Podcast: Liana Buchanan is asking our leaders to "do better" for youth in detention in Victoria
Laws and policies are created by our leaders. But in a democracy, like Australia, everyday people can influence the decisions they make. And in the youth justice system, that’s really important. If we care about the children in detention and about how they’re supported to understand the impact of their actions and make changes in their lives, then we need to let our government know.
Liana Buchanan returns in this episode of the Worth A Second Chance podcast. She's the principal commissioner at the Commission for Children and Young People in Victoria, which is the state's independent advocate for the safety and wellbeing of young people.
We heard from Liana in our first episode. Then, she spoke about scrutinising Victoria’s youth justice system, and about the young people her team meets inside cells. Today, she tells us about the realistic and effective criminal justice reform that could happen in Victoria to improve the system, and the important role our whole community plays in ensuring those troubled young people are safe, supported and accountable.
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.
Laws and policies are created by our leaders. But in a democracy, like Australia, everyday people like you and me can influence the decisions they make. And in the youth justice system, that’s really important. If we care about the children in detention and about how they’re supported to understand the impact of their actions and make changes in their lives, then we need to let our government know.
Liana Buchanan
When you come to, you know, looking at where government funding priorities sit, and you look at where government thinks the community cares, and feels some pressure to invest the services for the children I have in mind, barely, and rarely get a look in.
Sophie Raynor
Today, Liana Buchanan returns to the podcast. We heard from Liana in our first episode. She's the principal commissioner at the Commission for Children and Young People in Victoria, which is the state's independent advocate for the safety and wellbeing of young people.
In our first episode, Liana spoke about scrutinising Victoria’s youth justice system, and about the young people her team meets inside cells. Today, she tells us about the realistic and effective criminal justice reform that could happen in Victoria to improve the system, and the really important role our whole community plays in ensuring young people are safe, supported and accountable.
Hi, Liana. I want to start our conversation with some changes to laws that happened a few years ago. Victoria made it easier to move children so their criminal matters would be dealt with in the adult justice system, not youth justice, and also changed bail laws to make bail harder to get. What do you make of all that?
Liana Buchanan
It’s been an unfortunate period of some retrograde reforms in the in the past in Victoria. I'm hopeful some of those will be reversed. One of the big ticket items that we need to see changed, and we've made formal public recommendations about this as a Commission, is we need to see changes to the bail laws. We’ve seen massive, massive increase in the number of children and young people remanded in custody – we now have more children on remand by a long shot than we have children sentenced. And we know that most children and young people who are remanded – by the time their matter comes to court, they don't receive a custodial sentence. So there's been again changes in recent years that have made it harder for children to get bail. Those changes need to be reversed. And we also need to see some practice changes, some of which I think, have been promised in the most recent budget, where, when children are arrested after hours, at the moment, predominantly, they go before bail justices, whereas adults often get to go before the court. There's some improvements that we've certainly lobbied for, that I think might be in the wings, so that more children are actually brought before a magistrate. So we don't see – a Children’s Court magistrate – some of the really unnecessary situations where young children are held in remand, sometimes only for a weekend. But if you're 11, or 12, or indeed 13, or 14, or 15, and that's your first kind of experience of custody, it can be incredibly damaging, and indeed, can for some be that entry point into a much longer experience in the youth justice system.
Sophie Raynor
That's really sobering to hear you say that. And I want to pick up on something that you said about what we can do, when we're identifying problems with the youth justice system. I'm curious about whether the ‘we’ in your sentence was the Commission, or the general public? Is there a role for the general public in becoming aware of some of the challenges in the system and then advocating for progress?
Liana Buchanan
Yeah, it's a great question. When I use ‘we’, I usually am meaning the biggest, collective ‘we’, because I think it is a collective responsibility, how we respond to and treat and support children and young people, including some of the most vulnerable children and young people, those who've experienced some of the most challenging things in their lives. That has to be a collective responsibility. If we're a civilised society, then it has to be something that we all share a role in.
So yes, it's easy for me to say, no, the government needs to do this. And often I will say that, or the youth justice leadership team needs to do this. And again, often I'll direct particular recommendations or calls to them. But actually, the changes that we need to make, I do think we all have a role to understand what is happening for children and young people, including those in youth justice, and we all have a role to understand what's needed to do better and ideally, to call on those in power, whomever they be those who make the decisions, who make the laws, who allocate the resources to keep asking them to do better. So, in terms of the broader community, and what people can do, I think there's lots of resources out there that give you information about what's happening for children and young people in youth justice. There's lots of information out there about how many children and young people are in our youth justice system have a child protection background, or have an out-of-home care background… informing yourself, inform yourself about the issues, and playing a role to raise these issues, in whatever way you're comfortable – directly with government, directly with relevant ministers, directly with your MP, or in other ways – I would absolutely encourage people to do that.
One of the things that I see a lot in my role, and remember, I'm responsible for overseeing not only what happens to kids in youth justice, but also to those who are in contact with child protection, and those who are in the care system. And I think when you come to, you know, looking at where government funding priorities sit, and you look at where government thinks the community cares, and feels some pressure to invest the services for the children I have in mind, barely, and rarely get a look in. So you know, it's an election year, both state and federal, I'm not going to get political. But it saddens me… it saddens me that, you know, in a year like this, we're not likely to see, based on previous experience, we're not likely to see big investment into services for children, into services and interventions to support families who are doing it tough; we're not likely to see the kinds of investment to really transform a child protection or out-of-home care, or indeed, our youth justice system. And that I think all comes down to the fact that a lot of people don't know about the issues. And so it's easy for government to feel that a lot of people don't care.
Sophie Raynor
One area of justice reform where people have been quite vocal is the issue of raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14. There are over 120,000 signatures on the Raise the Age petition that’s being handed over this month So, I did want to take our conversation there, because that’s a big public campaign asking state and territory governments for reform in each of their jurisdictions. Do you have a view on whether or not Victoria should raise the age of criminal responsibility?
Liana Buchanan
Yes, yes, I do. And we have. In fact, as a Commission, we first made that recommendation in 2016, in a report that wasn't a public report, but we've subsequently said it more publicly many times. And indeed, in a major report that we tabled last year, the Our Youth Our Way report, which looked at the over-representation of Aboriginal children in the youth justice system, we made that recommendation that the Victorian government should raise the age to at least 14; we made that very clearly. It's a bit of a no-brainer, to my mind. It is telling, I think that it's a campaign that has gathered momentum that is supported by paediatricians and counsellors, and teachers, and a whole raft of different professionals, different people from different sectors, whose shared understanding and focus is an understanding of children, children's brain development, and children's capacity to understand what they're doing and have consequential thinking. And the idea that we would punish a child of 10, 11, 12… Hold them criminally responsible, given what the science says about their brain development and capacity… is just… it's pretty bizarre, frankly. So, I absolutely think Victoria should act to raise the age. We have not had a response from the Victorian government to our recommendation that says they will not do that. I think the government's public position is that they are prepared to act to raise the age to 12. I think we need to go further than that. And frankly, I think we need to act quickly. Because every day where we leave the law, as it is, is a day where I might learn about an 11-year-old, maybe from the care system, maybe in contact with child protection, who ends up arrested and held in police cells overnight or over a weekend. And if you have a 10 or 11-year-old in your lives out there, you can only begin to imagine how inappropriate that is, how inhumane that is. And how foolish it is. Frankly, I just I think I think it's overdue. I think I think we need to act in line with the UN recommendations and raise the age.
Sophie Raynor
And your background is as a solicitor – what would it take from government to actually make that reform happen?
Liana Buchanan
Well, I think from government, to be blunt, I think from government, this is an area of the law that is entirely within the jurisdiction and the power of the state government. So it kind of it takes an internal process that will ultimately result in seeing a bill in parliament and pass through parliament. In terms of in a practical sense, I suspect government wants both to kind of test for itself and to be persuaded that there are good, effective alternatives to a criminal response to deal with concerns, like – I've heard, which is, well, if we can't use a police and a criminal response, and a young child is behaving very badly, and offending, will we do? You know, we need something. So I don't think that's rocket science. To be honest. I think we already know what services need to look like to wrap around a child and their family, and to respond to behaviours, all kinds of challenging behaviours, in an effective way. So, I think we have that knowledge already, we have services… are already able to work in that way. But I suspect that's part of what government is working with, and quite possibly trying to work to persuade other significant justice stakeholders.
Sophie Raynor
A moment ago you mentioned an 11-year-old who might have had involvement with the child protection system. I want to come back to this. We know from the Parole Board’s statistics that nearly half of young people in detention have had some kind of involvement with child protection, and nearly one in six kids in detention is subject to a current child protection order. I want to start right at the very beginning of those figures and ask you to describe the relationship between involvement with the child protection system and the youth justice system.
Liana Buchanan
Yes, very easily. There's lots of data that I could reference, but the best data was prepared by the Sentencing Advisory Council, and they looked at all children who came before the criminal division of the Children's Court, over a two year period, and indeed, all children sentenced into custody. They found that half of those children, one half of those sentence to custody had been the subject of a report to child protection, a quarter had been in out-of-home care, and a fifth, or 20%, had experienced residential care.
So what that tells you – residential care, just so people know, there are only about 450 to 500 children in residential care in the state at any given time. So, that is a massive over-representation. The picture then that you have is number one, we're criminalising trauma. We are responding to children with a trauma background, again, whose behaviour and whose capacity to regulate their own behaviour; whose brain development has been affected by trauma and maltreatment. We are responding to those children by sending them into youth justice custody; by criminalising them. So, that's the picture we need to take away.
There's another part of the picture that is specifically about children who have been the subject of a report to child protection, maybe multiple reports, and who are removed from their families and placed in the care system. And including those who are placed into residential care. And again, there's been a lot of work, including by Victoria Legal Aid that has showed those children are especially likely to have contact with the criminal justice system. And some of what brings that about is that when they're in a residential care home, and they behave in a particular way, they’re acting out, they’re hitting walls, if they're potentially behaving in a kind of physically threatening way to others, it's much more likely that those children will have the police called on it. So the data again, is kind of really good and interesting information out there. People can google Care Not Custody, a fantastic report by Victorian Legal Aid, that demonstrates really clearly that when we remove children from their families, and we place them in care, and especially when we're placing them in residential care, the flaws and challenges in those overstretched systems and the way those systems respond to kids who are acting out itself increases the likelihood that they'll have the police called and will end up in custody.
Sophie Raynor
And then as you’ve already mentioned, the conditions inside custody are not set up for kids who have that kind of background of trauma and disadvantage.
Liana Buchanan
Far from it. Again, I wish I could convey to anyone listening, just quite how austere and harsh the physical environment is, you know, being in a unit with a number of other young people, some of whom are pretty big and pretty tough and have been involved in some pretty significant kind of incidents of violence outside in the community… you can kind of imagine the impact of that on children, young people with a trauma background. It's far from therapeutic, it's far from likely to support them to recover from their trauma. If anything, unfortunately, it's much more likely to entrench them in a way of thinking the only way they can be safe in the world is to develop toughness and the capacity to use their own violence.
Sophie Raynor
That’s heartbreaking to hear.
Liana Buchanan
It's pretty grim. It's pretty grim. And I guess all I would say, again, is, we’re doing better, I think, than we were a few years ago. But we have to do much better, still; we have to recognise the kinds of children and young people who we are bringing into the system, we have to do better to meet their needs. They are complex needs. There's no question about that. But we are a pretty well-resourced, well-developed society, we've got access to a whole lot of very clever people, good services, we need to be bringing all of these to bear so that we can support these children and young people to recover from what they've experienced, and to get on with their lives.
Sophie Raynor
That’s a hopeful note to start wrapping up our conversation on. I did want to ask you one more question about Worth A Second Chance, as a campaign that, you know, we’re speaking to the general public, so it's not necessarily speaking directly to decision-makers, it's speaking to, you know, podcast listeners who might not have a lot familiarity with youth justice, but who care about the welfare of kids. For a campaign like this, where do you see its value?
Liana Buchanan
I think, depending on what's running in the mainstream media, depending on what community narrative is prevalent at any given time, it's really easy, either not to think about these issues, not to think about these young people, or not to understand just what kind of children, young people we’re bringing into the criminal justice system. And, frankly, how flawed that system is as a means of supporting those children. So the value of a campaign like this, like Worth A Second Chance, is: if it can spread awareness, if it can incite interest from people, people who care, people who want a safe community, but they also want a civilised humane community that looks after our children, I think there's incredible value in sharing that knowledge and sharing that information and message.
Because I genuinely believe that if more people understand what kind of children, what kind of experiences we're talking about for these children, and how much change is needed to do better by those children, then I think, ultimately, any government, of any political persuasion, will be more likely to hear that concern and respond to it. Let's be very clear, if you if you did a bit of a tracking of how much money has gone into prisons, adult prisons in the last decade, 10 to 15 years. I can't even begin to describe how much more that is than the money that has gone into child and family services, child protection, or even – and we've seen some more investment in youth justice, recently, even youth justice rehabilitation services. So, we've got to get our priorities a bit straight as a community, frankly, and I think a campaign like Worth A Second Chance can only help to that end.
Sophie Raynor
Thanks so much for your time, Liana.
Liana Buchanan
Thank you. Thank you to you, Sophie, but also thank you to anybody who's tuned into this podcast and who is informing themselves, and is going to go forward and play whatever role you’re going to play, and trying to make things better for children and young people.
Sophie Raynor
That was Liana Buchanan speaking to Worth a Second Chance about criminal justice reform in Victoria.
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 Liana Buchanan 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.