00:00It's deeply concerning to hear children this young ending up in police custody, let alone
00:08over periods of time beyond the immediate investigation of offence. I'm deeply distressed
00:16here in the Northern Territory having worked to try to raise the age of criminal responsibility
00:21from 10 to 12 here over many, many years of advocacy with community organisations, with
00:27experts, with people who've got lived experience in the system, about the dangers and harm of
00:35criminalising children that young. Much offending by children is impulsive, it's transient,
00:41rather than planned and habitual. Unlike adult offending, offences by children tend to be
00:46attention-seeking, public, unplanned and opportunistic. Where children continue to have ongoing contact with
00:53the system, it's largely linked to systemic, environmental and social factors, factors that
00:58are often outside of their control. Sadly, the same factors that can lead a child into the child
01:04protection system are the factors that can lead them into the youth justice system. That is,
01:09multiple adverse life experiences, including abuse, neglect, exposure to violence and severe
01:16socioeconomic disadvantage. And people may be surprised, but the vast majority of children in
01:21contact with the youth justice system, particularly in the ages of 10, 11 and 12, are children well
01:27known to the child protection system and subject to child protection orders. So these children have
01:33really been abused, mistreated, and they're the ones we're funneling through into the detention
01:38system in the Northern Territory. Yeah, I want to touch on the age of criminal responsibility,
01:43Charlene. It's been lowered to 10 for some time now since the country Liberal Party was elected on a
01:51platform of law and order. What has the effect been of that lowering of the age?
01:57The shorthand response is that we've seen a return of children as young as 10 and 11
02:02being arrested by police, proceeded against through the courts. Some are ending up in detention on remand.
02:10People might not be aware, but the minimum age of criminal responsibility is the age that governments
02:16have determined a child could be liable to be dealt with by the criminal legal system for alleged
02:21offending. In the Northern Territory, it's 10. In some progressive jurisdictions, it's either 12 or 14.
02:28And the minimum age worldwide is actually 14 years. So we're really out of step with international
02:34standards and international law. But what it means is children as young as 10 and 11 can be arrested by
02:41police, they can be handcuffed, they can be searched, strip searched, held in police custody, interrogated,
02:48hauled before a court, and then locked away in a youth detention facility. And this is against all
02:54the evidence of what we know that children aged 10, 11, and 12 really lack the emotional, mental,
03:00and intellectual maturity for criminal responsibility. And sadly, the evidence demonstrates that
03:05criminalising these young people only serves to really entrench the behaviours that we should
03:11be trying to change. So really, it goes against all the evidence of what works and actually leads to
03:18these children becoming entrenched and further involved in adult offending into their adulthood. So
03:25to me, it's against the evidence. It's not going to make our community safer, and it's only going to
03:29lead to more and more crime. And I want to ask you about the situation in Alice Springs at the moment
03:35for young people. The youth detention centre there was closed and young people were being flown to
03:42Darwin to be held in detention centres there. Is that still the case currently? And what does that mean
03:52for those young people being flown from Alice to Darwin?
03:56Yeah, so in the Northern Territory, we used to have two facilities for the detention of young people.
04:05Recently, the Alice Springs Youth Detention Centre had been renovated to be fit for accommodating young
04:10people to support their rehabilitation, connected to services and programs on the ground in Alice Springs.
04:17So these children could be connected to their families, communities, culture and other supports.
04:24What has happened since the change in government here is in order to accommodate the mass influx of
04:32adult prisoners across the correctional infrastructure, they've had to recommission this Alice Springs
04:39Youth Detention Centre that had been the subject of millions of dollars of work to bring it up to
04:45scratch for housing young people into a women's prison. And so what that means is Alice Springs or
04:53Central Australian children who are detained in custody are being flown to Darwin, they're being
04:58housed in the Holtz facility, 1500 kilometres away from their family, from their community, from their
05:04culture, from the supports that are there in Central Australia. And people may be surprised, but the vast
05:11majority are Aboriginal kids whose language, first language is not English. And we're really
05:19disconnecting them from people that speak their language, who they can relate to, and who they can
05:24gain at least those supports that they need to rehabilitate. So I'm deeply concerned we're sending
05:32children away and really impairing their prospects of rehabilitation.
05:38The Attorney-General Marie-Claire Boothby has said today that NARJA's suggestions that funding should
05:44be pulled from police is reckless and inflammatory, flagging that additional beds in prisons are being
05:50built to deal with the increase in people, including children, being imprisoned. What's your view or your
05:58reaction to that approach?
06:02I don't know if it's evident, but I'm quite distressed. I'm from Darwin, I'm Larrake on my
06:08mother's side and have worked in the youth justice system for decades in prosecutions and criminal
06:15defence. And for me, the territory that the evidence is all in, we lock up children at a rate three times
06:22more than anywhere else. On any given day, 100% of children in custody are Aboriginal kids.
06:28Many of them have unmet and complex, intersecting health, disability and mental health needs.
06:34Many of them are victims in their own right. Children have been failed by other systems.
06:40And it's just astounding that this has become the response. These children need help, they need support.
06:47If we've got any chance of trying to reduce the likelihood of further crime in our communities,
06:52then we should be seeing them as children deserving of rights, deserving of support, and able to be
07:00connected back to their community and culture, because youth prisons themselves are criminogenic.
07:06And there's a lot of evidence that shows that these children need treatment, they need therapeutic
07:12interventions. And the evidence all shows that you lock a kid up, the more likely they're to re-offend,
07:19re-offend more violently, and go on to offending in adulthood, particularly the younger they are.
07:24There's been research done across Australia that showed that children aged 10 to 12 who
07:29spent time in custody are re-offended within 12 months. And it was something like 90 odd percent
07:35of the kids come back. So it's just madness that we're going down the poor trodden path of relic
07:44jurisdictions to lock these kids up when we know that it goes against the evidence and only going
07:49to lead to further, further crime and broken lives.
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