Foreword

Summary

Interdisciplinarity has long been recognised as a vital component of the family justice system and also, one hopes, of the criminal justice system. In the family justice system, though seemingly not in the criminal justice system, interdisciplinarity has come of age, with the increasing recognition of the need to rebalance the system through a much greater use of problem-solving courts. Psychiatrists and other professionals will no longer feature just as expert witnesses, helping the judge to establish what has happened and to craft some kind of solution; they will be key parts of an interdisciplinary team, including but not limited to the judge, seeking to understand, to address and to resolve the underlying problems.

There is, however, a difficulty. Any justice system of its very nature applies the law and operates in accordance with processes devised by lawyers and expressed in legalese. And, as our author tactfully reminds us with her very apposite reference to Dickens's Mr Kenge, lawyers are not always very good at explaining to non-lawyers what the law is or how the legal system operates. That is why we need practitioners’ handbooks, whether for the use, for example, of social workers or, as here, for the use of psychiatrists, written by experienced practitioners in the relevant discipline who understand better than lawyers what their fellow practitioners need and how best to present it in a way which meets those needs.

That is why this excellent handbook, written by a distinguished and forensically experienced consultant in child and adolescent psychiatry, is so important and why it will, I am sure, be so valuable. Ultimately, the judges of Dr Sarah Huline-Dickens's success in writing this handbook will be her professional colleagues. As a mere lawyer, all I can say is that it deserves every success and that it will, I expect, be of very great assistance to those in her professional community who need a reliable and accessible guide to what may be unfamiliar when their work takes them into the forensic context. I wish it well.