Centre for Mental Health Research releases reports on specialist New Zealand courts

The Centre for Mental Health Research at the University of Auckland has released two reports on specialist New Zealand courts.

Family violence courts: A review of the literature, authored by Alice Mills, Katey Thorn, Claire Meehan and Marilyn Chetty, provides a review of existing evaluation research on specialist family courts in Commonwealth jurisdictions and to a lesser extent the United States. To inform future evaluations of family violence courts, the review provides an overview of family violence court development and considers existing evaluations by highlighting methodological approaches and key findings.

Evaluating problem-solving courts in New Zealand: A synopsis report, authored by Katey Thorn, Alice Mills, Claire Meehan and Brian McKenna and funded by the New Zealand Law Foundation, outlines a preparatory study of the problem-solving courts movement in New Zealand. Problem-solving courts are one of a number of court innovations developed to assist in addressing the psychosocial causes of offending. The first problem-solving courts established in New Zealand were family violence courts. Other examples include courts around at risk youth, alcohol and other drugs, homelessness and Rangatahi and Pasifika Courts for young people. There is currently limited research available on the function and effectiveness of New Zealand problem-solving courts. This report aims to provide foundations for methodologically robust and theoretically grounded future evaluations.

The reports are available electronically via the New Zealand Family Violence Clearinghouse library.

Image: 'A little justice' by Orange Sparrow. Licence Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)