*** Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains details of a traumatic death.***
Editor’s note: The article was corrected after publication; the teenager who died was not Aboriginal, as was initially reported.
Introduction by Croakey: The death by suicide of a 17-year-old teenager in the notorious Banksia Hill youth detention centre in Western Australia has prompted calls for urgent federal intervention in the child prison system nationally.
Independent Victorian Senator Lidia Thorpe urged the Federal Government to work with First Peoples and the health and community sectors to create strong federal frameworks that hold the states and territories accountable and stop the abuse. She urged governments to close children’s prisons, in favour of evidence-based alternatives focused on care and wellbeing.
“I am calling on the Prime Minister, the new Indigenous Australians Minister, and the Attorney General to act now,” she said in a statement. “The era of prisons, surveillance and policing of children must end. We must imagine a different future our children, one based in care.”
Amnesty International said the WA Government had been repeatedly warned about the inhumane, dangerous conditions of the Banksia Hill youth detention centre, and repeated calls for its closure, saying it posed “a serious and unacceptable risk to the safety of detained children”.
Kacey Teerman, Amnesty International’s Indigenous Rights Campaigner, urged the WA Government to investigate the circumstances of this death in custody, as per the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
“How many more Aboriginal children will die before the WA government closes down these inhumane, dangerous youth prisons?” Teerman said in a statement.
The news comes as the Northern Territory Government comes under intense pressure from health, medical and legal experts to abandon its plans to lower the age of criminal responsibility to ten, and enact other “tough on crime” policies, as Croakey has reported.
Professor Nitin Kapur, President of the Paediatrics & Child Health Division Council of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, today described the move as “such a backwards step”, in an interview with ABC Radio.
Meanwhile, Catherine Liddle, CEO of SNAICC-National Voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families, provides some evidence-based advice for the new NT Government on how to break the cycle of youth reoffending, by helping struggling NT families access early childhood education and care.
Catherine Liddle writes:
The consensus among medical and legal experts is that lowering the age of criminal responsibility will do nothing to protect some of the NT’s most vulnerable children or make communities safer.
Repealing the laws that raised the age of criminal responsibility to 12 won’t fix anything. In fact, it’s likely to cause more harm and continue a devastating cycle of crime.
Experts such as the Australian Medical Association and the Law Council of Australia are calling for a shift away from punitive measures, like curfews, towards strategies that address the root causes of youth involvement in the criminal justice system.
We know that the younger a child encounters the justice system, the less likely they are to break the cycle of reoffending.
The new Northern Territory Government has an opportunity to take action and break that cycle by helping Territory families struggling to access early childhood and family supports and allied health services.
I congratulate the new Government and Chief Minister but now is when the tough work starts. That means listening to the Aboriginal community-controlled sector and the evidence.
This week, the Thrive by Five NT Early Childhood Alliance urged the government to support the actions outlined in their childhood alliance action plan – endorsed by 18 organisations, including SNAICC.
The first five years of life are crucial for social, cognitive, and emotional development, but two in five children in the NT are developmentally vulnerable when they start school.
We need evidence-based prevention, better access to early years and family support, justice reinvestment and early intervention programs which use local knowledge and cultural strengths to foster supportive environments and positive youth development.
Catherine Liddle is an Arrernte/Luritja woman from Central Australia and the CEO of SNAICC-National Voice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families.
Read more from Liddle and SNAICC on the NT Government’s age of criminal responsibility decision here.
Further commentary on the Banksia Hill Detention Centre
Previously at Croakey
Demands made for culturally safe and restorative approaches to youth justice, by Alison Barrett, 2023
Calling STOP on the harmful, punitive detention of children, by Jade Bradford, 2022
Locking up kids harms their mental health and doesn’t stop reoffending, 2022
For assistance
Lifeline: 13 11 14
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Lived Experience Telephone Line Service: 1800 013 755
See Croakey’s archive of articles on the 2024 NT election.