Foetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is a non-diagnostic umbrella term encompassing a spectrum of disorders caused by prenatal alcohol exposure. This article reports on a qualitative research project undertaken in three Indigenous communities in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, intended to develop diversionary pathways for Indigenous young people with FASD at risk of enmeshment in the justice system. Rates of FASD in some parts of the West Kimberley are comparable to the highest identified internationally. A diagnosis of FASD amplifies the chances of Indigenous youth being caught up in the justice system in Western Australia, including indefinite detention in prison if found unfit to stand trial. A fresh diversionary paradigm is required. Employing a postcolonial perspective, we explore issues surrounding law and justice intervention – and non-intervention – in the lives of Indigenous children and their families. The FASD problem cannot be uncoupled from the history of colonial settlement and the multiple traumas resulting from dispossession, nor can solving the problem be isolated from the broader task of decolonizing relationships between Indigenous people and the settler mainstream. The decolonizing process involves expanding the role of Indigenous owned and place-based processes and services embedded in Indigenous knowledge.
The move towards prevention in domestic anti-terror law and policy was initially justified as an exceptional response to the exceptional threat of transnational terrorism following September 11, 2001. However, commonalities are discernable between prevention in antiterror law and prevention as employed in other areas of Australian law. To begin contextualising and analysing preventive practices in Australia, a framework is required. 'The preventive state' provides one way to view the collection of preventive measures employed in Australia. Engaging a governmentality perspective has the potential to make visible prevention and pre-emption in law and governance, and to inform critical treatment of the preventive state itself. Whether and how prevention and pre-emption in anti-terror law differ from and exhibit continuities with other preventive measures has the potential to expose issues of selectivity and proportionality between preventive measures and force consideration of the limits of state action to prevent or preempt harm.
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