The Manitoba Youth Justice Program: Empowering and Supporting FASD Affected Youth in Conflict with the Law

Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) describes a constellation of physical, cognitive, neurologic and behavioral impairments resulting from prenatal exposure to alcohol. FASD is recognized as being one of the largest causes of preventable brain injury in children. There had long been concerns that some youth in conflict with the law may be affected with FASD given repetitive patterns of offending and apparent lack of understanding of consequences of their actions. In 2004 funding was received from Justice Canada for a pilot project with a cross departmental steering committee working together to determine a best way of working across systems to provide FASD assessments to these youth. It was recognized that provision of timely FASD assessments would allow the Court to provide more meaningful sentences taking into account the youth's strengths and challenges and enhance the chances of decreased recidivism and increase chances of rehabilitation. This paper describes the basic science around FASD and its' diagnosis, provides a history of the Manitoba FASD Youth Justice Program and reports on legal issues, structure, statistics, accomplishments and ongoing future challenges.The accepted manuscript in pdf format is listed with the files at the bottom of this page. The presentation of the authors' names and (or) special characters in the title of the manuscript may differ slightly between what is listed on this page and what is listed in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript; that in the pdf file of the accepted manuscript is what was submitted by the author