The ACT LGovernment has released a report on what is needed for raising the age of criminal responsibility.
The report states
The ACT Legislative Assembly has committed to raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility. In preparation, the government commissioned a review of the service system (Review) in order to identify service gaps, implementation issues and alternative models to meet the needs of 10–13-year- olds likely to be affected by the proposed reform.
A team including Emeritus Professor Morag McArthur, Curijo Pty Ltd – an Aboriginal consulting company – and Dr Aino Suomi from the Australian National University carried out the Review between March 2021 and August 2021.
This report outlines the gaps in the current service system that will require attention in order to meet the needs of children and young people aged 10–13. We will refer to them as ‘children’ from this point, and the term will include young people within the target range. This report identifies opportunities for reform to achieve improved outcomes for children and their families. It also proposes an alternative response to meet the needs of children affected by the changing legislative environment. The Review concluded that, overall, the service system requires reform.
This Review used multiple sources of data to inform its findings: published key literature; ACT administrative data and casefile review; interviews with young people and families involved in youth justice; and wide-ranging consultations with non-government services, government directorates and key advocacy groups in the ACT. The data used for the Review point to a complex set of needs in children who are at risk of early offending. The findings showed that these complex needs shape children’s pathways across health/mental health, education and child protection services. The Review also highlighted significant agreement on the service challenges that face the ACT system in responding to children with complex needs. There was also a strong consensus among the groups about what should happen to address these challenges.
This report concludes by outlining what is required to respond effectively to the needs of children who are most affected by raising the age of criminal responsibility. Based on the findings of this report, we argue for seizing the opportunity for comprehensive systems reform. This means building a stronger, more coordinated service system, ensuring early identification of needs and providing more universal support to meet those needs. These reforms are underscored by a shared responsibility for children’s wellbeing and safety. Raising the age of criminal responsibility highlights the importance of early, coordinated and sustained help for children and their families. A key outcome of this reform is to meet children’s needs. This outcome will not only be of value to them and their families but will benefit the wider community as well.
Key Themes
Children who are at risk of offending experience multiple health and mental health challenges, often with significant underlying trauma and disability. They are known to disengage from school early and to develop problems with substance misuse and are, too often, from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds or from families where parents have been incarcerated. Many of these children are involved with the child protection system and have a history of family violence (as victims and/or perpetrators), sexualised behaviours and sexual exploitation. They are also at risk of homelessness.
Children who offend or who are at risk of offending have complex needs
By the time children interact with the youth justice system, unmet needs have often multiplied and become more complex. The literature clearly recognises that the complexity and clustering of risks and unmet needs increase the probability of future problems. Tackling these issues requires coordinated or multiservice interventions (Baglivio et al., 2020; Farrington, 2002) as well as trauma- informed service responses matched to individual needs.
Gaps in the current ACT service system
The literature and the stakeholders consulted in this Review identified the issue that service systems are often unable to meet children’s complex needs, because of a lack of identification and assessment; ineffective information sharing and communication between services; a lack of coordination between services; service gaps; and a lack of familiarity with existing services or the functions of other services (including referral pathways).
Barriers to adequately addressing complex needs in the ACT include a lack of coordination and integration across the service system, including: limited information sharing; lack of capacity to work with children with multiple needs; limited specialised and generalist programs; service delivery modes that are inflexible; barriers to navigating the system; limited understanding of child-specific familial and cultural needs; and long waiting lists for specialised services. Stakeholder consultations revealed that demand outstrips the availability of services. Almost all stakeholders raised the difficulty of accessing mental health and alcohol and other drug services, identifying long waiting lists or narrow eligibility criteria as some of the main reasons. As a result, and only when problems escalate, the tertiary services (e.g., child protection or Youth Justice) will attempt to comprehensively address the needs of these children. One of the major concerns identified in the consultations was that children aged 10–13 – most affected by the reform – are commonly not eligible for a range of services in the ACT. This is particularly true for children under 12 years of age. They are too young to access many of the adolescent services and too unwell or complex for early intervention services, but not complex enough to access specialised services. They may also have comorbidities (e.g., disability and/or AOD or trauma response) that exclude them from key mental health services.
The consultations also identified a range of workforce capability issues, including the structure of funding arrangements and tendering in the community services sector. They also included significant workforce shortages in key areas, such as allied health professionals available to support children with trauma experiences and emerging mental health challenges.
More is required to develop a trauma-informed workforce. The ACT needs a workforce plan, tailored for specific service contexts and including a training and professional development strategy designed to operationalise trauma-informed care principles into practice and build the capacity of the sector to be more collaborative, child and young person -centred and culturally safe. If mainstream organisations set up to support children and families are not taking the lead in working in trauma- informed and culturally effective/sensitive ways, they can inadvertently cause further harm.
A range of stakeholders identified the need for safe accommodation for children. They emphasised that this need will be intensified with the change to the age of criminal responsibility. Key aspects of remedying the lack of safe (and secure) accommodation include crisis accommodation for the age group and a secure therapeutic facility for children in need of mental health treatment and who are at risk of harming themselves or others.
Implementing a strong narrative to communicate the changes
Stakeholders highlighted the importance of bringing the community along with the reform by clearly communicating the key arguments and benefits of a therapeutic or public health response over a youth justice response. Broad arguments should include the science of brain development, the serious impacts of trauma on behaviours and the evidence of negative long-term outcomes associated with early interactions with the justice system.
The narrative further needs to explain clearly the effectiveness of non-criminal processes in meeting children’s needs: evidence shows that therapeutic approaches prevent criminal/harmful behaviours in young people. It is also important to acknowledge the experiences of victims and to ensure that those who have been harmed will not be forgotten or ignored. As part of developing an alternative response, it will be important to recognise the rights and interests of people impacted by the harmful behaviour of children; they will require access to the same, or similar, supports as are currently available to victims of crime. Restorative processes have been built into the therapeutic proposal identified in this report, to ensure that victims and children have the opportunity to engage in restorative processes. Children who are held accountable for harmful behaviour, then repair damaged relationships and achieve closure, may be at decreased risk of (re)offending.
A therapeutic response to meet children’s complex needs
The report offers an overview of an alternative response to meet the needs of children affected by raising the age of criminal responsibility. The response includes a non-justice embedded youth worker model and safe accommodation options to support police’s interactions with children who may be at risk of antisocial or unsafe behaviour. The alternative response proposes a Multidisciplinary Therapeutic Panel (MTP), a collaborative forum to make service delivery decisions for children with complex and challenging needs. The MTP would consider and review children who have been referred to the panel because of the level of complexity of their needs or because there are insufficient or inadequate existing service responses to meet those needs. The work with children and their families would be coordinated by a new wraparound service.
The wraparound service would develop individualised child and family-centred plans to respond to the complex needs of children. It would be an intensive, structured process, convening a team of highly skilled professionals and involving the child and their family members along with professionals and natural supports relevant to a child with complex needs and their family circumstances.
The assessment process of the wrapround service would embed restorative processes by utilising Family Decision Making. The opportunity for children to participate in a restorative meeting would be considered as a way of ensuring that victims’ needs are also met. An important part of the proposed approach is to make available a range of restorative practices: restorative meetings; the provision of an apology; victim impact letters; or other forms of reparation. Appropriately used restorative processes are likely to have a therapeutic and empowering impact on both the victim and the perpetrator of harm.
The MTP and wraparound service would be overseen by a legislated Oversight Committee, responsible for identifying systemic issues that may have arisen because of the changes to raising the age of criminal responsibility and for recommending policy and legislative changes. The alternative response is based on the voluntary engagement of children and their families, because mandated measures are often ineffective and unaligned with the therapeutic aims of the suggested approach. If, however, the ACT Government determines that a mandated response for children with complex needs is necessary, the current legislative levers are already in place – albeit requiring amendments. A mandated response to children should be used: • only as a measure of last resort (for example with repetitive harmful behaviour) • only where there is a risk of harm to the child and or others and that harm is likely to be serious • only where significant attempts at voluntary engagement have been exhausted.
The need for strong systems for early help and support
This Review identifies the need for a stronger focus on early support. Decades of research in Australia and internationally demonstrate the benefits of early interventions for children, families and communities. The current ACT service system has limited prevention, early intervention and individualised support services available to children generally and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families specifically.
Further building the capacity of universal settings, such as early education and care, maternal and child health and schools, will be critical in identifying and responding to the needs of individual children and families. Locating supportive services in universal settings improves the prevention and early intervention possibilities. Schools are particularly important, because they are often where the needs of children and families are first identified. There is much more to be done to ensure that schools are adequately resourced and supported to engage actively with disability, mental health and welfare providers in order to enable integrated and holistic support for children at risk and their families. Stronger relationships can be built between schools and services in the non-government sector. Although schools cannot, by themselves, solve the complex social, economic and family challenges that present daily in the classroom, they remain an important site from which to provide trauma-informed responses, opportunities for early identification and assessment of need.
Improved integration of responses
Children’s (and their families’) needs cross directorate boundaries. Families whose children experience a range of issues may find themselves navigating different service systems and multiple service networks, including health, mental health, education and statutory child protection. Collaborative approaches recognise the complex and interlinked nature of issues for children and families and are better able to address complexity through coordinated interventions.
Despite several serious attempts by the ACT to increase integration across the service systems, stakeholders throughout the consultations still pointed to a system that remains siloed. Information sharing remains an issue. The reforms required to respond to the decision to raise the age of criminal responsibility necessitate the acknowledgement that our service systems need transformative change. All the proposals hinge on creating a coordinated service response through collaboration and sharing responsibility. No single service, agency or directorate can devise and implement a comprehensive plan that would adequately improve outcomes for children with complex needs who engage in harmful and unsafe behaviour.
A self-determined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander response
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are overrepresented in the youth justice system and experience ongoing impacts from colonisation, dispossession and alienation from Indigenous cultures. They also have high levels of individual risk factors, such as mental illness and disabilities.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people must be strongly represented in building the alternative response that will be required when the age of criminal responsibility is raised. This includes representation on the proposed MTP and employment in the wraparound service. The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and service providers must be actively engaged in determining appropriate services to meet the needs of children and families.
Self-determination in responses to children at risk of early offending will require a strengthening of the role of our current Aboriginal organisations, provision of appropriate funding and support for any new initiatives. Workforce capacity building and other support will help to ensure that our Aboriginal Community Controlled Services are sustainable.
An Independent Authority for children’s safety and wellbeing
This report calls for an independent authority to oversee and support systems implementation of the reform and to respond to the identified critical service gaps. Currently, many different directorates are responsible for children’s wellbeing and safety, their health, their education and their participation in society. An independent authority would be a vital mechanism in creating an integrated whole-of- government and whole-of-community system to support children’s wellbeing and safety. It would help to develop a greater sense of shared responsibility across government and communities.
The authority would be responsible for collaboratively developing a shared framework that can be used as a key driver for more joined-up approaches across directorates. This framework would provide the authorising (policy) environment and actively enable services across sectors to work differently and more collaboratively, including at the practitioner level.
