Page 2479 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 31 July 2019
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perfect sense. Not everyone agrees, however. Twelve years ago a report prepared for the Australian National Council on Drugs noted repeatedly:
The research base on compulsory treatment is young and incomplete.
But its authors still confidently stated, without further evidence:
Compulsory treatment of young people does not work.
This statement seems to have been the standard position for a number of years. Much more currently, researchers at the University of New South Wales drug policy modelling program earlier this year noted:
Mandatory treatment is not without controversy … with such programs raising a number of ethical and motivational concerns including how much the state should impose on civil liberties and whether individuals need to both recognise their problem and want treatment for the treatment to be successful.
These researchers, however, also felt that the research is often limited or is characterised by significant gaps. Interestingly, their own investigation into compulsory treatment involved looking exclusively at centres “in a number of east and South-East Asian countries that resemble prisons, located in remote areas”. Unsurprisingly, the authors of this report did not recommend copying this approach.
It should be pointed out, however, that rehabilitation centres in the jungles of Cambodia and Laos are not the only compulsory treatment models available for inspection by serious research—or the end of it. In 2014 Magistrate Jennifer Bowles of the Victorian Children’s Court applied for a Churchill Fellowship to gain an understanding of the overseas residential treatment options for children and young people. Her specific objective was to ascertain whether mandated treatment in a secure, therapeutic residential facility could assist young people and, if so, what were the essential ingredients.
Upon obtaining the fellowship she travelled to 21 different treatment facilities in Sweden, Scotland, England and New Zealand to see what is happening in those places and to spend time with experts and young people alike. Her conclusion was:
For some young people, compulsory orders to attend therapeutic residential facilities are necessary in order to ensure these young people are safe and secure, to deal with the addiction, to commence the process of improving their physical and mental health and wellbeing and to reconnect them with education and training.
Upon returning to Australia, Magistrate Bowles published her findings and, taking the best of what she had witnessed, proposed that the state of Victoria adopt a nine-point model that involves empowering the Children’s Court to make a youth therapeutic order that places a young person in a secure therapeutic community facility to engage in treatment with appropriately qualified and committed staff. This model includes judicial oversight of the process and a well-resourced transition plan for the young person to return to the community.
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