Abstract
This chapter introduces the approach to restorative justice, which is the focus of this monograph—namely Youth Justice Conferencing in New South Wales, Australia. In Youth Justice Conferences, adolescent offenders meet with their victim and other relevant members of the community to discuss relatively minor offences and work out some form of community service by way of reparation (instead of going to court, getting a criminal record and possibly serving time in juvenile detention). The specific conferences which were the focus of this research are introduced, alongside the model of language and semiosis used for analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The chapter ends with an outline of the topics to be considered: genre, exchange structure, appraisal, body language, identity and ceremony.
An early draft of this chapter was revised by Paul Dwyer , and subsequently reworked for inclusion in this monograph.
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- 1.
Across Australia, the rate at which young people (aged 10–17 years) were being held in detention had been consistently falling during the 1980s and 1990s, from a rate of 65 young people per 100,000 in 1981 to a rate of just 28 per 100,000 in 2001. By 2008, the detention rate had climbed back up to 37 young people per 100,000 (Richards 2011). In NSW alone, the number of juveniles in detention rose by 52 per cent between 2005 and 2010 (see McGrath A. and Weatherburn D. (2012) The effect of custodial penalties on juvenile reoffending. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 45: 26–44).
- 2.
In NSW, over two-thirds of young people who receive a custodial sentence are convicted of a further offence within two years (see Weatherburn D., Vignaendra S. and McGrath A. (2009) The specific deterrent effect of custodial penalties on juvenile re-offending. Report to the Criminology Research Council).
- 3.
There are a range of Ethnic Community Liaison Officers (ECLOs) associated with the police who are involved with conferences. Throughout the book we will primarily see an example of an ECLO who works with the Islamic community of one YP, but there are others, such as Aboriginal Liaison Officers who are specially devoted to various communities.
- 4.
The Young Persons Act does make provision for a YP attending a conference to be accompanied by a lawyer; however, the lawyer can only advise the YP, not speak for them. In the conferences observed as part of our research, no lawyers were ever present.
- 5.
For an overview of New Zealand Family Group Conferencing, see Hudson J., Morris A., Maxwell G.M., et al. (1996) Family Group Conferences: perspectives on policy & practice, Annandale: Federation Press.
- 6.
Note that the category of ‘citizen Convenor’ can include a police officer who convenes conferences outside the hours of their police work, in a private capacity. This was the case of one of the Convenors whose conferences we observed. She described the appeal of conferencing, compared to her police work, in terms of the opportunity ‘to have a different, more hopeful kind of conversation’ with a YP, one in which ‘you feel like you’re making more of a difference to their lives’.
- 7.
A note on our spelling of the word ‘indigenous’ in this section: when written with a lower-case ‘i’, it refers to indigenous cultures around the world; when written with an upper-case ‘I’, following current usage in our own part of the world, it refers specifically to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of Australia.
- 8.
It should perhaps be noted that Blagg is here basing his observations on conferencing in Western Australia where relations between the police and Nyoongar youth are often highly adversarial. Cuneen and White (2007) are most concerned by the police-run conferencing programmes, as well as the role police might play in formal cautions—one step down from a conferencing process—where the YP attends the police station. As Cuneen and White mention, much depends on the way in which diversionary programmes are implemented and regulated (see Cuneen C and White R. (2007) Juvenile Justice: Youth and Crime in Australia, Oxford: Oxford University Press).
- 9.
A recent study of the cost-effectiveness of YJCs has suggested that it is about 18 per cent less than if the YP had been dealt with via the Children’s Court (see Webber A. (2012) Youth Justice Conferences versus Children’s Court: A comparison of cost-effectiveness Crime and justice bulletin 164).
- 10.
There is a fine balance that needs to be achieved between being minimally invasive in terms of the use of equipment without reducing the quality of the recordings that can be produced. For instance, the type of recording used in this project, where participants were not wearing lapel microphones, might be compared with the widely circulated documentary ‘Facing the demons’ in which a hugely invasive camera set-up was used, involving a full camera crew. While this configuration captures fantastic audio and video recording, the impact on participants may be significant (see Ziegler A. (1999) Facing the demons).
- 11.
For a discussion of issues of validity in relation to criminal justice research, see Chan J. (2013) Ethnography as practice: Is validity an issue? Current Issues in Criminal Justice 25: 503–516.
- 12.
Eggins (1994) offers an accessible introduction to SFL and our brief exposition here is indebted to her account. For a short history of the theory, citing key references, see Martin J.R. (2016) Meaning matters: a short history of systemic functional linguistics. Word 61: 1–23; foundational papers are collected in Martin J.R. and Doran Y.J. (2015d) Grammatics. Critical Concepts in Linguistics: Systemic Functional Linguistics, Vol. 1. London: Routledge; Martin J.R. and Doran Y.J. (2015c) Grammatical descriptions. Critical Concepts in Linguistics: Systemic Functional Linguistics, Vol. 2. London: Routledge; Martin J.R. and Doran Y.J. (2015a) Around Grammar: phonology, discourse semantics and multimodality. Critical Concepts in Linguistics: Systemic Functional Linguistics, Vol. 3. London: Routledge; Martin J.R. and Doran Y.J. (2015b) Context: register and genre Critical Concepts in Linguistics: Systemic Functional Linguistics, Vol. 4. London: Routledge; Martin J.R. and Doran Y.J. (2015e) Language in Education Critical Concepts in Linguistics: Systemic Functional Linguistics, Vol. 5. London: Routledge.
- 13.
Bauman ’s definition of performance connects strongly to the way Dell Hymes used the term in his linguistic anthropology and his ‘ethnography of speaking’ framework that has been taken up in applied linguistics and was an early influence on SFL (see Hymes D. (1962) The ethnography of speaking. Anthropology and human behavior 13: 11–74). The brief elaboration we offer of Bauman’s definition in this paragraph—where performance is seen as whatever behaviour emerges from the dynamic interplay of three variables, namely roles, resources and goals—is borrowed from Tim Fitzpatrick (see Fitzpatrick T. (1995) The Relationship of Oral and Literate Performance Processes in the Commedia Dell’arte: Beyond the Improvisation-Memorisation Divide: Edwin Mellen Press).
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Zappavigna, M., Martin, J. (2018). Approaching Restorative Justice. In: Discourse and Diversionary Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63763-1_1
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