Australia is failing its children. A ‘tough on crime’ approach to youth justice puts politics before prevention

This opinion piece by National Children's Commissioner Anne Hollonds was published in The Guardian Australia.

We all want to live in communities where we feel safe and where children can flourish and get the best start in life. But the last few weeks have marked a major step backwards for the rights of Australia’s children.

Between the newly elected Northern Territory government’s plan to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10, the Queensland opposition’s pledge to sentence serious child offenders as adults if it wins next month’s state election and last Thursday’s tragic death in youth detention of a teenager in Western Australia, our nation’s failures to protect our most vulnerable children have again been laid bare.

Decades of research have emphatically found that being “tough on crime” with kids is not the answer.

We desperately need a better approach, so my team and I have spent the last 12 months finding one. We invited submissions and met with hundreds of stakeholders and experts across Australia, including more than 150 children and young people who have been or are at risk of contact with police and criminal justice systems.

And what one child in youth detention said to me echoed the pleas of many others: “We need help way earlier.”

That’s because there are common threads for kids who get into trouble: poverty, homelessness, violence and abuse, health and mental health issues, disabilities and learning problems, dropping out early from school and – for many First Nations and migrant families – systemic racism and intergenerational trauma. For most, these are disadvantages from birth.

These kids want help with the most basic of human needs: a safe home, food to eat, clothes to wear, healthcare, a school where they feel they belong and families who can support them.

But the systems that are meant to help – like health, education and social services – are fragmented and uncoordinated and these children are falling through the gaps.

It is clear from our findings that instead of locking children up, we should be focusing our attention and resources on the root causes of child offending and the barriers that stop us implementing evidence-based reform.

The key findings of a report we tabled in federal parliament last month are: for child wellbeing to be made a national priority; coordinated action on reform across Australia’s federation; and ensuring legislative change is based on evidence and human rights.

We need to redesign service systems to provide help for vulnerable children and their families much earlier and we need reforms to our child justice systems.

It has been a heartbreaking journey listening to so many children who feel shunned by society with little hope for a better future. We have met others who were able to overcome their significant challenges because they were lucky enough to get some help.

It has also been upsetting to see the lack of attention to the safety and wellbeing of children which is paid by our political leaders.

We often talk about it taking a village to raise a child. This implies that there are protective layers wrapped around a child and their family, like the bond of trusted neighbours and systems like education and healthcare that help nurture them. But recent tragedies in the child justice system – such as that of the 14-year-old girl with an intellectual level of five years who has already been in the isolation cells of a Queensland police watch house at least 10 times – tell us that the “village” is a very unsafe place for many children.

We are failing to protect our children. Frequent breaches of their human rights are inexcusable and a national shame. As a federation we repeatedly ignore our obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and have not embedded its principles into a national Human Rights Act and other domestic laws. We lack accountability for the safety and wellbeing of children and we lack an urgency for policy reform.

These are preventable problems of our own making. We are choosing to invest millions more in criminal punishment instead of evidence-based solutions to prevent offending and reoffending that would keep the community safer.

It’s a choice to ignore the evidence and put politics ahead of prevention.

National Cabinet meets this Friday. It is my urgent plea to the prime minister and leaders of all governments to look closely at the evidence, agree to make child wellbeing a key priority and work together across the federation.

We urgently need to build a national reform strategy with accountability for action based on evidence, so vulnerable children can get the help they need “way earlier”.

Anne Hollonds is the National Children’s Commissioner