Beth is joined by Youthlaw Lawyer & Legal Pod Program Coordinator, Scarlett Trewavis, to discuss Youthlaw’s innovative Legal Pod Program, the only legal program in the state working with out of home care leavers to resolve legal issues that come up during their transition out of state care at 18 years old. We also chat about Youthlaw’s new Heads Up Project, which aims to resource the workers and agencies supporting care leavers to better identify, understand, and respond to their unmet legal needs.

Youthlaw, Victoria’s specialist community legal centre for young people and a member of the Smart Justice for Young People coalition, prioritises services to young people in out of home care, and is trying to come up with creative ways to prevent their entry into the justice system.

Smart Justice for Young People is a coalition of over 40 leading social services, health, legal, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, and youth advocacy organisations, working together to create change for children and young people who come into contact with the criminal legal system.  

The coalition’s 2023 Action Plan ‘Working Together’ identifies that Victorian young people in out of home residential care “are members of our Victorian community with enormous strengths, in spite of the harm and structural barriers they face, that if enabled, and supported to heal, can realise their goals and aspirations”.

However, it also finds that these young people are unfairly over-criminalised and over-represented in the criminal justice system.

A person is over-criminalised if they are subject to inappropriate, unnecessary or unjustified police or legal system contact (including stop, question, search, arrest, prosecution and detention).

This is one driver of over-representation, where a person or group is more likely to be in contact with the criminal justice system than their group’s proportion in the population would predict.

A 2019 Sentencing Advisory Council (SAC) analysis found that 94 percent of children known to child protection engaged in their first sentenced or diverted offence after a child protection report about them had been lodged.

The Victorian Government has also acknowledged this problem through the creation and implementation of the 2020 Framework to reduce criminalisation of young people in residential care.

Over-representation and over-criminalisation cause significant harm to young people, and can result in disengagement from school, family and community.