Centre for Child, Youth and Family Welfare
School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work

You are warmly invited to a seminar with Elicia Savvas (Child Protection, Family, Youth and Children’s Law, Victoria Legal Aid) who will give a presentation on Child protection law and practice in Australia and the missing voice of the child

12.00pm for lunch and networking
12.30pm presentation and discussion

The presentation is open to all and will be of interest to anyone working with children and young people in any setting and from any discipline. 

Speaker:
Elicia Savvas is the Associate Director, Child Protection at Victoria Legal Aid (VLA) based in Melbourne, Australia.

VLA’s Child Protection programme provides or funds legal assistance to approximately 9000 children and parents with child protection involvement per year.  As the manager of statewide child protection legal aid services in Victoria, Elicia has responsibility for the design and delivery of legal assistance to children and their families with court proceedings and she has responsibility for Victoria Legal Aid’s innovative non-legal early intervention service that assists First Nations parents and parents living with intellectual disability to navigate the child protection system and diverts families from court.

Elicia Savvas has a long-standing commitment to improving outcomes for children and young people in contact with the justice system. With a particular interest in the child protection legal system, she advocates for trauma informed legal and justice responses that recognise the rights of children and enable children and families to access therapeutic services and support. She is passionate about supporting children and young people to participate in decision making within the legal system.

Elicia has published articles on the need for different justice responses for adolescents using family violence and to address the criminalisation of young people in the child protection system.

Elicia was appointed to the Suitability Panel in 2022, a multidisciplinary panel which assesses allegations of abuse of children and young people by out of home carers and makes determinations about carer disqualification. She is a member of the Law Institute of Victoria’s Children’s Law Advisory Committee.

She is a recipient of a Winston Churchill Trust Fellowship to investigate child centred approaches to children’s law services and is visiting the US, Scotland and Northern Ireland in 2024. Her study tour will look at how other children's legal services meet the legal and non-legal needs of children/young people in the child protection system in a trauma informed and culturally safe way. Drawing on experiences these other children's services, particularly those are designed together with children and people with lived experience of child protection systems, VLA will embark on a review children’s legal services to better understand and meet children's needs in coordinated way and to reduce entry into the criminal justice system and future child protection involvement.

Booking your place:
It is essential that you confirm your attendance, for catering purposes and managing the venue capacity, by emailing Professor Davy Hayes d.hayes@qub.ac.uk