Valerie Braithwaite

• BA (Hons), PhD
• Professor at Australian National University

Australia’s Indigenous children are 12 times more likely than non-Indigenous children to be in out-of-home care, a rate that has been increasing. Since 2009, government policies have committed to keeping children safe in families through support, early intervention, and Indigenous self-determination. Action has not matched policy. Quantitative and...

Child protection reform has been difficult, despite evidence that practice should be more child-centred, respectful and responsively inclusive of family and communities. An Australian survey of 387 third parties working with statutory child protection authorities revealed widespread support for reform, but significant opposition to child protection...

The National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children provides unifying policy and priorities for the 6 states and 2 territories with jurisdiction over child protection. The 2021–2030 Framework will address specific and important problems in order to achieve tangible improvements on key performance indicators. An argument is presented for addi...

From its inception, child protection policy has been infused with domination, and over the long arc of history has been accompanied by the spread of institutional oppression. A case study of Australian child protection policy and practice illustrates how Iris Marion Young’s (1992) five faces of oppression ((a) exploitation, (b) marginalization, (c)...

Community workers provide critical support services to parents and families with children who may be placed in out-of-home care by child protection authorities. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifteen community workers, who represent nine agencies assisting families with child protection issues in a small jurisdiction in Australia, we show how...

Undertaking research with young people presents an array of methodological challenges. We report the findings from a qualitative study that took place alongside a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) prevalence study among detainees in Australia. Of 38 participants, 27 were Aboriginal youth. Interviews were conducted using “social yarning” and “r...

Looking beneath the iceberg: can shame and pride be handled restoratively in cases of workplace bullying Central to restorative justice interventions that follow revised reintegrative shaming theory (Ahmed, Harris, Braithwaite & Braithwaite, 2001) is individual capacity to manage shame and pride in safe and supportive spaces. From a random sample o...

Restorative justice coupled with responsive regulatory strategies help chart practical pathways for moving from healing to problem solving and contributes to the development of theory and research relevant to tackling complex social problems. In the face of increasing evidence that despotic, authoritarian or simply invisible powerful hands control...

This chapter argues that a degree of institutional forcing of a New Zealand kind is required to make families nodally powerful. Most of the entrepreneurial energy to move restorative and responsive principles into completely new domains of the human services is best to come bottom-up from restorative communities. The dangers of excess in neoliberal...

This chapter considers over-regulation and under-regulation both as potential threats to freedom. It conceives political knee-jerks that see-saw between over- and under-regulation as posing particularly strong threats of domination. Responsive regulation was developed as an integrated and balanced approach to these threats to freedom. Its balance i...

In Restorative and Responsive Human Services, Gale Burford, John Braithwaite, and Valerie Braithwaite bring together a distinguished collection providing rich lessons on how regulation in human services can proceed in empowering ways that heal and are respectful of human relationships and legal obligations. The human services are in trouble: combin...

A total of 3956 children aged 12–13 years who completed the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC Wave 5) were studied about their experiences of traditional face-to-face bullying and cyberbullying in the last month. In terms of prevalence, sixty percent of the sample had been involved in traditional bullying as the victim and/or the offe...

Vocational education and training once held a proud place in Australia’s education system, providing opportunity along a less academically and more practically oriented path. While interest in and need for vocational education and training has not lost currency, the sector has been drawn into a downward reputational spiral. Reforms have been introd...

Community workers play an important role in providing support services to parents and families whose children may be placed in out-of-home care by child protection authorities. This paper shows how the stigma attached to parents spreads to discredit community workers who are assisting them and results in stigma by association. Stigma by association...

Data from seven empirical studies undertaken as part of the Capacity Building in Child Protection Projects are used to demonstrate how Iris Marion Young’s (1992) five faces of oppression apply to child protection. Overcoming entrenched oppression within child protection systems requires authorities to offset their tight networks of control with ope...

A total of 3956 children aged 12-13 years who completed the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC Wave 5) were questioned about their experiences of traditional bullying and cyberbullying in the last month. Sixty per cent of the sample had been involved in traditional bullying as the victim and/or the offender. Eight percent had been invo...

This update of Applications of Responsive Regulation (2010) 1 provides an expanded set of examples of responsive regulation applications or aspects of responsive thinking, both in Australia and overseas. At a time when deregulation is on the political agenda in Australia and other parts of the world, we considered it useful to review:- the range of...

This article draws upon self-report survey data to examine the commitment of 181 small business taxpayers to their tax practitioners. Using hierarchical regression modelling, commitment was associated with a local chartered accountant; having a letter of engagement; receiving cautious, competent and aggressive advice (once expectations were control...

Deterrence can boost compliance with tax authorities or undermine it depending on whether taxpayers cope with the threat of taxation through thinking morally, or feeling oppressed, or taking control of the tax they pay. When feeling oppressed dominates thinking morally in response to deterrence, resistant defiance is expressed. When taking control...

This article tests the hypothesis that 'love thy neighbour' values, victim and offender needs, and belief in benefits can predict willingness to participate in a restorative justice meeting. A postal survey sought the views of 1,355 Australian and Japanese offenders or victims, or relatives of victims, of violent crime. For all groups, 'love thy ne...

This article briefly maps the domain of tax evasion and draws on the best data available from the United States to illustrate the magnitude of the problem. It reviews the scientific literature on the primary drivers of tax evasion. The nature and extent of tax evasion vary across contexts and time, depending on opportunity to evade tax and the enfo...

Shame management is purported to be part of the healing process that is a goal of restorative justice. However, the development of shame management capacities and how they are engaged in conflict resolution remains a relatively understudied phenomenon. This study examines how shame management (acknowledgment and displacement) is employed by childre...

A qualitative study explored the private realities of forty-five Australian Indigenous parents and carers who had experiences with child protection authorities. Interviews focused on the nature of the relationship between parents and authorities, how these regulatory encounters served to enlist or dissolve cooperation, and how child-focused outcome...

This paper investigates the attitudes and beliefs that the public hold about criminal behaviour in Japanese and Australian society, with a view to uncovering sources of resistance to, and support for, restorative justice. The study draws on a survey of 1,544 respondents from Japan and 1,967 respondents from Australia. In both societies, restorative...

http://johnbraithwaite.com/monographs/

In his article, Levi (2010, this issue) makes an argument for why serious tax fraud and noncompliance should be addressed through criminal as opposed to noncriminal proceedings. But will it deter the noncompliant? Context, as he acknowledges, is a central determinant in how sanctions affect subsequent tax noncompliance. Context includes the norms a...

http://johnbraithwaite.com/monographs/ Indonesia suffered an explosion of religious violence, ethnic violence, separatist violence, terrorism, and violence by criminal gangs, the security forces and militias in the late 1990s and early 2000s. By 2002 Indonesia had the worst terrorism problem of any nation. All these forms of violence have now fall...

Our article was intended to question the "regulatory" assumptions, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged, that underpin the operation of current child protection systems. Approaching child protection as a form of regulation is in itself a fairly uncommon approach, and orienting the debate around the unique questions that this perspective might ask...

The influence of security and harmony value orientations on attitudes and attitude change depends on (a) the degree to which imbalance exists in the importance placed on security and harmony values (i.e., the degree to which individuals are predomi-nantly security oriented or harmony oriented), (b) the degree to which individuals place equal import...

'[Valerie] Braithwaite merges her considerable knowledge of a wide range of disciplines to produce an exemplar of interdisciplinary research. The use of the taxation system as the basis for analysis of how people manage their relationship with authority is effective and produces a much-needed addition to the behavioural literature. While the book i...

Mature democracies have a core set of values with wide appeal that define and justify political agendas. Underlying their use is the assumption that people think along a left–right political continuum and that values that are favored by conservatives are necessarily at odds with values favored by liberals. The value balance model shows this to be a...

Child protection systems are expected to scrutinize the care offered to children and to coordinate the provision of improved quality of care. They are under stress in many developed countries with burgeoning caseloads and a mixture of positive and negative outcomes. Because child protection systems seek to change the course of parenting, they can b...

This paper reviews some results from a large scale longitudinal and cross national study of nursing home regulation. The Australian system of standards monitoring was designed to be heavily outcome oriented and resident focused. The outcome orientation of the approach is critically appraised, with particular attention to the broadly defined nature...

Psychologists have been observing and interpreting economic behaviour for at least fifty years, and the last decade, in particular, has seen an escalated interest in the interface between psychology and economics. The Cambridge Handbook of Psychology and Economic Behaviour is a valuable reference resource dedicated to improving our understanding of...

http://johnbraithwaite.com/monographs/

Australian higher education funding policy has been a contentious and emotionally charged topic on the political agenda since the introduction of the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). Under HECS, students have options either to pay upfront or defer payment. This article examines the implications for the Australian Taxation Office, which...

The central proposition of motivational posturing theory is that regulatees place social distance between themselves and authority, communicating the nature of that distance through a narrative that protects the self from negative appraisal by the authority. One of the key components of posturing is the coping sensibility that individuals adopt to...

The implementation of responsive regulation in taxation means influencing the community's commitment to pay tax through respectful treatment, through attending to resistance and reforming faulty processes, through fairly directed and fully explained disapproval of non-compliant behavior, through preparedness to administer sanctions, and capacity to...

Aggressive tax planning is found to be a cyclical phenomenon in Australia and the United States. While people strongly disapprove of it, mass participation in aggressive tax planning occurs during cyclical upswings, probably at a level involving well over 100,000 Australians in illegal schemes during the late 1990s. We analyse these cycles as a mar...

This study examined the relationships between forgiveness, reconciliation, shame and school bullying. The sample consisted of 1,875 Bangladeshi adolescents (60% girls) in grades 7 to 10 (M= 8.28). In a structural equation model, both forgiveness and reconciliation directly predicted less bullying. In addition to the direct effect, an indirect pathw...

Australian National University. Eliza's main argument in her research on taxation is: if people are to pay taxes, they must believe that requests from the Tax Office are reasonable, that the tax system is fair and legitimate, and they must have confidence that others believe in the system. She has co-authoured "Shame Management through Reintegratio...

Purpose. The current study addresses the issue of discontent at a personal and policy level with higher education and its funding, and its relation to tax compliance among a graduate population. It examines the thesis that discontent with the provision and funding of higher education plays a significant role in lowering tax compliance through the m...

This study investigated tax morale among a sample of 447 Australian graduates who completed the Graduates’ Hopes, Visions and Actions Survey shortly after receiving their higher education degrees. Using structural equation modeling (AMOS), pathways are mapped out showing linkages from (a) the values that individuals hold concerning the kind of soci...

This study focuses on the prediction of self-initiated bullying from family, school, personality, and shame management variables. Reintegrative shaming theory provided a theoretical framework for data gathered from students (n = 1,401) and their parents (n = 978). To test the importance of shame management in relation to bullying, the MOSS-SASD ins...

This paper investigates the relationship between making additional payments to the state for student loan (via the Higher Education Contribution Scheme) and child support (via the Child Support Scheme) and compliance with tax law. Data are taken from the Community Hopes, Fears, and Actions Survey based on a random sample of 2040 individuals. Additi...

This study examines the roles of family variables (authoritarian and authoritative parenting, family disharmony) and school variables (liking school, perceived control of bullying and school hassles) in discriminating non-bully/non-victims, victims and bullies. Participants were parents and their children aged 9–12 years (N = 610). Data were analyz...

The psychology of individual hope has been well articulated through the work of Seligman and Snyder, but scholars have done little to extend this model to under-stand how individuals engage in collective hope. This article develops a model of the collective hope process that emphasizes the importance of principles of social inclusion, open contesta...

This paper examines Australian taxpayers'' perceptions of their idealized tax practitioner as well as their perceptions of their current tax preparer. The analysis was based on survey responses from 2,040 randomly selected Australian taxpayers who completed the "Community Hopes, Fears and Actions Survey" (author, 2000). Three dimensions were identi...

Data from the Community Hopes, Fears and Actions Survey are used to examine how pervasive the view is that the more privileged in society are failing to pay their fair share of tax, to understand the beliefs that underpin such perceptions, and the reforms that are needed to open dialogue with the Australian public about the issue. Support is found...

Data from the Community Hopes, Fears and Actions Survey are used to examine how pervasive the view is that the more privileged in society are failing to pay their fair share of tax, to understand the beliefs that underpin such perceptions, and the reforms that are needed to open dialogue with the Australian public about the issue. Support is found...

This study examines the roles that justice and shame management play in deterring escalation in tax evasion. Data were taken from the Graduates' Hopes, Visions and Actions Survey based on a sample of 447 Australian graduates who recently received their tertiary degrees. Path analysis reveals that both justice variables (societal and personal) indir...

In this chapter, we examine the issue of movement into and out of the cash economy. All indications are that the cash economy is on the increase worldwide and is posing a challenge for sovereign states aiming to control its growth. An increasing economic literature is addressing the factors that drive its development and map its effects on the offi...

In the late 1990s, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) underwent a series of reforms that set the stage for a new proactive role in building a voluntary taxpaying culture. The evaluation of these measures is being undertaken rather more systematically than reforms in other countries, with results that have implications for all nations' tax regimes...

An effective democratic society depends on the confidence citizens place in their government. Payment of taxes, acceptance of legislative and judicial decisions, compliance with social service programs, and support of military objectives are but some examples of the need for public cooperation with state demands. At the same time, voters expect the...

Morris and Young conclude their essay in this collection recognizing that punishment processes and practices are a reflection of the sort of society we are and want to be. The connection between punishment institutions and a society’s values extends from the macro level discussed by Morris and Young to the micro level where connections are mirrored...

This paper first gives an explanation of the behaviour which motivates individuals to engage in the shadow economy. It will be shown that people who fear being caught by tax authorities will be less likely to work in the shadow economy and those who earn more money in the official economy will also work less in the shadow economy. The result of a l...

This study contributes to the debate on general versus contextual measures of caregiver well-being through examining the differential relationships of caregiving appraisals to outcomes. Six dimensions of caregiving appraisal were examined as predictors of minor psychiatric symptoms, affect balance, and burden. Burden was high, symptoms were high, a...

This groundbreaking book is a follow-on to John Braithwaite's best-selling and influential Crime, Shame and Reintegration. Shame management is becoming a central concept, in theoretical and practical terms, across a range of fields. This book makes a major contribution to the advancement of shame in a theoretical sense, and through its detailed ana...

Decades of research on regulatory rule enforcement prompted a battle of sorts between those who favor a deterrence approach and those who promote compliance approaches, between punishment and persuasian (Reiss, 1984; Hawkins, 1984; Pearce and Tombs, 1990; Snider, 1990). In some areas, evidence suggests that deterrence works, if only modestly, as in...

This ground-breaking book is a sequel to John Braithwaite's best-selling and influential Crime, Shame and Reintegration. It contributes to our understanding of shame in a theoretical sense, and through its detailed analysis of shame management in cases of drink-driving and school bullying, in a practical sense.It has two major theoretical outcomes:...