In the 2024 Queensland election, youth justice was a primary focus of both major parties. Over the past three years Queensland has seen a rise in some types of youth crime as well as substantial social unrest about youth offending. This unrest has been heightened by several high-profile violent crimes committed by young people, as well as community concerns about public safety related to increases in home burglaries, automobile thefts, and other types of crime.
These problems are not unique to Queensland. On the contrary, several Australian states and territories have seen moderate but real increases in youth crime, and also heightened social unrest and division about how to best respond to offending by young people. This has resulted in attempts by governments to find quick and often heavy-handed solutions, particularly in Queensland, where youth incarceration rates are now the highest in Australia. It has also resulted in sometimes acrimonious political divisions on how to best address youth offending.
In Queensland, as in most Australian states and territories, restorative justice is a frequently used response to the aftermath of youth offending. Since the late 1990s, forms of youth justice conferencing have been used largely as a diversionary response to youth offending. While these conferences vary between states and territories in terms of eligible offenses and format, they all share several primary goals. These include:
- helping young people to be accountable to those they have harmed and to understand the impacts of their wrongdoing,
- providing victims with an opportunity to directly voice and explain harms caused to them by young people, and
- encouraging young people to make amends to victims and the community for the harms they have caused.
While these goals are often difficult to achieve, research shows most restorative conferences achieve these goals at rates better than conventional children’s court practices. However, in the run up to last year’s election in Queensland, there were substantial mischaracterisations of restorative justice in the media and from some policymakers, both in terms of what restorative justice is and how it is used in Queensland and Australia.
Research shows most restorative conferences achieve these goals at rates better than conventional children’s court practices.
These mischaracterisations were the beginning of a discussion for us at RPI. We realised this was an opportunity to clear up some of the myths about restorative justice, and also to provide some plain language overviews about what restorative is, how it works in the context of youth justice, and where it succeeds and where it faces challenges.
To address these questions, in 2025 RPI Queensland is presenting a four-part series on the use and role of restorative youth conferencing in Australia. The first part of the series looks at some of the more predominant myths about restorative justice, and explains restorative conferencing as used in youth justice in Australia. The second part of the series provides a more detailed overview of the use, benefits, and in some cases problems for victims that participate in restorative justice. The third part of the series drills down a bit more into how restorative justice impacts young people that participate, not only in terms of reoffending, but also in their ability to be accountable to others and engage in reparative actions. The final part of the series explores current challenges and significant problems facing the use of restorative justice as a response to youth offending in Australia.
In this series, we provide a plain-language overview of these topics that is readily accessible to practitioners, advocates, the public, and those that may participate in restorative justice. However, we recognise restorative justice depends on a community of practitioners, advocates, and scholars. As such, our goal is also to make sure the information in this series is correct and up to date. We welcome any comments, suggestions, and feedback on things we may have missed, gotten wrong, or should clarify. Comments can be directed to Dr William Wood (w.wood@griffith.edu.au).
Finally, in this series we are attentive to the use of inclusive and restorative language. We thus avoid terms such as “criminal,” “offender,” and so on when talking about young people that commit offences, as these terms are often pejorative and label young people in stigmatic ways. As we discuss in the series, a primary goal of restorative justice is to encourage people to be accountable for harmful actions, but also provide them with an opportunity to “make good” to those they have harmed and move towards more pro-social behaviours and roles in their lives.
However, we do use the term “victim” in the context of criminal justice, for two reasons. First, while restorative practices in education and other spaces now use “person harmed” or similar language, in the case of the criminal justice system the phrase “person harmed” may unintentionally diminish people’s need for validation and recognition from the justice system and their own communities as “victims” or “victim-survivors,” and not just as a person who has been harmed by another. Following on this, we follow current research in victimology where terms such as “victim” “victim-survivor” and similar language appears to remain important or at least not contested by people that are victimised and by those that work closely as victim advocates.
