| Title: |
From ‘at risk’ to ‘a risk’: The criminalisation of young people with cognitive disability in residential care |
| Authors: |
McCausland, Ruth; Dowse, Leanne |
| Contributors: |
‘Lost in Transition: Supporting young people with complex support needs’. UNSW–Chief Investigators L. Dowse, P. Mendes, I. Strnadová, J-S. Lee, T. Cumming, P. Snow, L. Smith and K. Ellem |
| Source: |
Incarceration ; volume 3, issue 2 ; ISSN 2632-6663 2632-6663 |
| Publisher Information: |
SAGE Publications |
| Publication Year: |
2022 |
| Description: |
There is a growing body of research in Australia and internationally focused on ‘care-criminalisation’: the criminal justice system involvement of young people in out-of-home care. Residential care – a model of out-of-home care where groups of children and young people live with paid staff – has been identified as a specific site of criminalisation for those who live there, in particular young people with cognitive disability and complex support needs. This raises significant human rights concerns and the need for greater systemic scrutiny. This article aims to make a contribution by focusing specifically on the institutional arrangements and characterisations that criminalise young people with cognitive disability in residential care through interrogating the official administrative records of two young people with cognitive disability who spent time in residential care and had contact with the criminal justice system as teenagers. Analysing case studies compiled from these records illustrates the ways that criminal justice intervention becomes justified and normalised for young people with cognitive disability in residential care. We critique the ways that institutional mechanisms and narratives serve to construct, coerce and constrain young people with cognitive disability in residential care. The specific forms of surveillance and control they are subjected to mean that their designation of ‘at risk’ almost routinely transmutes to ‘a risk’ to others, to themselves and to property and in the process their vulnerability and need for care and protection becomes instead a mechanism of criminalisation. Often disability becomes erased or at least overshadowed in administrative records, with care-specific and disability-related behaviour reinscribed as offending behaviour. Particularly stark in this analysis is the institutional and interpersonal violence that accompanies such criminalisation and the pervasive nature of this violence in the lives of young people with cognitive disability in residential care ... |
| Document Type: |
article in journal/newspaper |
| Language: |
English |
| DOI: |
10.1177/26326663211021687 |
| Availability: |
https://doi.org/10.1177/26326663211021687; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/26326663211021687; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full-xml/10.1177/26326663211021687 |
| Rights: |
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Accession Number: |
edsbas.9EF15743 |
| Database: |
BASE |