criminal justice system. One of the major concerns was that while some reforms have allowed more and younger children to give evidence, full advantage has not been taken of other reforms to ease children's experience at court.

scholarly journals Contact and Adoption Plans for Children Adopted from Out-of-home Care in New South Wales

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 404-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
Betty Luu ◽  
Amy Conley Wright ◽  
Judith Cashmore
Keyword(s):  
Home Care ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Out Of Home Care ◽  
South Wales

‘I feel like I failed him by ringing the police’: Criminalising disability in Australia

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 290-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth McCausland ◽  
Eileen Baldry
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
New South ◽  
Indigenous Australians ◽  
Cognitive Disability ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems ◽  
People With Disability ◽  
Therapeutic Measures ◽  
Justice Systems ◽  
And Control

The stigmatisation, control, criminalisation and incarceration of people with disability have a long history. While in recent decades there has been increasing commitment to the rights of people with disabilities by governments in western nations, the over-representation of people with mental and cognitive disability in criminal justice systems has continued. Although there are similarities amongst Western jurisdictions in regard to the treatment of people with disability in justice systems, there are particularities in Australia that will be drawn out in this article. We argue that disadvantaged people with mental and cognitive disability are being managed by and entrenched in criminal justice systems across Australia’s six states and two territories, including so-called diversionary and therapeutic measures that appear to accommodate their disability. In the absence of early and appropriate diagnosis, intervention and support in the community, some disadvantaged and poor persons with mental and cognitive disability, in particular Indigenous Australians, are being systematically criminalised. Criminal justice agencies and especially youth and adult prisons have become normalised as places of disability management and control. Drawing on research that focuses in detail on the jurisdictions of the Northern Territory and New South Wales, we argue for a reconstruction of the understanding of and response to people with these disabilities in the criminal justice system.

Battered Women, Startled Householders and Psychological Self-Defence: Anglo-Australian Perspectives

2013 ◽  
Vol 77 (5) ◽  
pp. 433-457 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicola Wake
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Battered Women ◽  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Loss Of Control ◽  
Loss Of Self ◽  
South Wales ◽  
Self Defence

This article provides a timely and critical reappraisal of the interconnected, but discrete, doctrines of loss of self-control, under ss 54–56 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, and self-defence within s. 76 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. The loss of control conceptualisation renders it difficult for defendants to claim the partial defence where exculpatory self-defence has been rejected, and fear of serious violence is adduced. This doctrinal incoherence has been exacerbated by the fact that s. 43 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 effectively legitimises the use of disproportionate force in self-defence, but only in ‘startled householder’ cases. A more appropriate avenue of reform is provided by developments in Australian jurisdictions. This comparative extirpation engages the introduction of a new partial defence of self-preservation/psychological self-defence predicated on the notion of excessive utilisation of force in self-defence as in New South Wales, supplemented with a ‘social framework’ provision, akin to that in Victoria. The new defence would avoid the problems associated with requiring the abused woman to establish a loss of self-control and/or affording an affirmative defence in ‘startled householder’ cases.

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