Australasian Youth Justice Conference 2013
 

Keynote speakers

Judge Andrew Becroft
Principal Youth Court Judge of New Zealand

His Honour Judge Andrew Becroft is the current Principal Youth Court Judge of New Zealand.

Born in Kuala Lumpar, Malaysia, and educated at Rongotai College, Wellington, Judge Becroft graduated from Auckland University in 1981 with a BA. LLB (Hons) degree. He practised in Auckland with the firm Fortune Manning & Partners, where he was an Associate. In 1986 he assisted with the establishment of the Mangere Community Law Centre and worked there until 1993. He then worked as a criminal barrister in South Auckland until his appointment to the District Court bench, sitting in Wanganui, in 1996. He was appointed Principal Youth Court Judge in June 2001. Judge Becroft was a former council member of the Auckland District Law Society and the New Zealand Law Society.

Judge Becroft is a current editor of LexisNexis Transport Law, is the Patron of the New Zealand Speak Easy Association Inc., which assists those with various forms of speech impediment and is the Chairperson of the Board of the Tertiary Students Christian Fellowship (NZ) Inc. He is a strong advocate of youth issues.

 
Professor Kerry Carrington
Head, School of Justice
Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology

Professor Kerry Carrington is the Head of the School of Justice in the Law Faculty at QUT, Vice Chair of the Division of Critical Criminology, ASC and Chief Editor for The International Journal for Crime and Justice. From 2003 to 2005 she worked in Australian Parliament as a senior researcher and then as the Head of the Children, Youth and Families Unit at AIHW and helped establish the Juvenile Justice National Minimum Data Set.

Professor Carrington is a leading expert in female delinquency and youth justice, with a long track record of high quality scholarly achievements and publications in this field, including the books: Offending Girls (1993) and Offending Youth (2009).

In 2009 Professor Carrington’s submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family, Community, Housing and Youth Inquiry into Youth Violence was heavily quoted in the final report.

In 2012 Professor Carrington was involved in a submission to the Legal Affairs and Community Safety Committee to address the Youth Justice (Boot Camp Orders) and Other Legislation Amendment Bill 2012.

 
Dr Raymond R Corrado
Simon Fraser University

Dr. Raymond R. Corrado is a professor in the School of Criminology and the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University and an associate faculty member in the department of Psychology and the Faculty of Health Sciences. He is an adjunct professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Bergen and a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall College and the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. He is a founding member of the Mental Health, Law, and Policy Institute at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Corrado was also a former co-Director of the BC Centre for Social Responsibility and former Director of the Centre for Addictions Research British Columbia, SFU Site.

He has co-authored 7 edited books including, Multi- Problem Violent Youth; Issues in Juvenile Justice; Evaluation and Criminal Justice Policy; and Juvenile Justice in Canada, as well as having published over 100 articles and book chapters on a wide variety policy issues, including juvenile justice, violent young offenders, mental health, adolescent psychopathy, Aboriginal victimization, child/adolescent case management strategies and terrorism.

Currently, Dr. Corrado is a principal investigator and co-principal investigator working on a number of research projects including 3 large-scale studies on incarcerated serious and violent young offenders, comprehensive risk management instrument for violent children and youth, and on early childhood aggression. He received his Ph.D from Northwestern in Chicago.

 
Professor Mark Halsey
Law School, Flinders University

Mark first joined the Law School in 2000. From 2005 to 2007 he taught criminology at the University of Melbourne. His areas of interest include youth offending, repeat incarceration and desistance from crime. Mark has undertaken consultancies for state and local government in areas ranging across graffiti vandalism, restorative and therapeutic justice and serious repeat youth offending. He serves on the editorial boards of the International Series on Desistance and Rehabilitation (Willan) and the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology. In late 2010, Mark was appointed to the Social Inclusion Board, Department of Premier and Cabinet, South Australian Government.

From 2003, funded by Flinders University and the Australian Research Council, Mark was the Chief Investigator on a five year study examining the experiences of repeat incarceration as narrated by young males in South Australian juvenile and adult custodial facilities. From early 2009, he has been and remains Chief Investigator on a further Australian Research Council Discovery Project which aims to explore social connectedness and exclusion in the lives of young incarcerated males and their significant others to 2013.

 
Mr Juan Tauri
Lecturer, School of Justice
Faculty of Law, Queensland University of Technology

Juan is currently a lecturer in the School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, where he teaches units on Indigenous justice and penal policy and punishment.  In the past Juan has carried out research on a range of topics, including restorative justice, youth gangs in South Auckland, New Zealand, First Nations theories and responses to social harm, and First Nation youth experiences of conferencing programs.  Juan’s current research interests include the inter-jurisdictional transfer of crime control policies and products and their impact of First Nations in New Zealand and Canada, and contemporary policy responses to youth crime and youth gangs in Settler Societies.

 
Dr Tracy Westerman
Managing Director
Indigenous Psychological Services

Dr Tracy Westerman, Managing Director of Indigenous Psychological Services (IPS) is of the Nyamal people near Port Hedland, WA. She founded IPS in 1998 to address the inequity between the high rates of mental ill health amongst Aboriginal people and low rates of access to quality services. Dr Westerman has a Post Graduate Diploma (Science, UWA) in Psychology, a Masters Degree (Clinical Psychology, Curtin University) and a Doctor of Philosophy (Clinical Psychology). She is a recognised leader in Aboriginal mental health having won numerous awards including the NAIDOC National Scholar of the Year (2002); the Vice Chancellors Award for the top 10% of PhD’s submitted (2003); the National Health & Medical Research Council Post Doctoral Fellowship to investigate ADHD in Aboriginal people (2004; the only Aboriginal person to be awarded such a fellowship) and the Suicide Prevention Australia Award for Emerging Researcher (2006). She has been recognised in the Who's Who of Australian Women and Who’s Who of the Worlds Women from 2007 and won the WA Business News Strategic Alliance Award which recognized that she is one of the foremost business leaders under 40 in WA.

She is widely sought after as a keynote speaker averaging 6 Australia wide per year and as an international keynote speaker in Canada (2003); the USA (2004), Auckland, New Zealand (2006 & 2007) and Wellington (2009). In 2005 the Canadian government sent a delegation to Australia to explore Dr Westerman’s innovative approaches resulting in recommendations that the same approach be adopted for Canadian Aboriginal people. Dr Westerman’s work has resulted in a number of world ‘firsts’ including the development of a number of unique psychological tests for Aboriginal people including the Westerman Aboriginal Symptom Checklist – Youth (WASC-Y) and WASC-A (Adult version), workforce development products (the Aboriginal Mental Health Cultural Competency Test) and Indigenous Specific Whole of Community Mental Health Intervention Programs (Canadian Health, 2009). She has worked on numerous state and federal tenders, research grants, community based interventions and attracts an average of 800 people to her training workshops across Australian annually placing her at the forefront of understanding frameworks, policies, procedures and service delivery models that have demonstrated effectiveness with Aboriginal people.

Details of the work of Dr Westerman can be found at www.indigenouspsychservices.com

Indigenous Psychological Services is a private company based in Perth, Western Australia that was established in 1999 by Dr Tracy Westerman, an Aboriginal psychologist. IPS delivers services and programs Australia wide into rural, remote and urban Aboriginal communities at a level that is enviable within the field.