The University of Sydney
Justice Collaboration
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5th Edition, October 2024
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Welcome to the fifth edition of our newsletter!
The University of Sydney's Justice Collaboration aims to improve justice outcomes and to ultimately prevent crime.
The University of Sydney has numerous strengths in this area and has a track record of work across disciplines, faculties and research centres directly and indirectly relevant to justice systems and people in conflict with the law. These newsletters will showcase such work.
Through a whole-of-university approach, the University of Sydney can have a significant positive impact on justice systems and outcomes.
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The University of Sydney’s central campus sits on the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation and has campuses as well as teaching and research facilities situated on the ancestral lands of the Wangal, Deerubbin, Tharawal, Ngunnawal, Wiradjuri, Gamilaroi, Bundjulong, Wiljali and Gereng Gureng peoples. We pay our respects to elders, past, present, and emerging who have cared and continue to care for Country.
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Child Protection: Domestic & Family Violence, Alcohol & Other Drug Use, and Mental Health Issues
Funded by the Australian Nation Research Organisation for Women’s Safety, and ustilising the newly established NSW Human Services Dataset a team of researchers from across the University of Sydney investigated the experiences and needs of children from families experiencing domestic and family violence (DFV), parental alcohol and other drug use (AOD), and parental mental health issues (MH).
Researchers found that 33 per cent of children reported to NSW’s Child Protection Helpline had either experienced parental DFV or DFV alongside parental AOD use and/or MH issues. When all variables are controlled for, children who are experiencing DFV, parental AOD use and parental MH issues are twice as likely to be removed from their parent’s care.
The research underscores the importance of greater investment in integrated models of care for MH issues, AOD use and DFV, along with evidence-based, trauma-informed early interventions for children.
The research can be accessed through the project page on the ANROWS website.
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Dr Lobna Yassine: Critical Whiteness in the Child Protection & Youth Justice Systems
In a recent book chapter, Collaboration member Dr Lobna Yassine interrogated the Youth Level of Service Case Management Inventory, a risk assessment tool used in Australian youth justice systems. In the chapter she problematises the tool, suggesting that ‘risk assessments do not simply predict, but rather produce and re-produce the ‘risky juvenile’’. Presented as neutral and objective the tool ‘guarantees that the gaze remains fixed on individuals and families, rather than to the institutions and policies that produce risky environments for children and communities’. In doing so, the tool neglects wider issues of racism, colonialism and poverty, while reinforcing the overrepresentation of marginalised groups in the youth justice system.
In an article co-authored with Caitlin van Noppen and Katarzyna Olcoń, Dr Yassine also analysed practice standards for the NSW child protection system. The authors found that these documents established Whiteness—and White parenting—as the norm, and ‘entirely omit the impacts of racialization and Whiteness despite the historical context and other evidence of institutional racism embedded in human service organizations and the ongoing overrepresentation of racialized children in the child protection system.’
‘YLS-CMI Risk Assessment Tool and Neutrality’ is a chapter in Youth Crime, Youth Justice and Children’s Courts in NSW, an edited book that can purchased through the Lexis Nexis website. ‘Whiteness in our understanding of culture: A critical discourse analysis of the cultural responsivity practice frameworks in child protection’ can be accessed through Qualitative Social Work.
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The long-term effectiveness of a personality targeted substance use prevention program on aggression from adolescence to early adulthood
Collaboration member Associate Professor Emma Barrett, her colleagues from the Matilda Centre and researchers from the University of Montreal recently published an article showing how the Matilda Centre’s personality targeted substance use prevention program delivered in Year 8 in schools significantly reduces both reactive and proactive aggression up to 7 years following intervention.
The Preventure program is a selective prevention intervention that targets adolescents that relate highly to one of the four personality risk factors for substance use: sensation seeking, hopelessness, impulsivity, and anxiety sensitivity (Conrod, Stewart, Comeau, & Maclean, 2006; Newton et al., 2016). Preventure provides personality-specific coping skills via a two-session brief intervention incorporating best practice principles for substance misuse (i.e. CBT, MI).
The results of the study suggests a brief personality-targeted intervention may have long-term impacts on aggression among young people. The analysis found that students who received the Preventure program demonstrated larger reductions in aggression over the 7-year follow-up period, from adolescence to young adulthood. Young people who received the Preventure intervention demonstrated accelerated declines in aggressive behaviors compared to those who did not receive the intervention.
The article, published in Psychological Medicine can be accessed here.
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Fostering Lifelong Connection
Fostering Lifelong Connections, was a 3-year action research project led by a team from the University of Sydney that explored how the out-of-home care sector could better support relationships between children, their families and carers.
This project developed, tested, embedded, and disseminated practices for children in permanent care to develop and sustain positive connections with birth relatives by:
- identifying relationship-building practices and co-designing resources to promote good practice
- conducting action research at four NSW sites to trial, implement and evaluate practice changes
- implementing new relationship-building practices in organisations through embedded champions, staff training and change management
- disseminating research findings, practice resources, and training to the out-of-home care sector.
More information is availiable on the project website.
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The youth justice system is under constant critique. But in a recent podcast episode, University of Sydney student Julia Jacobson talked to Collaboration member Associate Professor Garner Clancey about why there is reason to have hope in the future of youth justice in Australia. With an emphasis on the need for innovation and interdisciplinarity in the study of law, this episode reflects on the relationship between theory and practice.
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Locked Up & Locked Out: Incarceration & Children's Interests
Gabriel McGuire is the administrator of the Justice Collaboration and a student at Sydney Law School. He recently completed an honours in philosophy, writing his thesis on the justifiability of the current practice of juvenile incarceration.
In the thesis he argued that children have rights borne out of both extrinsic and intrinsic interests. Gabriel suggested that the detained child's interests in development allow us to justify incarceration as a means of moral education. However, he concludes that the current practice of juvenile incarceration—as evidenced in Queensland—violates the detained child's rights to carefreeness, connection, and future autonomy. In doing so, the justifiability and permissibility of the practice is undermined.
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