Missing Pieces: a youth justice consultation
Through meaningful consultation, children’s experiences guide the way toward a fairer, rights-based approach to youth justice in Australia.
The Missing Pieces summary report captures voices of 31 young people with lived experience of youth justice, revealing what truly matters: feeling connected, being heard, and belonging. It highlights four core insights:
- Connection—strong ties to family, culture, and community.
- Being valued—trusting relationships with adults who show up and follow through.
- Belonging—navigating tensions between ‘lore’ and ‘law’.
- Missing pieces—when services feel unsafe or inaccessible.
Our consultation highlights the importance of:
- centring systems around children and young people
- providing consistent, integrated, culturally safe support
- strengthening connections to family, culture and community, and
- facilitating trusting relationships with professionals who genuinely care.
Missing Pieces turns children’s perspectives into actionable recommendations for rights-respecting systems. Use it to educate, advocate, and design policies that honour children’s voices and create safer, more supportive pathways.
Our promise to young people
This report is part of our ongoing commitment to listen, reflect, and act - in fact, the consultation with young people was based on our promise that young people’s experiences and insights would be taken seriously. The insights shared by young people will shape our services, influence our advocacy, and guide our internal practice.
Youth friendly reports
We've also made youth-friendly versions of the report - both for the broader community, and a special report-back to the young people who participated in the consultation. We hope that through them, young people can see that we are listening, learning and taking them seriously - and we also hope these reports will be useful for others.
