Who founded and leads Sustainable Justice Australia?

Sustainable Justice Australia was founded by Suzanne H Visser, who directs it and facilitates its workshops. She is a legal scholar in Sustainable Justice; she is a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle (thesis: Exploring Sustainable Justice). She works with Alexander de Savornin Lohman of the Centre for Sustainable Justice in the Netherlands, and together they cover common law and European civil law. She also founded Clear Mind Press.

Trauma informed legal practice

Trauma is defined by what it does to a person, not by the event alone. Trauma-informed legal practice asks what happened to the person, and takes care not to add to the harm.

What trauma is

Trauma comes from an event, a series of events or a set of circumstances that a person experiences as harmful or life threatening. It has lasting effects on how they function and on their wellbeing. The same event may traumatise one person and not another.

Several writers help explain how this works.

Peter Levine notes that wild animals are often threatened but rarely traumatised. He links human trauma to survival responses that never finished. He sees trauma as an injury caused by fright, helplessness and loss, not as a disease or disorder.

Bessel van der Kolk argues that trauma reshapes both brain and body. It can weaken our capacity to engage, to control ourselves and to trust.

Richard Schwartz and Janina Fisher describe a self that trauma divides into parts. For Schwartz, having parts is not a pathology. Parts get stuck carrying the burdens trauma imposes. Fisher’s work aims to replace shame, self-loathing and assumed guilt with compassion for the parts of the self a person has disowned.

Deb Dana applies Porges’s polyvagal theory to therapy. She maps the body’s automatic states so people can build regulation, safety and connection. The theory is contested. Paul Grossman argues that each of its five basic premises is untenable or highly implausible on the evidence.

Graham Music traces how trauma and neglect shape children’s emotional and brain development. He also shows how dissociation, depression and helplessness after trauma can give way to hope and vitality.

Jessica Taylor argues that women and girls are pathologised, and labelled with personality disorders, for natural reactions to abuse and oppression.

From ‘what is wrong with you’ to ‘what happened to you’

Read together, these accounts shift the question. We stop asking what is wrong with a person. We start asking what happened to them.

Why trauma matters across the law

Trauma is not only an issue for criminal law. Legal processes meet people after harm, and they can add to it.

Processes can re-traumatise. Intimidating practices in the criminal justice system can re-traumatise people who already carry trauma. Trauma runs through child welfare, criminal justice and other systems, where it often stands in the way of good outcomes.

Family law. The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia accepts that many people in family law matters have complex trauma histories. Taking part in proceedings can re-traumatise them. The Court expects professionals to work in a trauma-informed way.

Memory and evidence. Research for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that ‘common sense’ beliefs about memory, held by police, lawyers, judges and juries, did not match the science. One example is the assumption that an inconsistent account must be inaccurate.

Civil liability. Civil law recognises trauma only as a diagnosis. In New South Wales there is no liability in negligence for pure mental harm unless it is a recognised psychiatric illness. There is no duty of care unless a person of normal fortitude might have suffered one. The test asks what is wrong with the plaintiff, not what happened to them.

Sentencing. In Bugmy v The Queen, the High Court held that the effects of profound childhood deprivation do not fade with time or repeated offending. A deprived background is to be given ‘full weight’.

Tribunals and access to justice. People with legal problems often face trauma alongside other disadvantage. All members of the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal receive trauma-informed training.

Solastalgia and community harm. Harm to place and community is also felt as harm to persons. Glenn Albrecht and colleagues call this solastalgia: distress caused by environmental change to a person’s home environment, made worse by a sense of powerlessness.

What trauma-informed practice looks like

For Sustainable Justice, trauma-informed justice does three things:

it asks what happened to the person;
it avoids adding harm through its own processes;
it supports recovery over time.

No process is exempt. Restorative processes are no exception: a poorly designed one may retraumatise the people taking part.

Sustainable Justice Australia

Helps future-proof governments, companies, organisations, families and individuals

Trauma informed legal practice

What trauma is

From ‘what is wrong with you’ to ‘what happened to you’

Why trauma matters across the law

What trauma-informed practice looks like

Further reading