Criminology Research Council grant ; (11/86)
The project explored the experience of appearing before a Children's Court charged with a criminal offence from the perspective of the child. Sixty-three children were interviewed at two Courts. The first Court was a specialist Children's Court and the second was an outer suburban Magistrate's Court, constituted as a Children's Court. Approximately half the children interviewed had not previously appeared in court charged with a criminal offence.
The analysis focussed on reading the interviews as texts, as sources of meaning. The manner in which children discussed, described and explained the Court experience was examined in order to make explicit what the accounts had in common, and the unexpressed or hidden assumptions embedded in them. The research report, Children in Justice, by Dr Ian O'Connor and Ms Pamela Sweetapple will be published as a book by Longman Cheshire in late 1988.
In chapters 2 to 6 of Children in Justice, different aspects of the children's accounts (the experience of being policed, the expectations the children have of court, their accounts and perceptions of lawyers, child welfare officers and prosecutors, the description of the court hearing and the role of the magistrate therein, and finally, their discussions of the sentencing process and the sentence itself) are explored. Particular attention is paid to how the ideas of young people, and the practices of the court hinder children's participation in the court process and how these same ideas are functional in reinforcing a structural position of powerlessness and dependency in young people. The manner in which the actual offence, the precipitating incident, disappears in the court's processing of the child, and the consequences of this for society as well as the child, are also noted.
The final chapter argues for a re-examination of the relationship between young people and society and a reconstruction of the manner in which children's crimes are dealt with by society.