Parents and youth justice.

• Author: Hillian, Doug

Introduction

Although parents play a key role in helping prevent youth crime and rehabilitating those convicted of breaking laws, they are virtually invisible in youth justice policies and practices. Civil and criminal laws that attempt to hold parents accountable without ensuring adequate support do not take account of the actual experiences of parents or of the fact that parenting a young offender is difficult in the best of circumstances (Smith and Stern 1997). As a result, parents already struggling with a difficult child are often left feeling blamed and excluded in their encounters with the youth justice system.

The purpose of this article is to explore the place of parents in the youth justice system. The contributions and responsibilities of parents in youth justice policies are introduced conceptually, and parental experiences are examined, based on a study of adults who had a son involved with the Vancouver Island youth justice system in the late 1990s. The article concludes with a discussion of possible ways to support and expand the place of parents in youth justice.

Parents in approaches to youth justice

The place of parents in the justice system varies significantly over time and by place, as youth justice laws, policies, and practices take up different concepts about parental responsibilities and society's response to parents (Hillian 2000). Crime control policies prioritize youth and parental accountability, along with the protection of society and private property (Corrado 1992; Faust and Brantingham 1974). For example, law and order, deterrence, and punishment are emphasized in the presumption, in the new 2002 Youth Criminal Justice Act, of adult sentences for youth 14 and over convicted of serious crimes. Such an approach presupposes the duties of parents, but not their rights, capacities, or needs.

The distress that parents experience when a young person offends is often exacerbated by a common societal belief that the misbehaviour of children is the fault of their parents. Blaming parents is an expression of the faulty parenting paradigm, a set of ideas that children in trouble are the product of poor parenting and that both children and parents should be held accountable (Halpern 1996; Schaffner 1997). This tendency to blame parents is now being manifested in parental responsibility laws, such as those passed in Manitoba and Ontario, allowing victims of property crime to take civil proceedings against the parents of young offenders. Most American states hold parents civilly liable for their children's destructive acts and 17 states impose additional criminal liability, wherein parents judged to be improperly supervising children are fined, even jailed (McNaught 1998). The 2001 Parental Responsibility Act of British Columbia, for instance, states that an individual or an insurance company can use small claims court to commence a civil action against a parent of a child who caused property loss. A parent must pay compensation up to $10,000 unless able to satisfy the court that reasonable supervision was exercised and destructive activity discouraged. The burden of proof is not on the state to prove parental negligence, but on the parent to prove s/he should not be held liable. Parental responsibility is mitigated if there are psychological disturbances in child or parent, if the parent has sought to improve his/her skills by attending parenting courses, or if the youth is in the care of the state (s. 10(d)(h)(j)).

A radically different approach to the place of parents in youth justice shifts the focus to addressing the processes that create social inequality and the root causes of youth crime (Law Reform Commission of Canada 1991; Schissel 2000; Reid and Reitsma-Street 1993; Fisher and Jantti 2000). This community change approach assumes that youth and their parents are primarily neither rational individuals acting in their own best interests nor deviants in need of rehabilitation. Their choices, including decisions to commit crimes, are made in the context of current possibilities and historical constraints. Systemic changes are needed to promote the welfare of all youth and families, to stop violence, and to prevent crime. Parents and their communities are responsible for the care, supervision, and control of young people, and society is collectively responsible to ensure there are sufficient resources for raising healthy children and youth. When youth do hurt people or property, then parents, community, and youth together need to participate in processes that examine what happened and why and that repair the hurt. There is an assumption that the majority of custodial programs should be abolished, while special programs are needed for small numbers of youth requiring separation from the community.

From an aboriginal perspective the required societal changes are immense, as all aspects of current and past youth justice systems have been built by white people on the assumption that it is essential to establish individual guilt and punish wrong. These assumptions are alien to aboriginal people, whose traditional approaches to parents and to youth justice are based on different principles and practices (Hamilton 2001; Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples 1993). In youth justice policies featuring reciprocal responsibilities for parental, community, and youth change, alternatives to formal judicial proceedings and custody are promoted through a strengthened network of community resources supporting parents and youth and non-judicial and community-based processes for redressing hurts. To this end, the 2002 Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) has provisions permitting family-group conferences and sentencing circles. Although these provisions are not mandatory in the new law and are reliant upon discretionary funding, policies and demonstration projects for family conferencing are being developed in British Columbia.

There are other approaches to youth justice policies less attentive to societal change and community responsibility and more focused on modifying the criminal behaviour and antisocial attitudes of individual youth and their parents. These approaches also emphasize diverting less serious offenders from legal proceedings, especially youth with strong parental resources (Cornell 2001; Leon 1977; LeBlanc and Beaumont 1992). In these approaches, there is an assumption that parents should be the key adults to take responsibility for the supervision and welfare of youth. In the YCJA, section 2(1), the definition of parent or guardian includes any person who has in law or in fact the custody or control of any child. Most mandatory provisions in old and new Canadian youth justice laws attend to monitoring parents and evaluating how well they discharge their responsibilities to children who break the law, but helping parents control and care for their children is reserved for rhetorical statements of principle and discretionary provisions (Havemann 2000; Reitsma-Street 1989/1990). For instance, in reports considered by judges in sentencing youth, justice workers must examine the relationship between the young person and their parents, and the degree of parental control and influence (YCJA s. 40(2)(d)(vi)). The caring and supportive work of parents is not mentioned, nor what would help parents care for or control youth.

The last important conceptual approach that influences the legal and experiential place of parents under policies and laws draws upon assumptions of rights and justice, parental accountability, and due process (Bala and Kirvan 2000). The primary duty of parents is to care for and control their children, but parents also have rights. The key parental right proclaimed in the Young Offenders Act (YOA) and in the YCJA is the right to particular information, including notification of reason and date of arrest and of dates for court proceedings and Review Board hearings (YOA ss. 9, 10, 29(1); YCJA s. 26). Proceedings may be invalid if notice has not been given to a parent or guardian, unless the judge or justice dispenses with notice. Parents do not have the right, however, to speak in court or to participate in the decisions, or to have a lawyer paid for by the state if charged with failure to attend court or provide proper supervision. The justice system has no responsibility to ensure that parents understand their rights or to support them in carrying out their responsibilities when they need to take days off work and to travel to attend various court proceedings, including those ending in adjournments.

The rights of parents to participate in actual youth justice decisions mayor may not increase under the new law. In YCJA section 19, for instance, a judge or other justice official may convene a conference at any decision-making stage of the proceedings. The participants in the conference, which could include parents, are mandated to give advice on extrajudicial measures, conditions for release, sentences, and reintegration plans. The conference participants advise but do not make the final decision. A stronger provision for parental rights is in section 94(3): the provincial director shall bring a youth sentenced to custody for review by a youth justice court upon the request of a parent, after certain prescribed periods of custody have been served.

In brief, there has been little explicit attention to parents in the development of laws and policies. (For a detailed table depicting models of youth justice, with the innovative inclusion from our research of parental considerations, see Hillian 2000). There is, however, the implicit assumption that parents can, should, and will care for and control their children, bringing them up to be law-abiding citizens. We now turn to the perspective of parents themselves and to their experiences of the youth justice system, before the discussion section picks up how laws, policies, and programs could change if parental...