Children must be heard when they cannot be seen. An analysis of youth justice detention in contemporary Australia – external oversight mechanisms, children’s rights and the capabilities approach
Creators: name: Ewenson, Lisa
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 441001
subject: Applied sociology, program evaluation and social impact assessment

description: Detaining children and young people in carceral institutions is the most severe sanction imposed for criminal offending in Australia, yet we rarely hear and learn from young people about their experiences of youth detention, while institutional reform measures are sometimes mooted but rarely acted upon. This situation is further complicated in the Australian context by the staggeringly high rates of detention of young Indigenous people. Informed by a child rights-based approach and by decolonising methodologies, this thesis seeks to disrupt hegemonic narratives about the state of youth justice detention, by drawing from the narratives of young people (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) who have experienced youth justice detention, and through detailed analysis of national and international policy and frameworks relating to youth detention.

Narratives from young people pertaining to the lived experience of youth detention were collected through primary fieldwork comprising of qualitative, narrative interviews based in NSW and through the analysis of secondary documentary material already in the public domain relating to the Northern Territory. The legislative frameworks shaping youth incarceration are documented and discussed, while particular attention is paid to explicating the architecture of international human rights law pertaining to youth incarceration and the degree to which it is reflected in domestic arrangements. 

The narratives of the young people in NSW revealed a nuanced and deeply complex experience of youth detention and were analysed via a capabilities approach that organised key themes of significance arising from the interviews. Key findings of this study include that youth detention in NSW was a contradictory experience for study participants, being perceived as both deprivation and, ironically, as providing a level of respite for young people from the multiple significant hardships they had endured prior to detention. Further, study participants reported seeking and finding, while detained, care and nurturing from their peers and, where possible, from available adults. They also reported seeking greater connection with their communities on ‘the outside.’ Instances of demeaning treatment by staff were also revealed. Australia’s obligations under the recently ratified Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT) regarding youth detention were examined, as well as suggestions for effective practical implementation, noting however that while robust oversight mechanisms for closed environments are imperative, they are insufficient to sustain the wholesale transformation of the youth detention institution.

The thesis concludes that a policy of decarceration is imperative and that raising the age of minimum criminal responsibility across Australia is critical – while acknowledging also that some limited form of imprisonment will continue to exist for those young people who commit the most serious violent offences. For those young people detained in the future, a radically reimagined ethos and model of youth detention is expounded. Vitally, this reimagined model provides a platform to assist these young people to live flourishing lives, which will then also contribute to community safety in the long term.