Overview
- Provides insights into improving criminal justice system processes for children
- Discusses the competing views on children as witnesses
- Examines the impact of individual practitioners on children’s interactions with the criminal justice system
Part of the book series: Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice (PHPPJ)
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Table of contents (9 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book considers the law, policy and procedure for child witnesses in Australian criminal courts across the twentieth century. It uses the stories and experiences of over 200 children, in many cases using their own words from press reports, to highlight how the relevant law was – or was not - applied throughout this period. The law was sympathetic to the plight of child witnesses and exhibited a significant degree of pragmatism to receive the evidence of children but was equally fearful of innocent men being wrongly convicted. The book highlights the impact ‘safeguards’ like corroboration and closed court rules had on the outcome of many cases and the extent to which fear – of children, of lies (or the truth) and of reform – influenced the criminal justice process. Over a century of children giving evidence in court it is `clear that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same’.
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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Robyn Blewer is Lecturer at the Griffith University Law School in Queensland, Australia, and the Director of the Griffith University Innocence Project. She holds a Master of Criminology and Criminal Justice and completed her doctoral thesis as a member of the Australian Research Council’s Laureate research project, ‘The Prosecution Project’.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Child Witnesses in Twentieth Century Australian Courtrooms
Authors: Robyn Blewer
Series Title: Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69791-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-69790-7Published: 16 April 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-69793-8Published: 17 April 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-69791-4Published: 15 April 2021
Series ISSN: 2946-6075
Series E-ISSN: 2946-6083
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 261
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Criminal Justice, Legal History, Australasian History, Childhood, Adolescence and Society, Victimology, International Criminal Law