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Mater Dolorosa: Negotiating Support in NSW Youth Justice Conferencing

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Abstract

At the heart of Youth Justice Conferencing, a form of restorative justice aimed at addressing youth crime, is the notion that young persons who have committed an offence should be ‘reintegrated’ into their communities (Braithwaite in Crime, shame and reintegration. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989). This paper focuses on the role of parents as support persons, in particular the ‘crying mum’, an identity often leveraged by the Convenor when prompting the young person to express remorse to the circle. We explore an Avouchment genre that we have observed whereby support persons vouch for the character of the young person. Our analysis considers the ways in which values are composed (as ideational categories are coupled with evaluative interpersonal ones) and unfold in discourse as invitations for participants to align. In Knight’s (2010) terms, when shared, couplings of ideation and evaluation engender bonds through which participants may commune.

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Notes

  1. The transcription technique used in this paper reflected our interest in the discourse semantic stratum (for general justification of this kind of approach see [11, 13, 19], Elsewhere we have undertaken transcription that considered the phonological level or multimodal phenomena such as gesture and posture (e.g. [26]).

  2. The extract below is from the Liturgia Horarum.

  3. This Caution is not part of the design outlined in the NSW Young Offender’s Act, but has apparently emerged as a result of police Youth Liaison Officers’ regular attendance at conferences; we have called it Caution because we suspect it in fact involves moving the discourse of a formal legal caution (in the scaled ‘warning, caution, conference, court’ responses to an offence proposed in the Act) to the conference.

  4. This genre was labelled a Commissioned Recount because the events typically have to be "extracted" from a less than forthcoming adolescent by the convenor. It has the following structure (parentheses in the notation signal an optional element of structure): Orientation ^ Record of events ^ (Re-Orientation) ^ (Extension) ^ Interpretation ^ Ramifications.

  5. This kind of initiating move is referred to in exchange structure theory [10, 17] as Dk1, with 'D' for delay since the move which actualises authority is in effect delayed while the person questioned offers a response. This kind of initiation is familiar to most of us from quiz shows and classroom interaction where the person asking the question in fact knows the answer.

  6. Elsewhere we have argued that this kind of regulative discourse in conferencing projects a recontextualised field of social integration intended to re-align the YP with the values of his or her family, ethnic group and community and to diminish the relatively malign influence of peers [16].

  7. We will use this square bracket notation to indicate couplings throughout this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Arts and the Media, Robert Webster Building, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, 2052, Australia

    Michele Zappavigna

  2. Department of Linguistics, Transient Building F12, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia

    J. R. Martin

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  1. Michele Zappavigna
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  2. J. R. Martin
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Correspondence to Michele Zappavigna.

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Zappavigna, M., Martin, J.R. Mater Dolorosa: Negotiating Support in NSW Youth Justice Conferencing. Int J Semiot Law 27, 263–275 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9340-y

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