The last two weeks have been fairly hectic while I wrap up the first section of my report before moving up to Sydney! The first section of my report (as a reminder) is on looking at what existing best practice guidelines, resources, and standards are available in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK and creating recommendations around best practice. This has included looking at things like Legal Aid resources, law societies’ websites, court bench books, and more.
I have been working on several recommendations for best practice guidelines that YLA can implement. The overarching skill that lawyers working with children must be proficient at is communication. Communicating with a child client is often a far more complex matter than an adult client. However, law school does not teach you how to communicate with children and there is often not funding to provide lawyers working with children specialised training. This underscores the need for best practice guidelines. Some of the factors on how children communicate that I looked into to support me developing my recommendations were:
- age
- gender
- socio-economic status
- neurodiversity
- practice area the child is involved in
- cultural background
There were a couple of pretty horrific statistics that I came across. For instance, 89% of youth detainees in Australia have some form of neurodivergence and 56% of young people aged 10-17 under community-based supervision and 62% in youth detention were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Although knowing this can be quite disheartening, the contribution that YLA make towards reducing those figures and supporting the children and young people when they have no one else to go to is quite motivating.
Looking into the jurisdictions of Canada and New Zealand has been particularly intriguing because, like Australia, they have a First Nations population. It has been interesting to learn how the Western common law system interacts with the First Nations history and culture of each respective country. Australia, for example, have had a number of inquiries into how the justice system should interact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. However, nothing substantive has changed in the legal system to address the systemic injustices they face. New Zealand, on the contrary, have separate courts (Rangatahi Courts and Pasifika Courts) where Māori and Pasifika people can choose to have their cases heard instead. I found this particularly insightful because it’s something completely different from how the legal system functions in the UK.
Outside of my LiA, I’ve had the pleasure of being introduced to Dope Lemon, Skegss and more Aussie music and watched three more AFL games. I also went climbing up in Sand River, Buckland and heard loads of kookaburras. On my final full day, I went to MONA which is arguably the most unconventional museum in the world (I can’t effectively describe it, but Google it if you like art). Being in Tasmania has been a completely exhilarating experience, I’ll definitely be missing it! For the final three weeks I’ll be in Sydney working in YLA’s main office.
View from Sand River
Climbing in Sand River
View of Mount Wellington / kunanyi on the ferry back from MONA
Olly, who I shared a house with for three weeks