Abstract
Preventive detention schemes that aim to protect the community from certain ‘dangerous’ individuals have long existed. While risk assessment is now pervasive in the management and treatment of many individuals, it raises particular issues when a person's liberty is at stake on the basis of what that person might do. This R.G. Myers Memorial Lecture addresses the ethical issues raised by mental health practitioners providing risk assessments for legislative schemes that involve the deprivation of liberty. It will focus in particular on Australian post-sentence preventive detention schemes for sex offenders that have been held by the United Nations Human Rights Committee to breach fundamental human rights. However, the ethical issues discussed also have repercussions for civil commitment laws that enable the detention of those with severe mental or intellectual impairments.
Highlights
It is a great honour to be invited to deliver the R.G
My introduction to the wonderful work of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychiatry, Psychology and Law (ANZAPPL) came about in the early 1990s when Dr Deidre Greig came to a medico-legal seminar I had helped organise at Monash University
In the popular television series about commercial advertising, The Gruen Transfer, there is a section where the host poses the question: ‘What would Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong-un’ do to get their message across?65 Let me adopt that to ask what would Dr Myers have done in the face of requirements to give evidence of risk for the purpose of preventive detention schemes?
Summary
While risk assessment is pervasive in the management and treatment of many individuals, it raises particular issues when a person’s liberty is at stake on the basis of what that person might do. This R.G. Myers Memorial Lecture addresses the ethical issues raised by mental health practitioners providing risk assessments for legislative schemes that involve the deprivation of liberty. Myers Memorial Lecture addresses the ethical issues raised by mental health practitioners providing risk assessments for legislative schemes that involve the deprivation of liberty It will focus in particular on Australian post-sentence preventive detention schemes for sex offenders that have been held by the United Nations Human Rights Committee to breach fundamental human rights.
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