Page 3327 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 19 October 2022
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For me, this discussion is about what we need to do to keep children aged 10 to 13 out of the justice system and to support children who are engaging or at risk of engaging in harmful behaviour to establish a better life trajectory. As a government, we have asked not only what we need to do to raise the age but also the more important and more complex question that we have been grappling with, which is: what do we need to do to divert children and young people from engaging in harmful behaviour and to keep both them and the community safe when harmful behaviour occurs, without resorting to a criminal justice response for those young people?
This question was very much the focus of the Review of the service system and implementation requirements for raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility in the Australian Capital Territory, authored by Emeritus Professor Morag McArthur and Dr Aino Suomi from the Australian National University, and Belinda Kendall from Curijo Pty Ltd, which is often referred to as the McArthur report.
Raising the age is certainly one thing we can do to support the objective and we should do this. Indeed, we must. But our conversation in government has been about how we can build a better system for all children, young people, families and the community, including but not limited to children aged 10 to 13. The McArthur report acknowledged the importance of this and concludes:
Based on the findings of the current Review, we argue for taking the legislative change as an opportunity for comprehensive systems reform.
We are learning from others—for example, the Scottish whole system approach, which demonstrates that a more restorative, therapeutic approach can work to put children on a better life trajectory and divert them from later engagement in the justice system. We are working to implement a system that would keep children out of detention, largely divert them from court processes and deliver an intensive and coordinated service response for children and families at risk.
Raising the age sends a strong message about the value we place on children and recognises the evidence that children under the age of 14 are not sufficiently mature to form criminal intent. Raising the age also recognises that engagement with the criminal justice system can itself be harmful. It often does more harm than good, no matter how hard our incredible staff work to avoid that outcome. But this applies to all children and young people, not just those under 14. Given the number of young people engaged with the justice system who have significant cognitive and/or learning disabilities, the opportunity to change the broader system should not be lost.
A key challenge identified in the McArthur report is the fragmentation of the service system, due to age-related barriers to eligibility. A strong argument can therefore be made for an integrated statutory and non-statutory system that can provide a continuum of response for children and young people based on their individual circumstances and behaviours and the risk to them and the community.
The pathways that lead children and young people to engage in youth justice systems are complex. In the interests of time, I am not going to go through all of that. I think we all understand the very complex lives that many of these young people face. But where escalation of harmful behaviour leads to arrest rather than caution, most
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