Podcast: Jes Wikaira is "not your average support worker" for culturally diverse kids in Victoria's justice system
A Maori or Pasifika young person in Victoria’s criminal justice system might come across Jes Wikaira. She’s a cultural and intensive support worker on a program called the Youth Justice Community Support Service, which helps young people reset their lives and connect with the support they need after being in contact with the law.
Jes works with and advocates for young people who come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. That’s important, because they make up around forty per cent of the people in Victoria’s justice system – a disproportionate rate, which is due to complex and overlapping factors, including the continuing impacts of colonisation, entrenched disadvantage, and disconnection from vital support.
Here, Jes talks about the culturally safe support she provides to a whole family – not just an individual, in recognition of how Maori families like her own are comprised and understood – and the misconceptions about the people she works alongside that she’d like the wider community to extinguish, to make everyone feel more safe and welcome.
And you can keep scrolling to read the full transcript of this conversation.
Sophie Raynor
Welcome to the Worth A Second Chance podcast, where we explore true stories, challenges and solutions from the frontlines of Australia's youth justice systems. My name is Sophie Raynor.
Maori or Pasifika young people in Victoria's criminal justice system might meet Jes Wikaira. She's a cultural and intensive support worker on a program called the Youth Justice Community Support Service – it helps young people reset their lives and reconnect with the support they need after being in contact with the law. Jes works with and advocates for young people who come from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. That's important, because they make up around 40% of the people in Victoria’s justice system – a disproportionate rate, which is due to a lot of complex and overlapping factors.
Jes Wikaira
When young people get into trouble, all the things that have affected them historically around colonisation… continue to condense and impact them again when they go through the same mainstream systems, whether it's youth justice, whether it's education, you know – everything gets more complex.
Sophie Raynor
In this episode, Jes and I spoke about her approach to working with whole families, not just individuals; about how the system isn't set up to support the people she works with; and about what can be done to change things.
Hey, Jes, can you explain to me the role and value of family when you're working with a young person who's involved with the justice system?
Jes Wikaira
Yeah, so predominantly, like the wherever I’ve worked in youth justice, whether it was New Zealand, here, or overseas, there's always, I suppose, a priority that any young person that's referred through youth justice, we work predominantly with that young person. But culturally, it's quite near impossible to do that. And part of working with the family helps us provide the best support for a young person within the cultural context. So when we're working with a young person, I suppose there’s specific levels of cultural practice that's important. So when we're working with a young person, mum has a primary role, so the matriarch of the home has her role, and dad has his role, and so do siblings, depending on age. So for culture, it's important that we not only work with the young person, but we work with the family, with mum and dad, with extended family, because those are the supports that will help support the young person the best.
Sophie Raynor
I'd like to dig a bit deeper into that extended family so we can really understand who wraps around a young person, and that social environment young people are in what are the family structures like in the lives of the young people you're working with?
Jes Wikaira
What's a normal family to most, or the nuclear family, that's very different to how Maori and Pasifika families work. So there is a hierarchy. So that includes, you know, your grandparents that are living, that includes your parents, that includes your siblings, and includes grandchildren. And it also extends to the wider community. So the supports are actually wider. And we also have that same belief that any success is collectively driven. So when we… anything that we do in life, we normally do together and it's looked at as a collective rather than an individual achievement. It is about the collective, it is about the family. And so to work with just the young person outside of those types of practices is really difficult. And we find that you're not going to get the same outcomes that you would get if you are working with a family. That kind of hierarchy is also built on values and beliefs like respect, faith, all those types of things are built into the family structure. So it's important for us to be working with that whole structure holistically, rather than just with the individual, yeah.
Sophie Raynor
You're a cultural worker on the Youth Justice Community Support Service. Can you tell me a bit more about your role and the support you provide?
Jes Wikaira
I mean, as a cultural worker in your community, you know, they see you in your community. So you're the same in the community as you are at home and as you are at work, and the expectation for you to support your own community is beyond what the system can provide.
What I love about why YJCSS is that we'll get a referral from YJ. And it'll have a list of tick boxes with supports that the young person might require. And on that support list is a cultural worker. So they identify that this young person may need a cultural worker to help continue strengthening them with their cultural understanding. When we get the referral, we'll see where the young person actually needs support and help. And then we start planning out the care plan from there. When we plan it out, I suppose the benefit that I have as a cultural worker is, I get to explore some of the cultural practices with these young people, even if they’re, you know, they're very green to a lot of the culture, our young people. And that's what some of the community don't understand about our young people, is many of them were born here. Many of them were raised here. And so they don't have an understanding even of their own identity. So that's an opportunity for us as cultural workers to actually help them with that, and some of the rewards I’ve had. I mean, outside of my role, I'm also a family genealogist. So I've been able to connect and do a family tree for some of my young people that I work with, because many of them may not even know who their grandparents are. So it's important to make those connections because culturally, we are a people that… we recite our genealogy orally. So the opportunity to be able to do that for a young person has been really impactful and positive for them.
For us, really, it's about widening their support. That's probably one of the cultural things that we try to do, is widen the supports that they have outside of even their family. For a lot of our boys, that warrior culture or that mentality, it's been good to be able to refer them to programs like cultural performance, cultural weaponry, and things like that, because it's about discipline. It's about coming of age, so reconnecting them with things like activities in the community, with Maori Pasifika leaders, has been really beneficial for them. And I think what it's done is it's built confidence in the young people, and many of.. I suppose this year a lot of my young men have gotten full time jobs. And I think that's the key to what we try to do in YJCSS is try to connect young people to education, and employment, because once they have a day program, and they have a routine, and they have boundaries set in place, it's basically a formula for success for them.
Sophie Raynor
I'm thinking that youth justice systems in Australia are designed with individual people in mind, not that network of relationships and family and community connections that surround the young person you're working with. Is that something you'd agree with?
Jes Wikaira
Well, it's definitely a mainstream system. And very often that mainstream system is a system that opposes all the things within our own cultural construct. So, you know, it's fighting against some of the things like, you know, I think recently – so probably in the last 10 years – there's been, you know, originally funding towards CALD communities. So, and then, further on down the track, they identified where Maori and Pasifika were falling through the gaps or over-represented, and then they provided funding, and they put us together in the same cluster with CALD. And now probably in the last three years, they are identifying that Maori Pasifika need their own type of support. But over that time, it's been a learning, too, for youth justice, and for all of us that are working with Maori Pasifika families and young people, but it's definitely not set up to support the natural way that we work together as families, and supporting young people when they're going through different trials or those that are at risk. So yeah, I agree with that, that the system's not set up to really provide support.
Sophie Raynor
So, the system not being designed to support the people you're working with. Is that one of the factors that you see contributing to this over-representation that we see of Maori and Pasifika and First Nations kids in the justice system?
Jes Wikaira
Well, I think there's a number of factors, I mean, you know, you're already working with a dislocated minority of cluster of groups. So if you're talking about Aboriginal, First Nations, and you're talking about Maori Pasifika and CALD communities, they already come from a historic view of colonisation, assimilation. And so those factors are already built in where there's been a loss of the culture. And so you've got that condensed also with coming into the youth justice system and working against that mainstream system that was set up to ultimately conquer us or, you know, so it's like a two-edged sword. Because when, when young people get into trouble, all the things that have affected them historically around colonisation, continue to condense and impact them again, when they go through the same mainstream systems, whether it's youth justice, whether it's education, so… everything gets more complex, as we have less access to services and things like that.
So there's a number of things, there's things like, even just for Maori Pasifika young people, it's things like our immigration status. So in 2001, there was a change with immigration, which really impacted New Zealand citizens. And so I think there's a misconception around New Zealand citizens that come here; so we have a triple-four visa when we enter the country, and that visa, or that status allows us to work, we can get Medicare, and we can change our licenses over. And so that allows us an opportunity to get employment. But what it really says is that when we come here, we have to work, so we do not have access to Centrelink, we do not have access to financial support when we come. And I think that's a misconception about New Zealanders, or Kiwis, they say oh, you know, that you're able to come here and access benefits and get on to the unemployment benefit or single parents status. But we actually can't, we don't have access to these types of financial benefits. So that's one impact for our young people. So many young people's parents come here, and they have the desire, and they’re keen to just work. But I suppose one of the big impacts when we looked at COVID was we realised that a lot of parents lost their jobs if they weren’t essential. And then due to loss of employment, they were unable to access any kind of Centrelink or any kind of support payment. So, financial stability is probably one huge factor, which contributes to a lot of our young people taking up criminal activity.
Education is another one. So even for our parents that come across, many of the qualifications don't cross over into the qualifications here. So they'll have to go back and do additional study to meet the standard of learning and training here. So that's another thing that's impacted. I think, our young people have, just as any other young person, they’ve got the same difficulties with schooling and learning and things like that; there’s language barriers, so a lot of our families, or our participants, they speak their native languages at home. But when they come out into the community, they speak English; there's an English barrier with their parents. So that's also an impact.
I think even the social norm, so there's kind of three levels with a lot of the New Zealand citizens; Maori Pasifika that come to Australia. You have the young people that were born in New Zealand, or born in the islands. And then you have the young people that were born here in Australia, and there’s a very different cultural understanding, sometimes a lack of identity. And all of those things contribute to a lot of what is happening with young people; a lack of pro-social connections. A lot of parents that come here, they're both working. So when they're both working, and of course, there’s sometimes a lack of supervision with their own young people. So all of these things contributes to the way that young people behave.
Sophie Raynor
That's a really detailed picture of some of the challenges that young people are facing. I want to ask another tricky question. If someone's listening to this conversation and thinks, no, you're telling stories, Maori kids are actually like, much more aggressive or they're just bad kids. What do you say to that?
Jes Wikaira
Part of it is, I think, a misconception, you know, that we come from a warrior culture. And I think people look at that warrior culture as aggressive and as violent. So yeah, I think people will make their own opinions about that. But I think what's important is to understand the culture. And probably in the last five years we've felt the impacts of the media on young people in perpetuating stereotypes that they’re violent or they come from violent homes. But living and working in the communities and living and working within the youth justice structure, we know and understand that those statistics, or those stereotypes, are very much perpetuated by media and they're not accurate. So if you're working with these young people in their families you get to see a very different picture. They’re very normal families. A lot of these young people come from great parents that work hard. And they've got leadership roles in their communities. So yeah, I think, for myself, it's about people actually getting to know the culture. You can say the same for our Aboriginal young people. Their statistics and the perpetuation by media around the culture is all over TV, all over social media. But it's the positive stuff that we don't get to hear and the communities don't get to hear. And a lot of it is because of misunderstanding. They don’t understand the culture, the young person’s history, the young person's family, the disadvantages that they have. So it is really about not stereotyping or not choosing one type of stereotype for everybody. I think at the end of the day, all the youth have the same struggles. They're all trying to belong, they're all trying to be a part of something, they're trying to connect, they're trying to have their place in the community. And sometimes these vulnerabilities in the community and these barriers make it more difficult for these different clusters of within community.
Sophie Raynor
And zooming in on the young people and their families whom you work so closely with, you know, they've had involvement with the justice system, and maybe they've spent some time in prison, and now they've just been released. What do they need to sort of set themselves up to get their lives on track?
Jes Wikaira
I think what's really difficult is that the system is all based on crisis and urgency. So, often with youth justice, we might get a notification that a young person's been released, and we haven't even been notified. We could get notification that they're up for parole on Monday, and this is Friday, 5:30 in the afternoon. So then all of a sudden it's panic stations and everyone's trying to get things in place. Those basic things are housing or a safe place to stay. If that's not going to be with mum and dad or within a family home, you know, it's really about trying to find a safe accommodation for these young people. It's being able to help support them with all the appointments that are set up so that they're compliant with the youth justice orders, whatever those orders are. It’s setting them up with food, clothing, shelter. And sometimes that's the difficult part. Sometimes there's a little gap in space, so we might have a young person coming out of custody straight into a hotel. This is a kind of a risk factor, because during that time, it's normally a weekend where they're placed in a hotel and then they’re trying to find safer and more long term housing. And so they're in a hotel for three or four days while everyone's trying to find accommodation. And then in that time they revert back to associating with their own their old peers, associating with previous behaviour. And so it's kind of a risk period.
And, you know, when they come out, they just need the basic things that any young person needs, which is food, clothing, and shelter, a safe place to stay safe, a safe adult, and safe family members – just for support, because very often we find that participants are coming out of custody and they've got nowhere to stay. So they're going into crisis accommodation, and that just continues to impact them. So it's like a domino effect. From the time they get out and move into a hotel, you know, they get bored, they've got no money. They're using vouchers and things like that, they're living out of a suitcase, and then in that time they revert back to old habits, old peers, and sometimes our young people go straight back and because they get themselves into trouble within a week of coming out. And that's because they don't have those basic supports in place.
Sophie Raynor
What do you see as being the value of a campaign like Worth A Second Chance?
Jes Wikaira
I think it's really valuable; I think, you know, it's a platform where people can gain insight into things that they don't understand themselves. And I think it's important that you have people speaking from the perspective of experience and working with young people in youth justice.
Generally, they’re young kids, they're just young people, you know; they're impressionable, and ultimately navigating life to find their place in the community. I mean, like any young person, a lot of them are talented and skilled and smart, you know, they're persistent and motivated, and they’re keen to do things. Some of them are in the wrong place at the wrong time; you know, their choices around friends and peers and associates. So, they're just like any other young Australian that is trying to find their place and trying to belong. And along the way, there's these little obstacles that happen. And so YJCSS are there to try and help alleviate some of those obstacles and barriers, to give them the support that they need just to succeed, and sometimes they just need a chance, and part of that chance is for the community give them a chance as well.
Sophie Raynor
That was Jes Wikaira speaking with me about culture, family and the criminal justice system.
Worth a Second Chance is a community campaign from Jesuit Social Services. We’re calling for a more fair, humane and effective youth justice system, and we need your help. Learn more and join the campaign at worthasecondchance.com.au.
Thanks to Jes Wikaira for speaking with me today, and you can find new conversations every second Wednesday. My name is Sophie Raynor, and this was Worth a Second Chance.