Corrections is working with key government agencies, local organisations and individuals to create community offender support and monitoring networks to help reduce the risk of sexual offending against children.
These networks will be set up using the new Support Planning Meetings which, with the offender’s consent, bring together the offender, their support people, local representatives from Corrections (including the meeting facilitator, the offender’s probation officer and a psychologist), the Police, and Child, Youth and Family.
Support Planning Meetings provide a more formal framework for agencies to work together.
Overseas experience has shown that this kind of holistic approach that pulls together professionals and non-professional support people has been effective in monitoring highrisk offenders and mitigating their risk of reoffending.
Support Planning Meetings allow development of a safety plan by network members including, most importantly, the offender. This plan is designed to help monitor and support the person so the community is kept as safe as possible.
In the past two months, close to 50 probation officers and senior probation officers have been trained to facilitate Support Planning Meetings which were rolled out nationwide from October after being piloted successfully in Dunedin.
“Support Planning Meetings create a brilliant team approach,” says Service Manager Monique Cunningham, who attended meetings during the pilot as a probation officer and who now facilitates meetings. “The different aspects of the planning have always been done, but these meetings take away all the isolation.”
Community Probation Service Senior Operations Adviser Veronica Maitland says the meetings add to the range of tools already used by Corrections and other agencies to help protect potential victims.
“The past few years have seen major changes in legislation allowing government agencies to better counter child sex offending and to enhance community safety,” she says.
Extended supervision orders and information sharing agreements are two other examples of tools used to address sex offending against children.
These supplement intensive treatment and rehabilitative programmes such as Kia Marama and Te Piriti, and other specialist programmes offered by community agencies such as STOP and SAFE.
“The reality is that most child sex offenders are released from prison at some point and will return to the community,” says Veronica.
“Support Planning Meetings give us another tool that we can use to mitigate the risk of further sexual offending against children and to help create safer communities.”
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ISSN 1178-8453