The University of Sydney
Youth Justice Collaboration
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Weclome to the third edition of our newsletter! Scroll down to explore exciting work and events from across the University of Sydney.
The University of Sydney's Youth Justice Collaboration aims to improve youth justice outcomes and to ultimately prevent youth 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 youth justice systems and young people in conflict with the law.
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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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2024 Wingarra Djuraliyin: Public Lecture on Indigenous Peoples and Law
On Friday 9 August 2024, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People, Sydney Law School will host the 2024 Wingarra Djuraliyin: Public Lecture on Indigenous Peoples and Law.
This year’s lecture is “Critical Legal Juxtapositions: Practice and Decision-Making” and will be delivered by Professor Val Napoleon, Law Foundation Chair of Indigenous Justice and Governance at the University of Victoria, Canada. Professor Napoleon will discuss the application of Indigenous laws to state legal decision-making regarding Indigenous lands.This talk is intended to support learning about ways of approaching, understanding and working with substantive Indigenous laws through reimagined legal processes and decision-making.
You can find out more about the event and register here
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Age Verification on Social Media
The researchers behind the ‘Emerging Online Safety’ report, led by Dr Justine Humphry, have written an opinion piece on age verification proposals for social media. The authors argue that the voice of young people and parents has been missing from discussions about age verification.
Their research, which focused on Australian teenagers aged 12–17 and their parents, drew from focus groups and a national survey in 2022–23. Overall, the survey showed broad support for age verification. Specifically, 72% of young people and 86% of parents believed more effective age limits would improve online safety for young people. However, participants thought that age verification will likely not work. Instead, they said more safety education, face-to-face dialogue, and accountability from social media companies would be better approaches to keeping young people safe online.
The opinion piece was originally published in the Conversation. It can be accessed here.
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Research Student Focus: Laura Metcalfe
Laura Metcalfe is currently researching the age of criminal responsibility in Australia. She will argue that while there is ample evidence of the merits of raising the age to 14, consideration of reform must go beyond debate around raising the age as delimited to reform of a legal construct, to development of a conceptual framework for delivery of services and supports that crosscut governmental departments and that effectively respond to the needs of children at-risk for, or in contact with, the justice system.
Laura’s research will investigate the practical operation of the doli incapax presumption in NSW via observation of Children's Court proceedings and interviews with current and former judicial officers and legal practitioners with experience in doli matters. She will then analyse a linked administrative dataset (Human Services Dataset) to explore risk and protective factors that predict justice system contact for youth aged 8-13 in NSW. Understanding how these risk factors, individually and in conjunction, affect the odds of youth’s contact with the justice system can drive investment into primary and secondary prevention and intervention services that address these co-occurring risk factors through an integrated approach.
Laura has co-authored multiple articles and reports with Collaboration members. A recent article on education in youth justice centres can be accessed here.
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Collaboration members Dr Jedidiah Evans and Dr Sam Shpall—in partnership with HDR students Lily Patchett and Amie Doan— have started a forum for students, community members, and academics interested in examining prison justice alongside philosophy and literature.
Bridges Inside will hold regular discussion series. Each discussion series consists of four to five monthly sessions focusing on philosophical and literary texts. From August to December of 2024, Bridges Inside will examine Tommie Shelby’s book The Idea of Prison Abolition (2022) alongside selected works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
You can find out more and register for the series on the project website - Bridges Inside.
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Burden of Mental Disorders and Suicide Attributable to Childhood Maltreatment
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Collaboration member Dr Emma Barrett, alongside members of the Matilda Centre, recently published an article investigating the impact of child abuse and neglect in Australia.
The researchers found that childhood maltreatment—physical, sexual and emotional abuse, and neglect—causes up to 40 percent of common, life-long mental health conditions. Childhood maltreatment was found to account for 41 percent of suicide attempts in Australia, 35 percent for cases of self-harm and 21 percent for depression.
Researchers estimate that more than 1.8 million cases of depressive, anxiety, and substance use disorders, 66 143 years of life lost, and 184 636 disability-adjusted life-years could be prevented if childhood maltreatment was eradicated in Australia. The researchers say the results are an urgent call to invest in prevention and family support.
The article can be read in JAMA Psychiatry. A summary of the article can be accessed here.
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Research Centre Highlight: The CREATE Centre
The CREATE Centre (Creativity in Research, Engaging the Arts and Transforming Education, Health and Wellbeing) engages in three main areas: creativity research; the role of the arts in creative education, health and wellbeing; and how the arts transform all levels of education from early childhood through to higher education. Their researchers come from education, performance studies, medicine and health, literature, architecture, music, business, and the visual arts.
The centre’s current projects include researching body-mapping for communities impacted by suicide, the use of multi-arts workshops to increase young people’s wellbeing and employability, facilitating performance workshops for young people, anti-racism advocacy and empathy pedagogy. The centre also researches school transformation and runs training programs for teachers.
More information on the work of the centre can be accessed through their website.
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ActBack Hunters Hill
The CREATE Centre facilitated a drama and theatremaking workshop in Hunters Hill last year. The program, supported by the NSW State Government’s Office of Regional Youth, through the Children and Young People Wellbeing Recovery Initiative, sought to build resilience in the face of recent disasters including floods and COVID-19 and teach skills in disaster recovery to participant young people.
Across 5 days, 25 young people learnt theatremaking and drama skills, and developed a show that was performed for friends and family. The drama-based process helped them process and respond to recent disasters in a supportive environment.
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Transforming justice: The power of arts education
Collaboration member Dr Jedidiah Evans’ work in arts education at Parklea Correctional Centre was recently featured by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.
Dr Evans’ students developed their own research questions related to arts, incarceration, and education. Some research projects explored the possibility of running creative workshops in remand centres, researching the efficacy of arts programs to reduce reoffending and exploring specific visual arts workshops in local facilities. They received letters from incarcerated people describing their first-hand experience of education in prisons and engaged with an advisory panel of people who have experienced incarceration.
From Dr Evans – ‘A partnership like this can provide student-learning experience, support the flourishing of communities for the incarcerated, and introduce both inside and outside participants to the life-changing potential of studying the arts.’
The article can be read here.
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