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How Australia is failing on youth justice
Our nation needs a transformation when it comes to justice and wellbeing outcomes for children, argues the National Children’s Commissioner.
Grace Robbie
Speaking on a recent episode of The Lawyers Weekly Show, National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds, from the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), shed light on the troubling and distressing conditions prevalent within Australia’s youth justice system. This prompted her to release a recent report with the AHRC – ‘Help way earlier!’: How Australia can transform child justice to improve safety and wellbeing – which aims to spark significant and necessary changes in the current state of affairs.
Hollonds disclosed that she embarked on this project after observing significant and unaddressed concerns regarding the treatment of children in Australian detention facilities.
“The reason why I chose this project was because I think the most egregious breaches of the human rights of children are occurring in the youth justice systems, which are managed by the states and territories,” she said.
She conveyed the magnitude of this issue by acknowledging the distressing and recurring instances of child suicides within detention centres, highlighting how urgent action is to address this critical concern.
“Lawyers listening may have seen [on] media only just recently about a second tragic suicide of a child who was in youth detention in Perth. That’s the second one within a year, less than a year,” she said.
Hollonds also detailed the deplorable and inhumane conditions that children are forced to endure and confront within these detention centres.
“Often, there’s reporting about [the] terrible conditions [of] kids being locked down in isolation for 22 [to] 23 hours a day, which means that they’re not getting any education or rehabilitation. They’re just sitting in their cells,” she said.
Enduring these conditions is not a fleeting experience, with Hollonds emphasising how, in some instances, children are compelled to ensure prolonged periods of isolation, spanning “weeks and sometimes months on end, depending on the particular youth detention centre”.
Isolation and enduring inhuman conditions are just the beginning of the failings within these institutions. Hollonds revealed that children are being held in police watch houses for extended periods, which are facilities designed for short-term adult detention.
“There are also problems of children in Queensland, in particular, being held in police watch houses, sometimes for weeks on end. These are facilities designed for adults to spend maybe overnight in. [But] because of the overcrowding in the children’s prisons in Queensland, children end up there for many weeks on end, sometimes four to a cell,” she said.
“Again, no education, rehabilitation, no recreation, no windows, no natural light, no fresh air, and the police officers in these watch houses have no training to care for children.”
The catalyst for the ‘Help way earlier!’ report was Hollands’ visit to a detention centre in Perth, during which she saw firsthand the dire extent of the crisis.
“The project began when I visited Banksia Hill detention centre in Perth. I was there for five hours in June 2022, and I heard the most horrendous things about repeated suicide attempts,” she said.
Hollonds shared that during her visit to this detention centre, the staff confided in her about the heartbreaking reality they faced when dealing with cases involving unconscious children.
“The staff told me that they were not trained to deal with acute psychiatric disorders.
“They’d find a child unconscious on the floor. I’m not exaggerating, by the way. This is exactly what I was told. They would find a child unconscious on the floor, they would call an ambulance, the ambulance would take the child away to be triaged at the local hospital and then brought back,” she said.
The discussion sparked her to bring attention to government ministers about these alarming issues. However, she encountered frustration due to the lack of response from the relevant authorities.
“The staff were telling me that they were in crisis. So I tried to contact every minister who should have had an interest in these matters and tried to engage on the fact that we had a tragedy waiting to happen, and I couldn’t engage anyone, and that’s how the project began,” she said.
The ‘Help way earlier!’ report highlights the urgent need for changes within Australia’s youth justice systems, as the current system is failing to protect the basic human rights of children.
“This report [says] that we have misunderstood the nature of the problem that we’re trying to solve here by thinking that the criminal justice system, by making it tougher and tougher, will reduce offending by children and keep the community safer. So we’ve got it wrong.
“What we need to do instead is to put more attention and resources into understanding and preventing the underlying drivers of crime,” she said.
