Disadvantaged groups – the Law in practice

The basics

Children and young people in the justice system

Provide background, definitions and a description

Outline the legal response

Outline the non legal response

Evaluate the effectiveness of this response by researching relevant legislation, cases and media articles.

Chapter 7 is Children and Young people

Find crime and justice statistics. Look at the crime and justice topic to find statistics on crime, personal safety, crime victimisation, domestic violence, and drugs. The year books contain summaries of regions (for example New South Wales in Focus) which includes detailed statistics about crime in NSW.

Find reports and statistics on juvenile crime

Australian Institute of Criminology

Find information about young offenders

NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research [external website]

Find out what crime and criminal courts data the Bureau collects and learn how to use and understand this data. Use the Crime Mapping Tool to view maps, graphs and data on criminal incidents in NSW. There are also other tools and reports about trends in crime within NSW.

Look for Children, juveniles and young people

ABC The law report [external website]

Listen and read jargon-free stories about law reform, education, test cases, miscarriages of justice and legal culture.

Search for young offenders

Literacy demands

Language of evaluation/judgement

Use Citemaker for your bibliography

The legal response

Legislation

Accessing legislation

AustLII

Use this site to find all Commonwealth legislation

NSW Legislation

Use this site to find all NSW legislation

Example of legislation:

Young offenders Act 1997 (NSW)

Cases

Indigenous Law Resources
The AustLII database has a timeline of legal developments that have affected Indigenous Australians. The timeline includes case law, legislation, treaties, and other legal and political documents which have affected Indigenous people’s rights in Australia.

Law and Justice foundation of NSW
The Law and Justice Foundation of NSW provides up-to-date legislation, court lists and legal judgements from the Australian court system. It is the Web-site commonly used by lawyers for researching cases and legal judgements.

NSW Caselaw

Find cases from NSW courts and tribunals.

NSW Coroners Court

Find inquests into deaths, fires or explosions by clicking on the ‘Coronial findings’ tab.

LawCite

Available via AustLII, an international legal case and journal article citator. Use this to locate judgements and, online copies of decisions (if available), to find how decisions were subsequently treated and to find journal articles and other related material on a case.

The non legal response

Accessing media articles

Use Publication Search to open articles from the Sydney Morning Herald. Then use Search Within Publication to look for related articles.

Search for young offenders and Juvenile justice

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