Resources

This guide from Youth Power explains how to measure youth engagement, and why this is an important part of working with young people. It also discusses a number of specific indicators of youth engagement, and links to tools that can help you measure these.

The Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) has released updated fact sheets on Victoria’s Youth Justice System. The fact sheets look at the backgrounds of young people in the justice system, and highlight the disproportionate number of young people from rural and regional areas or from Indigenous backgrounds being incarcerated. Indeed, an Indigenous young person in Victoria aged 10–17 was 13 times as likely as a non-Indigenous young person to be under youth justice supervision.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) has published a report on youth justice, presenting youth justice data for the period 2015-16. The report is accompanied by eight fact sheets, profiling youth justice supervision in each state and territory. Interestingly, the rate of young people aged 10–17 under supervision on an average day was lowest in Victoria at 14 per 10,000. The report also highlights that around 5,500 young people were under supervision in 2015–16, down from almost 7,000 in 2011–12. Young Indigenous people were 17 times as likely as non-Indigenous young people to be under supervision on an average day.

The Victorian Government has released a comprehensive independent review of the Victorian Youth Justice System. The review provides a detailed account of the young people who are currently in the Victorian youth justice system, and the significant challenges currently facing the system. Currently, the reviewers note, just 1 per cent of youth justice investment is allocated to early intervention programs and 3 per cent to court-based diversion and restorative justice. The review highlights the need to draw on the evidence base and refocus on the needs of young offenders, and their rehabilitation.

This practical toolkit is designed to engage young people to evaluate and measure the impact of youth projects. It has been developed by Evaluation Access using resources and activities from Girl Scouts of the United States of America, the National 4-H Council, and the National FFA Organization. There are a number of creative activities and handouts to support young people to plan, develop, and implement community projects.

Mission Australia’s Youth Mental Health and Homelessness Report presents findings from the Mission Australia Youth Survey. It shows that poor family functioning and serious mental illness are factors that significantly impact the risk of homelessness for young Australians aged 15-19 years. Findings include those with a probable serious mental illness are 3.5 times more likely to have spent time away from home than those without a probable serious mental illness.

This guide has a series of “tip sheets” that identify practical ways to conduct a youth-adult partnership evaluation project. The tip sheets talk about various “leverage points” or those key processes and moments in implementation that can influence the outcomes of projects. It also provides tips on creating a culture of evaluation in an organisation, developing the right evaluation questions and practical and youth-friendly data collection/analysis strategies.

This toolbox provides practitioners in the youth alcohol and other drugs fields with reliable and current information to help to increase their knowledge and enrich their practice.

This ANROWS paper aims to help tertiary services respond more effectively to the needs of women with disabilities. Drawing upon the experiences of women with disabilities who have used domestic and family violence services, and a survey of service providers, the report sets out a number of recommendations. Recommendations include greater promotion of access, cross sector collaboration and inclusion of the views and experiences of women with a disability and experiencing family violence in service design.

This paper from Katie Lamb, Cathy Humphreys and Kelsey Hegarty (University of Melbourne) presents findings from qualitative research undertaken in Australia with children and young people who have experienced domestic violence aged 9 to 19 years. It explores children and young people's perspectives on fathering in the context of domestic violence as well as the key messages they believe fathers who attend a program to address their violence need to know. This paper will focus on some of the findings of the study, with a particular focus on the issue of reparation which was identified as a strong theme in children and young people's accounts.