A Portrait of Australia’s Children’s Courts: Findings of a National Assessment

Abstract

The Children’s Court is a critical social institution that decides important legal and social issues relating to children and families. This chapter reports the findings of a national study which canvassed the views of judicial officers and other key stakeholders in each of Australia’s eight States and Territories concerning the court’s contemporary status and challenges and future reform directions with a view to informing current policy debates and deliberations. It draws together the major themes that emerged from the analysis of data gathered from study participants in eight separate but parallel sub-studies conducted concurrently which together comprised the national study. Data were gathered in metropolitan and regional (and, in the larger States and Territories, remote) locations across Australia. The chapter provides an overview of Australia’s Children’s Courts before presenting the major findings. The national findings point to the need, for example, for additional resources for the court and the youth justice and child protection systems, for further training of courtroom personnel, for greater clarity about the role of lawyers, for the greater use of Indigenous sentencing courts and circles and for raising the lower age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12 years. Two further prominent findings were concern about the underutilization of bail in general and in relation to Indigenous youth in particular and support for the broader use by Children’s Courts of the therapeutic jurisprudence-oriented problem-solving approaches already found in some other Australian courts. In conclusion, the chapter points to the underinvestment in Children’s Courts. While the inadequacy of resources is a common refrain across the public sector, in some jurisdictions the dearth of resources has placed the Children’s Court at risk of becoming a meaningless institution in the absence of the wherewithal to achieve its mandate.