Katherine McLachlan, BA(Hons), LLB(Hons), LLM, GDLP, PhD has extensive experience working across criminal justice and social welfare agencies focused on child protection and child exploitation, youth justice, police intelligence, crime policy and research, victim support, and corrections. She is currently a member of the Parole Board of South Australia and has interviewed hundreds of people who have offended. She is an award-winning teacher who joined Flinders Criminology in 2022 and has a professional interest in victimology, trauma-informed practice, sentencing, and violence against women and children.
Abstract
Many young people who have experienced adversity and trauma have contact with both the youth justice and adult criminal justice systems. For those who ‘graduate’ into the adult system, little is known about the degree to which judicial officers given regard to adverse childhood experiences and developmental trauma. Trauma-informed sentencing requires that judges realise the presence of adversity and trauma in defendants’ lives, recognise trauma’s relevance to criminal behaviour, respond in a way that is informed by trauma and resist re-traumatisation (the 4Rs). Drawing from a sample of South Australian sentencing remarks within which judicial officers have identified defendants who have histories of child sexual abuse, this presentation will outline the degree to which sentencing may be trauma-informed, by applying the 4Rs framework and make suggestions for effective sentencing practice.