Research podcast- Youth Justice

Is there some sort of model of how do we understand that process? Someone has injury perhaps when they're young and then how do they end up there?

So I guess it's worth just kind of pausing on that kind of direct association between a brain injury and a, someone's journey into criminal justice.

As you say, there's enough of an association that we can't necessarily ignore that link.

You know better than me, James, brain injuries are very varied kind of heterogeneous thing and you know natural injuries the same people's the impact of those injuries can be very different but we do know that some of the kind of common symptoms or particular symptoms that might emerge from a brain injury a number of those do overlap with some of the things that as a criminologist we might call kind of risk factors for offending so things like um difficulties with impulse control or you know emotional regulation or inhibition or planning or peer relationships.

There's a whole load of factors that we know to be things that may occur for a young person who's had a brain injury.

that in a criminal justice, criminology context, we regularly label as risk factors for that behaviour.

And you can see how some of those symptoms and challenges might play out as the forms of behaviour that might turn into something aggressive or impulsive and provocative that might lead to antisocial or even criminal behaviour.

So there is a direct link.

but as we've already said it's not that most young people with brain injury are engaging in offending and actually the far more complex processes are those that mean that the child ends up in in prison sort of deeply embedded within you know criminal justice system and they're the processes that we're kind of most interested in um so we so as a social scientist i might kind of describe this as a kind of social model of disability kind of way of sort of thinking about and approaching this and i guess many of your listeners will be familiar with that kind of way of thinking but you know to kind of basically explain it we would think about the social model in the same way that's been thought about uh in other forms of disability and in particularly the example that people often use is where someone might be in a wheelchair so there is a there's already impairment there where someone can't can't walk and that's a very real impairment that only becomes disabling when the the environment the buildings that that person's trying to access are not suitable for them so the doors they can't open the doors they They can't use stairs, et cetera.

There's no facilities for them to access that space.

And that's what becomes disabling.

And we can take that kind of analogy and apply it to the systems that we're interested in.

So a young person may have a particular brain injury and a particular set of needs, but if those needs are understood and if our systems and our processes are responding to those needs, they don't necessarily lead to the same disabling experience and what we would call discrimination and the rights of that child not being met that might lead them to be caught up in our criminal justice systems and eventually in prison.

So we have to understand that journey of disablement and discrimination and criminalisation and how we can impact on that.