A Just Measure of Shame? Aboriginal Youth and Conferencing in Australia

Abstract

This article explores the limits of ‘reintegrative shaming’ and family conferencing as encapsulated in the ‘Wagga Model’ currently popular in Australia. I question the relevance of the model to the task of reducing the over-representation of Aboriginal people in custody. I argue that the model represents an ‘Orientalist’ appropriation of a Maori decolonizing process and is based on a one-dimensional reading of the New Zealand experience which involved a significant reduction in police powers. The product being franchised in Australia (and marketed internationally) promises to intensify rather than reduce police controls over Aboriginal people. There is also danger in assuming that all indigenous peoples are amenable to conference-style resolutions and that all operate within shaming structures of social control

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