Trina O'Connor

speaker

124 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 7 Sep

Trina O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Today with David McCullagh · Should parents be held responsible for the criminal acts of their children? · 7 Sep 2026 podcast

Yes, they are difficult to reach, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't stop trying.

And with a lot of the young people that I've worked with over the last forty years, I've worked with people that you uh people have completely written these young people off.

And what I found in the work that I've done, which involves wrapping services around young people, is that when young people have services around them consistently over a period of time, so over a number of years,

They can turn their lives around.

And I think that the whole thing around

finding parents and kind of undermines the principle of individual criminal responsibility as well.

So we have to look at young people have to be made criminally responsible as well for their actions.

So that's why we need to look at restorative justice.

And this is really useful because what this does is it forces young people to take personal accountability.

and repair the harm directly either with the victim or with the community and gives them a way back.

We we can't make children parise and not give them a way back because if we accept and acknowledge and and understand that the adolescent brain is different to the mature brain, well then we need to start from there.

Well that's where our criminal sanctions come in.

So that's where a young person may end up in detention or they may end up

in the bail supervision support or they may end up on one of the other community sanction sanctions that we have and they're the processes that we have in place.

But what I'm talking about is keeping people out of uh criminal uh system as much as possible.

But if people refuse to engage and I if everything's exhausted, well then we have to use our criminal justice system.

That's what it's there for.

But I don't agree that finding parents

will be useful because clients don't teach parents new skills or help the troubled teens.

It's about reaching them families and trying to support them and move them away from criminality.

Showing 21–40 of 124 · page 2 of 7