Ms Lisa Ewenson1
1RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Detaining children and young people in carceral institutions is the most severe sanction imposed for criminal offending in Australia, yet we rarely hear and learn from young people about their experiences of youth detention, while institutional reform measures are sometimes mooted but rarely acted upon. This situation is further complicated in the Australian context by the staggeringly high rates of detention of young Indigenous people. Informed by a child rights-based approach and by decolonising methodologies, I undertook research seeking to disrupt hegemonic narratives about the state of youth justice detention, by drawing from the narratives of young people (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) who have experienced youth justice detention. The narratives of the young people in NSW revealed a nuanced and deeply complex experience of youth detention and were analysed via a capabilities approach that organised key themes of significance arising from the interviews. Key findings of this study included that youth detention in NSW was a contradictory experience for study participants, being perceived as both deprivation and, ironically, as providing a level of respite for young people from the multiple significant hardships they had endured prior to detention. Instances of demeaning treatment by staff were also revealed
Biography:
Lisa is a PhD Candidate at RMIT, who has over 15 years experience working in legal and social work roles promoting human rights, primarily within detention environments. Lisa’s doctoral research involved undertaking narrative inquiry with young people recently released from youth detention in NSW to learn about their experiences of detention, and applying the theoretical lens of the capabilities approach.