Problematising the potentials of music programs to address Australia’s youth justice policy problems

ABSTRACT

Reflecting an international shift from punitive to more rehabilitative responses to youth offending, many Australian youth justice systems are undergoing significant revision and reform. The urgency of these changes are intensified by longstanding inequities pertaining to the gross overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth and documented violations of human rights within Australian youth detention centres. As state and territory jurisdictions strive towards more child-centred practices, music programmes have been seen to provide transformative experiences for incarcerated young people through opportunities to express themselves and form positive relationships with others. In considering the potentials of music programmes to contribute towards such a child-centred youth justice ‘solution’, this article reports a poststructural policy analysis of Australian youth justice policy texts that produce child-centredness in particular ways. Music programmes are thus positioned as inherently political endeavours that hold potential to reinforce or disrupt policy problems, with implications for equity and justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Community music; music education; policy; What’s The Problem Represented To Be; youth justice

Introduction

While many justice systems around the world advocate for rehabilitative over punitive responses to youth crime, youth justice is still largely seen as something that is ‘done to young people rather than done with young people’ (Smithson and Jones 2021, 349). Recognising the acute vulnerabilities and complex needs that many justice-involved youth present with, and that incarceration risks exacerbating these vulnerabilities, approaches that afford youth voice, agency, and participation in decision-making with regards to their own lives are gaining traction (e.g. Case and Haines 2020; Creaney 2020; Forde 2018; Smithson, Gray, and Jones 2021a). One arena seen to hold potentials for this to be achieved in youth justice settings is through the development of ‘appropriate programs’ (Clancey, Wang, and Lin 2020, 5) that have the flexibility to respond to local cultures and individual situations. Internationally, music programmes are emerging as some of the most popular of such provisions, seen as one of the very few arenas for creativity within youth justice centres that can foster transformative opportunities for justice-involved children and young people. With programmes ranging from lessons on musical instruments, to choirs, to Indonesian gamelan, mixing beats, and rapping, music is seen as a unique medium through which justice-involved youth can ‘enact their subjectivity’, explore who they are and who they are becoming, ‘even in and against an objectifying space’ (Shieh 2010, 34). The inherent relationality of creating, learning, or performing music together has also been seen to foster inter-personal skills and transform ‘the relationships between young people themselves, between young people and authority figures such as music teachers or other institution staff, or between young people and communities on the outside’ (Kallio 2022, 7). In Australia, where youth justice remains the subject of contentious public debate and almost all jurisdictions are undergoing significant revision and reforms, calls for approaches to youth justice where ‘children are part of the solution, not part of the problem’ (Haines and Case 2015, 45) are intensifying. In critically considering the potentials of music to contribute towards such a child-centred solution, in this article I examine what the problem of Australian youth justice is represented to be in policy texts, approaching policy not as a neutral guide for practice but ‘contingent historical creations, human constructions, that produce effects’ (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 7), that produce problems in particular ways.

The problem of Australian youth justice

Youth justice in Australia is administered by the six federated states (Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria, and Western Australia) and two territories (the Australian Capital Territory and Northern Territory). States and territories function almost identically, with the power to form a parliament and create their own laws. However, state laws are protected by the constitution, whereas territories are granted somewhat less power with the Commonwealth Government able to override territory laws. The minimum age of criminal responsibility in Australia has been a divisive issue in recent years, with a number of jurisdictions recently responding to overwhelming public pressure to raise the age of criminal responsibility – the age at which a child is able to be arrested for, charged with, and found guilty of a criminal offence – from just 10 years old to 12 or 14. On any given night over the course of 2020–2021 there were approximately 787 children and youth were held in detention (AIHW 2022), a number that has steadily declined since 2017. Of these 787 youth, 91% were male; a significant number were from rural and remote areas (despite these areas being lower in population density, Butcher et al. 2019); and 53% were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, with the gross overrepresentation of Indigenous youth in detention fluctuating throughout the year and between regions, ranging between 5 times to 21 times the rate of incarceration for non-Indigenous youth (AIHW 2022). Despite incarceration intended as a ‘last resort option’ (Clancey, Wang, and Lin 2020, 5), 72% of youth in detention are unsentenced, either incarcerated while on remand or awaiting sentencing (AIHW 2022).

Compounding these inequities, many young people in contact with the youth justice system present with vulnerabilities and complex needs seen to relate to ‘challenging home circumstances’ such as ‘histories of familial offending, exposure to family violence, unstable accommodation or homelessness, and socio-economic disadvantage or poverty’, in addition to ‘alcohol and substance misuse, mental health issues, cognitive disabilities, childhood abuse and/or neglect, and disrupted education’ (Clancey, Wang, and Lin 2020, 6). These criminogenic risk factors have largely been based on ‘negative individual attributes and behaviours that are statistically associated with offending’ (Cunneen 2020, 529), correlating youth crime with individual responses to societal and social hardships. However, these hardships disproportionately affect certain social groups extending Australia’s colonial history, and it has been argued that the statistics upon which measures of risk are based assume a sociocultural homogeneity that is ‘defined by the values and experiences of Whiteness’ (Cunneen 2020, 528). This in turn holds the potential to construe Aboriginality and Blackness as risk factors for (re-)offending in and of themselves.

In recent years, the urgency of change has intensified, with ‘sustained patterns of abuse, humiliation, denial of basic human needs, and long-lasting physical and psychological damage’ (Clancey, Wang, and Lin 2020, 6) identified in some detention centres noted to be ‘emblematic of systemic, widespread violations of the human rights of children in contact with the juvenile justice system’ (Cunneen, Goldson, and Russell 2016, 174). In addressing longstanding inequity but also acute issues of child welfare, legal experts, doctors, child psychologists, social workers, educators, researchers and members of the public have called for innovative approaches that not only highlight community safety but also serve the best interests of the child. Emphasising the different ‘emotional and education needs’ and different stages of ‘physical and psychological development’ of children to incarcerated adults (United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child art. 3), a ‘Child First’ approach that meets childrens’ welfare needs has been argued to offer not only a more effective response to youth offending, but a more ethical one (Day 2023; Case and Haines 2021).

Music programmes as part of the solution?

Internationally, music programmes have been seen to offer ‘a safe place’ for incarcerated individuals to engage in personal transformation, and ‘learn or relearn how to interact in the real world’ (Hakes 2018 cited in Cohen 2019, 9; see also Cohen 2012). Within these spaces, music has been seen to provide opportunities for young people to process trauma (Cain and Cursley 2017; Clennon 2015); build confidence, self-esteem, and a sense of competence (Barrett and Baker 2012; Hickey 2018); develop a sense of autonomy and agency (Henley 2015); improve their self-control and emotional regulation (Henley 2016); enhance their capacity to engage in and persist with learning (Barrett and Baker 2012) and generate a sense of hope and goals for the future (Daykin et al. 2017). However, this has not only been seen as individual therapy or a process of ‘re-socialisation’ (Henley 2015, 107), but a space for young people to exercise agency in their own decision-making and lives, centreing notions of creativity and voice. Music education scholar Maud Hickey (2018) conducted a 5-year study on a music composition project for incarcerated youth in the United States to examine the potentials of music through the strengths-based-approach of positive youth development. Positive youth development is underpinned by Deci and Ryan’s (2000) self-determination theory, where autonomy, relatedness, and competence are seen to be basic human needs that are closely connected to personal wellbeing, motivation and growth. Noting that young people often spoke about their enjoyment alongside experiences of creating something new, Hickey (2018) suggests that ‘creating music (as opposed to performing)’ may be particularly powerful in youth justice settings, ‘leading to better self-image and then more options for successful rehabilitation’ (4062). Whereas self-determination theory articulates that competence, autonomy, and relatedness are required for creativity (Deci and Ryan 2000), Hickey (2018) argues the inverse, ‘that the nutriment of creativity is required for competence and autonomy’ (4060). Particularly in spaces ‘such as a detention center where there is little to no room to be creative’ (Hickey 2018, 4060), music programmes potentially offer incarcerated youth with valuable opportunities to explore beyond ‘what is towards what could be, foregrounding issues of agency, relationality, and social justice’ (Kallio 2022, 1). But more than this, in imagining what could be, music programmes might offer ‘a little bit of a sense of freedom’ (participant cited in Henley 2016, 203) for young people to articulate their subjectivities and needs and for those working within the youth justice system to listen and respond accordingly.

Research task and approach

The research task of the poststructural policy analysis (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016) reported in this article was to investigate how the identified problem of child-centredness (or rather, a lack thereof) was produced by Australian youth justice policy texts, thereby shaping the potentials of music programmes to contribute towards systems that place the ‘Child First’ in responding to youth offending.

As there are no explicit policies governing music programmes in Australian youth justice settings, the current youth justice policies and strategies for each State and Territory were analysed. Three States and Territories are excluded from this analysis as being either unavailable or in-development. The Tasmanian government have released a Final Draft Youth Justice Blueprint 2022–2032 and are in the process of receiving community and expert feedback. In New South Wales (NSW), Youth Justice is part of the NSW Department of Communities Justice within the Stronger Communities cluster, and while there are a number of action plans addressing aspects of youth justice (such as the Youth Justice Domestic and Family Violence Strategy 2019–2022, the Youth Justice Disability Action Plan 2021–2024, and the Aboriginal Strategic Plan 2018–2022) in addition to numerous policies under development, there is currently no overarching strategic policy publicly available that focuses specifically on Youth Justice. In the Northern Territory (NT), two key documents were released in early 2023 (the 10-Year Generational Strategy for Children and Families in the NT and the NT Coordinated Investment Framework) which outline the foundations for further strategic development in youth justice. It is also worth noting that the Western Australian Youth Justice Framework included in this analysis is outdated but undergoing significant reform following reports by Amnesty International and the Inspector of Custodial Services (OICS) in 2017–2018. In addition, a class action lawsuit was filed in late 2021, alleging that the Western Australian Government failed in their duty of care to Aboriginal children incarcerated at the Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre, adding to the calls for change. The five State and Territory Youth Justice policy documents analysed as part of this study are outlined in Table 1.

Table 1. State and Territory Youth Justice policies analysed

Policies and Strategies	Length
Australian Capital Territory Government Blueprint for Youth Justice in the ACT 2012-2022	55 pages
Queensland Government Youth Justice Strategy 2019–2023: Working together, changing the story	11 pages
Western Australian Government Youth Justice Framework Western Australia 2015–2018	7 pages
South Australian Government Youth Justice State Plan 2020–2023	43 pages
Victorian Government Youth Justice Strategic Plan 2020–2030	52 pages

Analysis followed Bacchi and Goodwin’s (2016) What’s The Problem Represented To Be? (WPR) strategy, using policy ‘texts as “levers” to open up reflections on the forms of governing, and associated effects, instituted through a particular way of constituting a “problem”’ (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 18). Engaging a Foucauldian (1977) mindset to ‘think … problematically’ (185–186), policy texts were thus approached ‘‘backwards’ … to attend to the ‘unexamined ways of thinking’ on which they rely’ (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 16) as a ‘problematizing activity’ (Maddison and Denniss 2013) rather than a means towards definitive answers. The WPR approach consists of seven steps to identify, reconstruct, and interrogate problematisations:

1. What’s the problem represented to be in a specific policy or policies?

2. What deep-seated presuppositions or assumptions underlie this representation of the ‘problem’?

3. How has this representation of the ‘problem’ come about?

4. What is left unproblematic in this problem representation? Where are the silences? Can the ‘problem’ be conceptualised differently?

5. What effects (discursive, subjectification, lived) are produced by this representation of the ‘problem’?

6. How and where has this representation of the ‘problem’ been produced, disseminated and defended? How has it been and/or how can it be disrupted and replaced?

7. Apply this list of questions to your own problem representations.

                   (Summarised in Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 20)

Drawing upon Foucault’s (1991) theorising that power ‘produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (194), this analysis process involved the identification of problems relating to child-centredness in each of the policy texts (Q1); identifying the meanings of these (Q2) in order to consider ‘patterns in problematizations that might signal the operation of a particular political or governmental rationality’ (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016, 21); engaging in a form of Foucauldian genealogy (Q3); and comparing problem representations and rationalities across jurisdictions (Q4) before considering the effects of these problem representations on the potentials of music programmes in youth justice settings (Q5) including their potential to disrupt these problem representations (Q6). This process forms the basis for my future reflexive engagement as a scholar (Q7) and may inform further research on music programmes in youth justice settings, considering how we ourselves contribute towards the representation and production of social, cultural, and musical problems.

Problematising the child-centredness ‘problem’

All State and Territory Youth Justice policies highlighted that the field is experiencing a significant shift in purpose ‘away from systems that deal largely with the consequences of youth crime, towards ones that address the underlying causes of offending by children and young people’ (ACT 2012, 4). The ‘problem’ is thus construed as a lack of differentiation between adult criminal justice systems and those addressing offending behaviours by young people. This difference between adults and children was emphasised as developmental and cognitive, as the Queensland Government (2019) Youth Justice Strategy explains,

During adolescence, a young person’s ability to undertake clear, logical and planned decision making, and to properly consider the consequences prior to acting, is still developing. (6)

This ostensibly is not to construe every child as one ‘at risk’ of offending but to justify youth justice systems and processes as separate and different from the more punitively focused adult criminal justice system. However, how this move towards a child-centred youth justice system is conceptualised varies considerably between States and Territories, with implications for how children and young people are governed by and within these systems. For example, the Government of Western Australia’s Youth Justice Framework (2015) and the Queensland Government’s (2019) Youth Justice Strategy position the child or young person at the centre of change in youth justice by focusing on more effective and efficient ways to ‘change the behaviour of young offenders’ (Queensland Government 2019, 4). It is noteworthy that these are the only two policies that seem to retain a punitive or deterrent role of detention within these ‘child-centered’ frames, with the Western Australian Framework (2015) noting that ‘punishment … should be designed as to give the offender an opportunity to develop a sense of social responsibility and otherwise to develop in beneficial and socially acceptable ways’ (7) and the Queensland Youth Justice Strategy (2019) aiming to reduce re-offending through ‘responses, punishments and support that work to stop re-offending and enable successful reintegration with their families, culture and communities’ (21). With the child or young person framed as ‘problematic’, the ways in which their voices are ‘included’ in the Queensland Government (2019) Youth Justice Strategy itself suggests how they might be included in youth justice practice. As a quote from ‘former youth justice client’ ‘Grace’ is inserted on page 7,

Some words of wisdom I can give – if you put your mind to it anything is possible. The only person you should try to be better than, is the person you were yesterday.

Narrating young people as at a loss precludes their involvement in addressing problems that affect them, representing them more as the ‘objects and not the subjects of any potential transformation’ (Shieh 2010, 21), yet as in the quote above, justice-involved youth are also positioned as responsible for their own rehabilitation. Failure to succeed is then a failure of the individual who perhaps didn’t ‘put [their] mind to it’ quite enough. Related to this, even when broader systemic ‘problems’ are identified, such as the ‘culture, operations and services’ (Queensland Government 2019, 6) of Western Australia’s Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre (now subject to a class action lawsuit related to a 2018 Amnesty International Report outlining inhumane treatment and abuse), the evidence sought in addressing such problems or developing evaluation frameworks and tools for future programmes and operations is not from those with lived experience, but experts ‘in areas such as Aboriginal mental health, child health, innovation, use of empirical data, engagement and capacity building’ (Government of Western Australia 2015, 3).

In contrast, other policies represent child-centredness as placing the child or young person at the ‘centre of the youth justice system’ in a way that seems to align more with the United Nations’ (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child, of which Part 1 Article 12,

1. States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

2. For this purpose, the child shall in particular be provided the opportunity to be heard in any judicial and administrative proceedings affecting the child, either directly, or through a representative or an appropriate body, in a manner consistent with the procedural rules of national law.

For example, the Australian Capital Territory’s Blueprint for Youth Justice (2012) explicitly references justice reinvestment with the aim to keep children out of custody, and ‘aspires to a system that works with children, young people and their families to develop and design services, programmes and even policies that affect them’ (24). In this instance, the policy frames the ‘problem’ as youth being excluded from their own rehabilitation and seeks to place their voices at the ‘centre of the youth justice system’ (2012). Similarly, the Government of South Australia’s Youth Justice State Plan (2020) seeks to involve children and young people in decision-making, ‘such that they themselves are helping to create their own positive alternate pathways, and connection to community and country’ (7). Yet, the involvement of youth voice is also systemic as well as individual, through the implementation of a ‘Youth Justice Advisory Board comprising young people with lived experience across the youth justice system’ as part of decision making (32). However, examining these policies in relation to the United Nations’ (1989) Convention on the Rights of the Child, we can problematise which children are deemed capable of forming their own views (as the notion that some children are capable implies that there are others who are not, divisions that may align with broader deficit narratives of race, ethnicity, dis/ability etc.) and what factors are taken under consideration in relation to a child’s maturity given the extraordinary stress and pressures of incarceration.

All State and Territory policies characterise justice-involved youth in similar ways, in justifying the need for a ‘Child First’ youth justice. The Australian Capital Territory’s (2012) Blueprint for Youth Justice describes incarcerated children and youth as disproportionately representing backgrounds of,

Socio-economic disadvantage, family breakdown, poor health and living conditions, intergenerational trauma, poor educational achievement and disengagement from education, sexual abuse and family violence, neglect, family drug and alcohol abuse, mental health problems, previous contact with the youth justice system, social and cultural discrimination and a history of failures – their own, their families and their support systems. (10)

Furthermore, questions of capacity are further raised by the Queensland Government (2019) Youth Justice Strategy, which notes that,

A young person may have other cognitive impairments sustained as a result of childhood maltreatment, such as foetal alcohol syndrome, brain injury as a result of ‘shaken baby syndrome’ or violence, or other unexplained injuries and psychological impairments. (6)

The problem of a youth justice system that is not in the best interests of the child is then also related to broader ‘problems’ relating to historically discriminatory policies, systemic disadvantage, and intergenerational trauma. As Kelly (2001) notes, ‘at-risk discourses constitute, in part, a historical continuity in the construction of certain youthful populations in terms of deviancy, delinquency, and deficit’ (25). As such, youth justice policy does not only target the governance of young people, but also their families, and particular populations deemed problematic.

As illustration, we may note that Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) is not covered by government healthcare subsidies in Australia, and many justice-involved young people are not screened or diagnosed at any stage of the criminal process, despite associated disabilities impacting upon their culpability, understanding of charges, ability to communicate needs for support, and pathways of reintegration. However, when mentioned alongside ‘shaken baby syndrome’, the criminalisation of disability is not the only issue at stake. The problem here is represented to be parents or caretakers. Even more specifically, if we also note that over 70% of incarcerated youth in Queensland are Indigenous and that the vast majority of FASD prevalence studies have focused on Indigenous communities (e.g. Fitzpatrick et al. 2017), the problem is represented as Indigenous mothers. This representation of Indigenous mothers as unfit draws upon, and feeds into, a long history of Australian policy portrayals of First Nations families as ‘deficient and dysfunctional’, requiring state intervention (Dunstan, Hewitt, and Nakata 2020, 323). The rate of Indigenous children being removed from family settings and placed in state care is currently around eight times higher than for non-Indigenous children, extending a long history of criminalising Indigenous family life (Dunstan, Hewitt, and Nakata 2020). Even while acknowledging the systemic inequity and discriminatory contexts in which youth offending takes place, the individualisation of the response may further entrench Indigenous families ‘in a cycle that perpetuates ongoing trauma, disadvantage and risk of neglect, whilst the links between Indigenous families’ intergenerational trauma, historically discriminatory family policies and systemic disadvantage are obscured or ignored’ (Dunstan, Hewitt, and Nakata 2020, 332–333).

If music programmes are introduced as part of broader solutions to child-centredness problems, how these problems are produced by policy texts has significant implications for how these programmes are designed and implemented.

Problematising the potentials of music programmes in youth justice

Despite the good intentions of organisers and educators, music in youth detention centres is always entangled as part of the disciplinary structures of youth justice and may function to reinforce problem constructions that rely on the individualisation of risk, potentially exacerbating racial and social inequity. For example, permitting certain musical expressions in detention/rehabilitative settings and not others may be seen to impose normative ideals of ‘behaviour, forms of expression and identities’ (Daykin et al. 2017), producing young people as subjects insofar as they are able to exist within dominant sensibilities. This may assume the form of forbidding swear words or themes that may be seen to glorify criminality, or the celebration of musical forms that articulate a predetermined vision of rehabilitation (see Kallio 2022). With music programme opportunities often being engaging alternatives to the monotony of everyday life in detention centres, music programmes risk being wielded as a form of ‘coerced correction’ (McNeill 2014), that further reinforce a ‘criminology of the other’ (Garland 1996) while demanding assimilation through music. The child-centredness at play is thus one that constitutes incarcerated youth ‘at a loss’, confining them as the ‘objects and not the subjects of any potential transformation’ (Shieh 2010, 21).

However, as Bacchi and Goodwin (2016) suggest in question 6 of the WPR approach, music programmes may also hold potentials to disrupt and replace policy problems. Through establishing spaces and practices that are adjacent to – though not wholly part of – the youth justice system, music programmes may enable participants to ‘take risks ‘safely’’ (Barrett and Baker 2012, 257) and negotiate understandings of criminality and rehabilitation in and through music. These opportunities to exercise voice also need to be complemented with opportunities to be listened to, in supporting respectful and supportive relationships between facilitators and participants (e.g. Cursley and Maruna 2019; Daykin et al. 2017). This is not to say that these relationships ought to be wholly celebratory of participants’ expressions, as Caulfield et al. (2022) note, incarcerated children place great importance on ‘constructive critical feedback’ (77) from facilitators as part of their relationships with them. However, it ought to be asked whether opportunities for such constructive critical feedback are unidirectional, or whether music programmes might be an arena ‘for social experimentation or for the exercise of a musico-political imagination, in the sense that they may enact alternatives to or inversions of, and can be in contradiction with, wider forms of hierarchical and stratified social relations’ (Born 2011, 381). It is this foregrounding of human togetherness that holds potentials for problem disruption, by positioning children and young people as the authors and authorities of their own transformation in ways that have an explicit interest in plurality and difference. Such provisions for collaboration through music might enable those small moments of freedom to challenge the individualisation of risk to make politics visible and replace the current problems of child-centredness in Australian youth justice problems with child-defined ones.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Griffith University Arts, Education and Law Group New Researcher Grant.

Notes on contributors

Alexis Anja Kallio

Alexis Anja Kallio is Deputy Director (Research) of the Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University. A specialist in the politics of arts education, Dr. Kallio works in close collaboration with community groups, policymakers, and educational institutions to explore how music education policy, practice, and research can structure opportunities for equity and justice. She is editor of Difference and Division in Music Education (2021, Routledge), co-editor of The Politics of Diversity in Music Education (2021, Springer) and co-editor of Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements (2019, Indiana University Press).