Do we meet UN standards?

• Author: Winterdyk, John
• Position: Feature on Youth Justice

By the time this article is in print, our new Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) will have been fully enacted for approximately six months. The rhetoric of "what might be" will now shift to "so now that it is all said and done, is the Act living up to its expectations?"

In spite of our youth having historically represented a subservient class, the concern over the welfare and discipline of young persons has plagued societies for centuries. If one traces the history of child rearing practices, it is quite apparent that our ideas of how to raise and discipline children has been fraught with ambiguity, inconsistency, and fundamental ignorance of understanding youth. Yet, this has not prevented each successive generation from offering, up a new solution--all in the name of serving the best interest of our youth.

Our current ideas were heavily influenced by the Child Saving movement of the late 1800s. The movement was influenced by a group of middle and upper-class citizens who imposed their values upon delinquent youth and began to use such terms as disease and illness to imply that delinquency was some kind of pathology. This resulting rationale for intervention and treatment has remained comparatively intact ever since.

Yet, despite all our efforts, and those of every other nation that has embraced some type of legislation to address youth crime and delinquency (see Law Now, April/May 2001 for a description of the basic juvenile justice models) the problem has not been alleviated. In fact, official statistics indicate that crime among adolescent females has increased dramatically throughout the 1990s. And while property crime may have abated somewhat, minor violent crime has increased (although the practice of labelling all schoolyard fights and often bullying as simple assault has contributed to this apparent increase). These trends are not generic to Canada, but have been observed in many other parts of the world as well.

It is commonly acknowledged that public reaction to several violent crimes committed by both adolescent boys and girls in the 1990s, were instrumental in forging the latest Canadian legislation. Comparatively speaking, our efforts to find a balance between accountability and rehabilitation can be considered better than some of the practices in other countries such as Nepal which still allows mentally ill children to be jailed and chained or China which still executes some child offenders. Yet, our custody rates were still among the highest relative to other western countries including the USA even though custody rates and remand admission both declined 6% from 2000 to 2001.

International Standards for...