Abstract
Abstract The Scottish Children’s Hearings System makes life-changing decisions regarding the care and protection of children up to 18 years of age referred due to a need for support – because of offending behaviour or a risk to their physical or emotional safety. In March 2020, due to the covid-19 crisis, Hearings underwent one of the most significant changes since their inception: proceedings shifted to an online conferencing platform (“virtual hearings”), and some procedural modifications were introduced. In June 2020, we used an online survey to gather more than 270 responses from professionals, volunteers, young people, and families who had experience of virtual hearings. These responses highlight that while there are reasonable justifications for the use of virtual hearings, including the duty to ensure orders are appropriately reviewed and renewed, concerns related to children and young people’s right to participation, privacy and representation bring into question the extent to which children’s rights are realised in virtual Children’s Hearings.
Highlights
Compared to the rest of the UK and much of the world, Scotland has long taken a different approach to children who are in conflict with the law or in need of care and protection (Norrie, 2013)
In 1968, the Social Work (Scotland) Act made provision for the structures outlined in the Kilbrandon Report (1964) for the creation of the Children’s Hearings System
There was little recognition of children’s rights when the Kilbrandon Report was written, and as such the text of the report reflects perceptions of children’s limited capacity for autonomous decision-making: In the eyes of the civil law ... children are not regarded as completely free agents, and over a wide variety of fields of civil responsibility are debarred from rights of choice available to adults
Summary
Compared to the rest of the UK and much of the world, Scotland has long taken a different approach to children who are in conflict with the law or in need of care and protection (Norrie, 2013). Given the specific and varying needs, roles and agency of children and young people in legal settings (Tisdall, 2016), it is highly likely that their perspectives on, and the associated benefits and challenges of, virtual technologies will differ to those of adults With this caution in mind, we turn to the limited literature on virtual participation. The majority of experience is in relation to adults or their perceptions of children’s experiences – which may differ due to the greater level of support required by children fully to participate in proceedings Against this background a rapid review of experiences of virtual children’s hearings was completed to understand how virtual hearings impacted upon the hearings process, the extent to which experiences in other settings were reflected in this unique context, and to produce information to support the development and improvement of the hearing experience
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