Young Women’s Voices

 

Young women’s contact with the justice system in Australia, and internationally, has shown significant increases in recent years, but the system is largely designed for young male offenders. ​

About Young Women’s Voices

This Australian Research Council-funded project, a collaboration between Queensland University of Technology, Flinders University and five Anglicare organisations across Australia, including Anglicare Southern Queensland, focuses on improved service delivery for those who identify as young women.

Background and objectives

The project aims to discover how the youth justice system, and human services such as child protection, mental health and education that have touch points with justice, could be improved to generate better outcomes for girls and young women.

The project privileges the views and experiences of young women who are part of these systems using an innovative methodology and supporting software tool called ‘Sensemaker’®, which was designed to gain new insights into complex social policy problems.

 

Similar projects:

Young Women’s Voices emerged from a previous Anglicare Southern Queensland (Anglicare) project called Youth Voices, that provided a channel for young people to share their experiences of help and support.

A third initiative, Hanging by a Thread: Our Search for Home, further complements the projects above. Hanging by a Thread is a photovoice project in which young people from Anglicare’s youth homelessness and youth justice services explored their personal perceptions of home and homelessness through their photography.

Together, all three projects challenge us to look at their outcomes – not just as ‘findings’ in a final report that gets neatly filed away – but as an ongoing stimulus for an inclusive conversation about how to support young people, as they try to negotiate a satisfying life in a world where they have almost no power to change a system they didn’t create.

The research team

Kelly Richards
Professor
Queensland University of Technology

Ian Goodwin-Smith
Professor
Flinders University

Vanessa Ryan
Project Coordinator
Queensland University of Technology

Rachel Stringfellow
PhD(c)
Queensland University of Technology

University partners

Community partners