Pre-Congress Workshops

Recent years have seen interesting and heated debates and reforms in Australia and New Zealand surrounding the criminal responsibility of children. Whilst in some jurisdictions there are arguable advances, in human rights terms and otherwise, via increasing the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR; eg. to 14 years of age in the Australian Capital Territory from 1 July 2025), in other jurisdictions there have been calls for sentencing reforms for youth offenders (eg. the adult crime, adult time approach) and resistance to reform suggestions that exist (eg. in New Zealand Petition: Raise the age of criminal responsibility and Breen (2022) in 10 is too young to be in court – NZ should raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility: University of Waikato). Resistance to raising the MACR often is founded in concerns about the seriousness of offending rather than the capacity and rehabilitation potential of children who offend, and, the resistance to reform is often grounded in arguments at odds with the trends in relevant criminological data about youth offending. Evidence-based law reform shaped by psychiatrists, psychologists and lawyers has not always been used to balance concerns over public safety and the recidivism of child offenders with clinical, developmental or human rights perspectives.

This workshop is an attempt to survey relevant recent reforms in Australia and New Zealand against the global backdrop of reform in this area. Examples of evidence- based law reform sensitive to psychiatric, psychological, legal and criminological expertise will be given as well as examples of law reforms that are not as evidence- based in the same ways. Examples of how superior courts have discussed the most controversial of cases and reforms involving the doli incapax presumption, (mandatory) sentencing and (presumptions against) bail, for example, will sharpen insights into how law reform often proceeds with a risk of sidelining psychiatric, psychological, legal and criminological expertise (eg. recent reforms to s 5 of the Children (Criminal Proceedings) Act 1987 (NSW) in force from 1 March 2026), let alone by ignoring relevant criminological data.

Learning Objectives
Learning outcomes for the session will include:

• Understanding relevant legal reforms to MACR, doli incapax, sentencing law and bail law that impacts criminal responsibility of and treatment of child offenders within each Australian jurisdiction and in New Zealand;
• Understanding the legal and strategic differences between doli incapax arguments, fitness to plead arguments, mental impairment and cognitive impairment arguments children may seek to make once charged with offences;
• Confidence in discussing, comparing and critiquing these reforms with human rights, legal practice and law reform arguments globally;
• Sharing and examining case examples from leading legal decisions of relevance from superior and ultimate courts in both Australia and New Zealand;
• Discussion of literature-based overviews of the nature of expert testimony relating to the criminal responsibility of children, doli incapax arguments, and the assessments of the capacity of child offenders, including how each Australian jurisdiction, or how New Zealand law, allows parties to argue for and against the presumption of doli incapax where it exists.

This session is open to professionals of all disciplines interested in understanding the concept of legal professional wellbeing and strategies across individual, organisational and systemic domains for promoting wellbeing and safer workplaces to support legal professionals in practice.

The co-leaders and facilitators for this conference workshop will be Dr / Associate Professor Schulz Moore, Dr Nina Hudson and Professor Kate Diesfeld. The primary aim will be to workshop ideas for facilitating wellbeing in the legal profession. Those ideas will span individual, structural and organisational factors. Participants will draw inspiration from various sources including coronial preventive insights, research, policy and practice. The session will further aim to identify a ‘toolbox’ of practical strategies as an outcome of the workshop.

This session, run as a half day workshop, will include:

• Exploring literature and Coroner’s Court cases on relevant concepts, including legal professional wellbeing, ill-being, stress, distress, and vicarious and secondary trauma.
• Identifying key findings from research (including recent major studies in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand) on the causes of workplace ill-being, stress and distress and impacts on wellbeing and implications for the safety of legal professionals and the broader community.
• Unpacking the factors that have been associated with these causes, including individual, structural and organisational factors (using, for example, the ‘four Ps’ framework’).
• Considering the strategies that have been identified and recommended for effecting change, facilitating wellbeing and preventing ill-being and suicide in the legal profession.
• Using case studies drawn from the research and practice to explore how these strategies may operate in practice to address such individual, structural and organisational factors.
• Critically reflect on whether and how these strategies could be applied in participants’ current practice and, in particular, structural or organisational contexts, and identify other strategies for consideration. Examples of preventive and responsive strategies are: health pathways identified in disciplinary contexts where lawyers experienced impairment and approaches identified in coronial cases to support wellbeing and minimise suicide. By distilling preventive strategies from the Coroner’s Court cases, we will “learn from the dead to protect the living”.
• Considering implications for other professional contexts including those in psychiatry, psychology and other allied health practice.

Recent media coverage of domestic violence-related murders and an awareness campaign that accompanied the introduction of new coercive control laws in NSW in 2024 have contributed to increased reporting of domestic abuse. This has meant that specialist case management and case coordination services for victim-survivors and others impacted by this form of violence are stretched to, and often beyond, their limits.

Risk, Needs, Responsivity (‘RNR’) Principles are used in offender rehabilitation programs in correctional settings, and there is a great deal of empirical evidence to support this model in tailoring the level of interventions and supervision to match the level of risk posed by users of violence, and manage their specific criminogenic needs to moderate that risk. Effective offender risk assessment is one way to help the situation, since it helps systems target those most at risk of perpetrating further domestic assaults or other forms of intimate partner violence (IPV).

The ODARA is a 13-item empirical actuarial risk assessment instrument created by Professor N. Zoe Hilton and colleagues at the Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene, in collaboration with the Ontario Provincial Police in 2004. The ODARA is primarily for use with adult men with a history of physical violence against an intimate partner, although there is a growing body of literature supporting its use with adult women who abuse their male partners. The ODARA is one of the most widely used intimate partner violence risk assessment instruments in Canada and is extensively used in the United States and some European nations. It is also developing a user base in Australia and New Zealand, alongside its sister tool (the Domestic Violence Risk Appraisal Guide, or ‘DVRAG’, an in- depth assessment for domestic assault recidivism).

In this workshop, independent certified ODARA trainer Sam Ardasinski (www.saarna.org) will provide training in the use of the ODARA for an Australian context. The workshop entails:

• An overview of the background and development of the ODARA
• A review of applicable validation studies, to demonstrate where it sits within the broader risk assessment field available to forensic practitioners
• A thorough explication of the Scoring Criteria, as contained in the official manual
• Practice case examples, for individual item scoring practice as well as full application practice
• For those that would seek user certification, a post-workshop test can be provided which would allow for participants to be awarded an initial certificate of competency (as recognised by SAARNA)

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this event, participants should be able to:

• Understand how domestic abuse sits within the context of the risk spectrum, and how different users of domestic violence may present different risk profiles.
• Understand the normative base, and gain an awareness of the validation history of ODARA within the empirical literature.
• Identify applicable cases in which use of ODARA, and/or DVRAG, may be relevant in the context of forensic risk assessment practice
• Apply scoring principles, as taken from the official scoring manual, to confidently score ODARA in cases of intimate partner violence (IPV)

Child removal is understood to be a foremost continuing strategy of colonisation of Indigenous peoples worldwide. The overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in child protection systems, and the poor lifetime outcomes experienced by children subject to these interventions, remains a pressing human rights challenge. Reflecting on this challenge in the wake of the Bringing Them Home report, Commissioner Dodson’s call for a fundamentally different approach that restores to Aboriginal communities the authority to raise their own children remains as relevant now as it did in 1997:

“We know that strengthening families and communities is far better than punishing their children… Perhaps we cannot give back the children who were removed fifty or thirty years ago. But we can give back the children who are being removed today. And we can give back to Indigenous families and communities the capacity and the power to do what is surely their right – to bring up their own children (Dodson, 1997, para. 34).

Part of this ‘capacity and power’ is the opportunity to define the conceptual frameworks that underpin contemporary child protection systems. We have illustrated elsewhere, using the construct of attachment as an example, how developmental psychological constructs inform sociolegal frameworks and decision-making in ways that reflect and tacitly entrench dominant cultural norms. This epistemic violence reproduces and perpetuates intervention and associated harms for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. In doing so, we have sought to identify the structural and systemic dimensions of these harms, and the scope of reform needed to ‘give back’ the capacity and power to bring up their own children. Subsequent work has sought to explore the myriad ways these processes manifest and operate across child protection systems.

The workshop will begin by outlining the problem of epistemic violence, including the imposition of Western psychological constructs on Aboriginal children, families and communities. Further, it will explore the challenges associated with the uncritical application of related metrics on Aboriginal parents, often minimising or rendering entirely invisible the sociopolitical and historical determinants of Indigenous health, along with systemic and structural harms. We will then outline practice principles for professionals who conduct or use assessments of Aboriginal children and families in child welfare contexts with a focus on validity and utility, improving decision-making towards more just outcomes, ultimately breaking the cycle of child removal and generational harms, and reimagining a future where Aboriginal families thrive. The workshop will be grounded in Indigenous and clinical psychology theory and practice, evidence from current child welfare practices, and foundational Indigenous documents, including the Bringing Them Home report, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social and Emotional Wellbeing framework.

Learning objectives

Through a relaxed and conversational structured workshop, participants will:

• Recognise and reflect upon the misapplication of Western psychological constructs and concepts in the assessment of Aboriginal children and families in child welfare contexts
• Critique harmful assessment practices, such as an overreliance on historical records and the pathologisation of legitimate and proportionate responses to extraordinary circumstances
• Apply practice principles that will prevent misleading and biased information influencing or being included in child protection assessments and other child protection decision-making
• Understand the role of structures and systems in reproducing current outcomes, and the opportunities for improved processes and approaches.

This session is open to all early career researchers and students interested in qualitative methods with hard-to-reach populations in criminological, psychological, and forensic mental health contexts.

This session will include lessons learned from our combined clinical, and research experience featuring practical strategies, examples, and techniques for:

• Identifying, contacting, phone screening, and recruiting participants from hard-to-reach, at-risk, and complex populations
• Building rapport and trust with vulnerable participants
• Interviewing participants who are socially marginalised, structurally disadvantaged, and/or justice involved.
• Taking good field notes (from the beginning, on the day, and afterwards)
• Incorporating user-voice in the codesign of interview research from ethics applications to dissemination of findings
• Transcribing, organising, managing, and coding data to best prepare for thematic and narrative analysis
• Navigating ethical considerations, safety protocols, and preparing for (and learning from) ‘worst case scenarios.’

Forensic mental health professionals are frequently requested to conduct assessments of offenders who have committed sexual offences and homicides. Such assessments often focus on the information that can be obtained through a forensic clinical interview. However, recent years have seen a growing appreciation of offence behaviour as a valuable source of information for forensic assessors. Nevertheless, behavioural analysis is a skill that is rarely, if ever, taught in forensic training programs. Indeed, this is primarily the domain of those that work with police agencies than a core skill of forensic mental health professionals. This workshop aims to provide participants with the foundational knowledge to more appropriately consider offence behaviour in order to guide interview strategy, diagnosis, and formulation. Basic principles of behavioural investigative analysis and “offender profiling” will be described with case examples used to facilitate discussion. Decision-making approaches and the differentiation of modus operandi and ritual behaviours will be explored. A crucial distinction between impulsive and ritualistic or preferential offending will be emphasised and participants will learn how to identify sexual deviance and paraphilic interests from offence behaviour. The use of thematic analysis and typological frameworks for various types of sexual and violent offences will be described and participants will receive training in behavioural rating scales that can be used to inform diagnosis and formulation. Approaches to the evaluation of hypotheses derived from behavioural analysis will also be explored.

The teaching approach will include a mixture of interactive didactic material, case study discussion, and coding of practice exercises. The workshop will be practitioner-focused and would be of interest to practicing forensic mental health professionals (including students and registrars) as well as police officers and legal practitioners.

Learning Objectives:

• To develop an understanding of the field of behavioural analysis, offender profiling, and behavioural investigative advice
• To gain foundational knowledge of behavioural analysis techniques and how they can be used in the forensic assessment context
• To develop a thorough knowledge of thematic analysis in order to differentiate sexual and violent offenders by reference to motive
• To learn how to utilise several behavioural rating scales to assist diagnosis and formulation