Young People Using Family Violence: International Perspectives on Research, Responses and Reforms

This book examines the use of violence by children and young people in family settings and proposes specialised and age-appropriate responses to these children and young people It interrogates the adequacy and effectiveness of current service and justice system responses, including analysis of police, court and specialist service responses. It proposes new approaches to children and young people who use violence that are evidence based, non-punitive, and informed by an understanding of the complexity of needs and the importance of age appropriate service responses.

Bringing together a range of Australian and International experts, it sheds new light on questions such as: How can we best understand and respond to the use of family violence by young people? To what extent do traditional family violence responses address the experiences of adolescents who use violence in family settings? What barriers to help seeking exist for parental  and sibling victims of adolescent family violence? To what degree do existing support and justice services provide adequate responses to those using adolescent family violence and their families? In what circumstances do children kill their biological and adopted parents?

The explicit focus on child and adolescent family violence produces new knowledge in the area of family violence, which will be of relevance to academics, policy makers and family violence practitioners in Australia and internationally.

Kate Fitz-Gibbon is Director of the Monash Gender and Family Violence Prevention Centre and an Associate Professor in Criminology in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University (Victoria, Australia). She is also an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Law and Social Justice at University of Liverpool (UK) and a Research Associate of the Research Centre of Violence at West Virginia University (US). Her research examines family violence, femicide, the law of homicide and the impact of criminal law reform across Australian and international jurisdictions. Kate has advised on homicide law reform reviews and family violence inquiries in several Australian and international jurisdictions. Her recent publications include Towards a Global Femicide Index: Counting the costs (2020, Routledge) and The Emerald Handbook on Femicide, Criminology and Social Change (2020, Emerald), both with Sandra Walklate, Jude McCulloch and JaneMaree.

Heather Douglas is a Professor of Law in the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne. Recent research focuses on women’s experience of legal engagement as part of their response to domestic and family violence. Currently, she is exploring the legal response to non-fatal strangulation. She is the project lead on Australia’s National Domestic and Family Violence Bench Book and the author of many books and articles on domestic and family violence. Her most recent book is Women, Intimate Partner Violence and the Law (2021, Oxford University Press). Heather was appointed a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law in 2013 and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia in 2017.

JaneMaree Maher is Professor in the Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, Sociology, in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. Her research two key areas of gendered social science: women’s work, mothering and family, and gendered violences. Current research projects are focused on the impacts of family violence on mothering and intimate partner homicide. She is the author of over 60 peer-reviewed journal articles and five books: most recently Towards a Global Femicide Index: Counting the costs (2020, Routledge) with Sandra Walklate, Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Jude McCulloch and Policing Hate Crime: Understanding Communities and Prejudice (Routledge 2017) with Gail Mason, Jude McCulloch, Sharon Pickering, Rebecca Wickes and Carolyn McKay.