Youth Crime: Past the Panic

Youth crime is the headline that wins elections and the issue where the discussion is rarely in the grey, complex, nuance. In this episode we pull the conversation apart through three lenses: what actually works in practice, what the policy settings really do and how the politics distort the picture.

We sit with the uncomfortable questions. Who is the child behind the statistic? What does the evidence say versus what the talkback lines demand? And in a place like the Territory, where remoteness, demographics, and a small fierce media environment shape everything, why does the same debate keep looping back to the same dead ends?

This is not a lecture and it is not despair. We close where we always try to, with honest hope and a handful of questions you can take to your own kitchen table.

Have a listen, then start the conversation that the news cycle won't.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, this is the Bold Heart Collective, the wonderful Lauren Moss, magical Sarah Reinberger, and I'm Sal Cohen. And we're joining you from Garamilla on the equally magical Larakea country. And we'd like to pay our respects first and foremost, one to the magical Larakea people and their absolutely beautiful country. And we'd like to pay our respects to the elders who've walked before us, those who were lucky enough to walk behind, and even luckier if we get to walk beside them, and those who are yet to come. So welcome everybody. I'm sitting here with Lauren and Sarah in the beautiful Danala campus. And I want to share with you something that I heard at a community corrections conference in Darwin, and it was around 2013, 2014. And the keynote speaker, or the gentleman who opened the conference, was the then chair of the Victorian Youth Parole Board. A man who had extensive experience in youth justice, working with kids. He knew his stuff, well spoken, well educated. He he had gravitas. And then he made a statement that has stuck with me ever since. And the statement went along the lines of, and I'm quoting, but you know, it's not a direct quote. He wanted to know because he had never been able to identify himself. When does the witching hour strike? From when kids go from being vulnerable to little bastards. And so I'd like to open this session of the Bold Heart Collective with that very provocative statement. And one that certainly has stayed with me head, heart and guts. Wow. So Lauren, I know I know you have actually both of you, so much of your professional and personal lives are dedicated to kids and working with kids and for kids, and you know, doing what can we do that's going to support kids find whatever their good is. And I'm interested with your background, Lauren. What what does youth justice mean to you?

SPEAKER_01 2:38

I it's so fraught. And when I think about youth justice, it's it is that feeling sometimes of it's just such a fraught conversation, and I wish it wasn't. And youth justice, what does it mean to me? I I think it means the same thing that it sh I think it means to everybody. I was gonna say should and not gonna say should, but there should be consequences for behaviour, there should be discipline boundaries, but what that looks like is very different from person to person. When you say consequences, some in our community have a very clear idea of what a good enough consequence is in youth justice, and I think that's where we all start to diverge. But youth justice as it stands today, the conversation is overly simplistic, and I think often we take kids away from the center of the conversation and replace it with little bastards.

SPEAKER_02 3:48

That's a great question, Sal. And thanks, Lauren. Thinking about it, I have I have two thoughts, and will I remember the second one by the time I finish talking about the first one? I'm not sure. Firstly, I think we go from children to little bastards depending on the adult that makes the decision at the time. So for example, if the criminal age of responsibility is now 12, 10, 10. Thank you, Sal, is now 10, then that's probably the age they go from little children to bastards in some people's minds. However, having worked in early learning, I've also heard little children being spoken about in the context of they're abusing me because they're having a tantrum, for example. Um, they are doing this deliberately to me. They're manipulative. I've heard three-year-olds being called manipulative. So I think the definition kind of depends on the person that's creating that definition. And mostly it's always adults. And whether that's through policy or whether that's through practice and language, that generally is what I have seen. The other piece I think is really fascinating is the language. When we say youth justice, and this is not an area that I've worked in, I work with small children and usually in the disability space. But youth justice, if I was to say it and define it myself, would be justice for youth. So I find it really interesting that it actually what it means in our society is youth and their criminal behavior and how we are going to manage that. So I don't know, maybe we need a community justice department or something that does seek out justice for the community, but in a way that is actually perhaps evidence-informed and helpful for the entire community because we can't forget that these children or youth are part of their community. They need justice too. And I know as the conversation goes along, we will get into, you know, what happens when needs are not met early, etc. And that is part of the justice that needs to be sought for these children and youth.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Absolutely. I once worked in an area, community justice, and it is a really interesting construct concept. But I like where you've gone, Sarah, in terms of, you know, is it justice for children? Um, I struggle with the word youth, and I think it's similarly with the word juvenile, because I think now we've we've created uh such tension and used emotive language around those words. At one stage in my career in youth justice, I tried to change the language to boys and girls, and that was shut down. Because I think when we talk about boys and girls, we instantly shift, we shift, we shift the dynamic of the conversation. Well, it's the same language you would use in a school. Yes, yeah. Yeah. And so I think now we've created a category of child that we're trying to define and put into a particular box because then that makes it easier for us, the broader society, to manage, and I'm using manage in inverted commas, to put them in a box than it is to actually do the things that we need to do. And the last time we spoke, Sarah, I remember you talking about a little boy at the age of three being expelled from school. And so when we as adults can't take our critical thinking far enough to really explore, to interrogate and to understand what is going on in a child's life or not going on in a child's life to create those consequential behaviors. If we're not doing that, then we're never going to solve this problem of inverticomas, youth crime. Because kids don't start doing crimes. They start having concerning behaviors, my language, you might use something else, Sarah. Then they'll go to offending behaviors like the the red flags are going up, that the signs are there, and then it will become criminal. But what have we done all of that trajectory?

SPEAKER_02 8:22

I wonder if before we jump into that really deep, complex stuff, because I would like to get more of an understanding of what youth justice looks like, whether it's the Northern Territory, whether it's more national. But in your both of your careers, you know, what do we do when there's these offending behaviours or criminal behaviours? What are we doing for children here?

SPEAKER_01 8:48

Oh, I'll kick off. It's I would say it's changed substantially and not in many ways over probably the last decade and beyond. It's something that comes up uh in cycles, and politics has a lot to do with that. What youth justice looks like now structurally is a system that exists within a correctional system through an adult lens. And so there have been changes to that over the last decade where it was taken out of the corrections agency here in the Northern Territory, I must say, not um across the country, some of the models look very different, but taken out of corrections, put into children and families and uh those that are working with young offenders uh having differentiated training because they are actually dealing with young people, not adult offenders. And their chances of rehabilitation within that system are much higher than those who have been through the system uh their whole lives and are now in big boy prison, if you like. I would say there's been a lot of push for things like boot camps and those sorts of external options for young people who might come into contact with the courts, um, diversion options. But again, the community conversation around those is really interesting and I think has amplified over time. So we hit a point in 2015, 16 that transformed the uh justice system at that time. I think that we've hit that point again, to be honest. We've seen the return of Spithoods, we've seen lowering the age of criminal responsibility, so we're going back to that more punitive approach to how we treat young people who have offended.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

Yeah, and there are different models, um, as Lauren was saying, there are different models across Australia, but fundamentally we have an adult system and we have a youth or juvenile as it's sometimes called in different jurisdictions uh systems. Lauren's quite right. Um all detentionslash prison systems are based on a male prison system. So even for adult women going into prison, that was quite a challenge. Um, I will say for the system to suddenly go, wow, now we have w they have different needs. So uh, and that hasn't always been well addressed or well met. And then you take that adult system and you put it into a system that is um to care, and I'm using that word intentionally, for children. And you will have a mix of young girls and boys, usually fewer girls than boys, and uh difficult for girls to be in a system which again is really clunky, and how do we manage girls going through puberty, um, getting their menstrual cycles for the first time, that really awkward attraction between, you know, each other, girls and boys, you know, and how do we manage all of that stuff in a setting that's that's a really confined emotionally, spiritually, and physically space. And so, yes, we've had big calls internationally and in Australia to change the age of criminal responsibilities and you know, discussions when the social media ban was going on. I I remember hearing a discussion about, oh my goodness, we're stopping, you know, is it 16, but little is at age of 10. They're not able to look after their own social media presence, but we can hold them accountable for other behaviours from the age of 10. The thing is, and I'm not, I do not profess to have any experience in child development or child psychology, but I have experienced what I have experienced as a professional working in a government system that does have youth justice as part of it. And seeing littlies at the age of 10 find themselves many far, far away from home with people who they have never seen or people who they have seen before and they're scared of them, people who don't look like people from home, the food is nothing like what they've had at home. For some, for some, it will actually be, oh, thank goodness we we do have three meals a day here. I've seen many with FASD and who are more childlike than any other 10-year-old, and it's all quite discombobulating. And they find themselves in a system where they not only have gone from whatever the behaviour was that got them into detention in the first instance, and I would like to come back to this at a certain point, where detention is the only answer, and that's an extraordinary tragedy in the territory. But not only are they then they go from whatever home is into this setting which is called detention, and then they will be categorized again. So in my time in youth justice, kids were categorized by different coloured t-shirts. So the youth justice officers would know it was a behavioural marking. I don't know if that still happens today. It's certainly that something that has been challenged consistently, not only across Australia but in other jurisdictions. We keep putting children into these boxes, and then the other children will respond to those colours of t-shirts as well. So it is a setting that is most unnatural. We only allow certain people to come and visit them at certain times. We're really good at doing further penalties while they're inside detention. And for the good folk who do want to, and I'm not saying that all people who work in youth justice are bad people because they are not. I'm gonna say that twice. Not all people who work in youth justice are bad people, they are not. Good people who are trying to do the therapeutic programs, you know, helping kids to read and write, get education back on track, that will be taken away as a consequence of a behaviour. So it's a really tough environment, Sarah. It's not a nurturing environment.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

That's so interesting that you say that because I have a very clear recollection of actually visiting some of the teaching stuff in a child slash youth detention centre. And they are brilliant. They are just so good. And sometimes for the first time, you've got kids engaging in education, and they really take that opportunity really seriously, and they do their best to connect those young people in with schools externally once they leave the detention setting, and to varying degrees of success. I don't think that that's an area that is looked at enough and is working well enough. But you're right, if if behaviours lead to a young person being locked down, for example, they're not receiving education, which they should be receiving by law, and also is their right as it is any of our rights to access education. So you start to have some really yeah complex dynamics going on there around all the things that could potentially put that young person in a better position once they leave, which is just tragic and what most people are not thinking about.

SPEAKER_02 16:40

I think the the education piece while incarcerated is really interesting to me too. There's there's one thing about, you know, if you're behaving badly, we'll take this away from you. I also think about, even in you know, general mainstream education settings, what it takes to achieve for a child to learn. And fundamentally it's a sense of safety. And so if children are incarcerated, just by the very nature of all the things that you talked about, Sal, being away from your people, strange environment, other children who and other adults who might be very scary, t-shirts that dehumanize, other categories that dehumanize, there's no sense of safety there. So you've got children who, and we will, of course, get to the conversation around where this all starts, going back, back, back in a child's life. You know, you've got all of those sort of those things that happen that create this hyper-vigilance, plus layered on top of that, the hyper-vigilance that would come from feeling unsafe in such an artificial, as you put it, situation that they're in too. So I I feel I do feel for the teachers and the educators, the therapeutic supports in that space, because these are people that understand that fundamentally. So I wonder how effective they're feeling in their role. And if they can get through to one child and support one child, that's an absolute win for sure. But what a hard slog and what an uphill battle for the child and all the children in those situations. And the the piece around calling them youth, even in schools, calling calling children students, I do believe it's just a step away from connecting with people. It's a way that we can distance ourselves and make people more of a number, potentially, because it's much easier then to implement things like in schools, say behavior management. And we've touched on my hatred of that term previously. But in an incarceration situation, I'm sure there are terminology that basically insinuates that we're trying to manage behavior or you know, whatever they're called, concerning behaviors in in prisons. So I think this overall, what what I notice in this sort of system that we have is it seems to really lack empathy. And and empathy is easy to bypass when we're dehumanising people by creating these little tiny bits and pieces in the system that create distance from human-to-human contact.

SPEAKER_00 19:15

I and and I think that the the the word that stands out for me there is system. A couple of things that I've been thinking about, the physical structures of detention centres, and I visited many detention centres in in Australia, clearly not all, but a number of them. And in the main, they are very, very imposing, threatening, scary looking things, right? Particularly if you've got rolls of razor wire around the perimeter. They're not something that bids you welcome and safe journey and safe passage. And one of the challenges that youth justice staff face is when a child is having a really tumultuous time emotionally, and they are, and I'm going to use the words, and you can pull me up if they're wrong, but that they're acting out. They're so stressed, they are so anxious, they do not know what to do with their emotions. And so there is that overarching safety for all, right? We've got the safety of the individual child, the children, the staff, and everybody. And in buildings that are constructed where there isn't a safe space to take that child so that their emotions can be de-escalated, they can go to somewhere that's calm, they there can be soothing music, there can be soft furnishings, there can be a place where they can lash out a bit, but they're not going to hurt themselves and then just, just bring that tension down. Certainly in my time, and I I cannot talk for what goes on today, and I wouldn't like to make a comment that that is wrong. Uh, there was for a fleeting moment when the new youth justice centre was built out at Holtz or you know, uh special rooms that were were built, but often the recourse is the youth justice officers go, we've got to lock the kid in their in their roomslash cell. So that becomes the alternative. It's a bit like mum and dad going, you go to your room and you don't come out until. It's that it's that response because mum and dad aren't quite sure what to do, and that's going to be safe for everybody, right? So that's a problem. And the other problem is how are we training the staff to manage this? You know, often you see in the main a lot of young people coming in to be youth justice officers. There are definitely some older people as well, but they've got that lovely big brother, big sister feel vibe about them. They care about kids, they get kids. A lot of them are the really, really big people, but soft teddy bears, you know, and just want to do the right thing. And we give them a uniform and a set of keys and a really patchy handover. Fill your boots, my friend. Now I'm talking from my time. Where where is the training for them to know what to do, who to call in when those signs, the red flags are going up? What do we do collectively to make it better for this young person who's got are clearly going through a really bad state? And we know there can be a knock-on effect and help everybody else and keep everybody else safe as well.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

And what does that do to those people who go into the system wanting to make a real difference and then finding themselves in a situation where they're woefully under-resourced and yeah, I think it's called fight or flight. Well, yeah, and we know about phrase. We know about that. For people who might be listening who might not be familiar, um, I actually was going to ask you, Cell, for your thoughts and experiences of the difference between young people who might be in the system on remand and those who are sentenced, and how that works realistically in a systemic sense, because I don't think people understand how many, not only young people, but adults as well, that are in the system are actually not sentenced and how long they can be sitting in a detention facility without having actually ever been found guilty of a crime, potentially yet, for sure. But just I I think that's an interesting part of the conversation that we don't often talk about.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Yeah. And it oh gosh, it took me a long while to get my head around all these quirky things in a criminal justice system, be it adult um or youth. And so uh one of the things that you're alluding to there, um, Lauren, is when somebody is sentenced to a sentence, be it prison or a detention centre, that comes with the possibility to access services and therapeutic services. Now, again, I don't know if this has this has changed since then, but certainly uh an admission of guilt and and then being sentenced, um, you have a greater opportunity, or you did have at the time a greater opportunity of of receiving the services, if indeed they were available, because that's a whole other situation, right? So we know in the territory it's really hard to have enough people with, you know, the relevant qualifications and then having the right number of people with the relevant qualifications to work in a in a correctional centre or detention centre and have enough of them so that they don't actually have to work 24 hours, you know, 24-7, and to have a a suitable caseload where you're not the one psych looking at the ex looking after the X number of kids who are in detention, because that's just fraud. So a number of children, and this will happen across Australia, but certainly what we know in the territory, as a and again I'm referring to my time in youth justice, there were more children who were in remand in detention than actually who had been sentenced. So this means there wasn't a finding in relation to whichever matter they were before the court, and children can have more than more than one matter. And so even if you serve a sentence for one matter, you will go back to court for outstanding matters. And so you can potentially have the next X number of years ahead of you with no sunrise at the end, no light at the end of that tunnel. And often remand will happen when um a magistrate is unable to identify a suitable and safe place for a young child to be before their hearing has concluded, and whatever the results, the findings of that case. And I think this is one of the biggest challenges and the absolute weakness of any youth justice system, but certainly in the territory, is that, and you're talking about investment, Lauren, uh, we can invest in the detention centre. But when a magistrate cannot identify an alternative place by a detention centre that is supposedly safe to look after a child, we have a problem. And yes, this means that home isn't safe for the child, or there might be other things going on in the home, and when the magistrate determines, and obviously with counsel from the lawyers in terms of actually it's not great if the kid goes back here. Well, if there's nowhere else for the kid to go, what do we do in the system? We go, well, the great, you've drawn the detention centre card. Yeah. And trust me, and I don't have the data, I don't follow the statistics closely anymore, but that entry into detention gives them a free pass to spend a lot of their life in detention. Absolutely. Be at prison.

SPEAKER_01 26:57

That's still the case today. And just for uh and just for some context, and I I looked at these again really recently, actually, which is why I I asked because I'd had spoken to some people about this. Um, quarter two, 2025-26, this is Northern Territory Youth Justice, number of young people in detention by legal status. So, quarter two, the number of young people on remand were 128, and the number that was sentenced in that same period 45. So, and the quarter before that, we're talking about 134 on remand and 35 sentenced. And that's generally it's pretty stable that it's around that kind of split of young people on remand. And yes, you can imagine that over time, if the focus is more on detention not as a last resort, we are going to see that grow unless there is a corresponding investment in a whole range of other things, including the courts and making sure that there is speedy access to justice, because that's another important part of the conversation, right? It's actually really important not only for fair access to justice, and people will say this is all about perpetrators, it's not. Speedy access to justice is really important to victims as well. So we do have an ongoing problem here, and it's been a problem for a long time. The amount of young people who actually have a sentence is relatively small in terms of how many young people might actually be in detention. Overwhelmingly, it's young people who don't have a sentence, and I think that's really just important to note and underscore out there. We might go to what's the difference between what's announced, what gets funded, where do you see the gaps, what are we not recognizing in terms of work that's going out there in the community? And I think we'll start with you, Sarah, in terms of what you think we should be doing more of, or things that you think maybe are being talked about uh as though we're doing more than we are.

SPEAKER_02 29:15

I think part, thank you, Lauren, for passing over to me, right? I'm ready. Uh as you were talking, as you were both talking, I'm thinking a lot about the conversation that is also what is the percentage or proportion of our children either waiting in remand or having sentences in the youth justice system, I will say, with disability, trauma, et cetera. And this comes back to your very uh earliest comments, Sal, about where all this comes from in the first place, because I think it then also links into what you were saying, Lauren, about where money is not being spent and where the gaps currently are. So I don't know if we have reliable information, data on the proportion of children in our youth justice system with, say, a diagnosed disability and/or trauma. I would think when we say trauma, my guess is 100%. I don't know. I I'm not an expert in that space, but I would suggest that if you have found yourself in the youth justice system, there is significant trauma there. And you know, if these a lot of these children have been in care or some kind of care situation, that that that is associated with trauma as well, in some respect, whether it's, you know, traumatic events that happened at home that led to that, and even the process of being taken away from home and in an out-of-home care situation, traumatic in itself for children and their development. And then we've got, you know, uh neurodevelopmental disabilities, etc. Uh, you were talking about FASD earlier, sal, you know, intellectual disability, acquired brain injury, whatever, whatever that disability is. Undiagnosed to diagnosed doesn't really matter. It matters in terms of our data collection and what we know to be true for children. And thinking about that, so going back to those earlier years when early identification of developmental concerns and trauma in particular become really important. We know the evidence is very, very clear when it comes to early intervention. That's where the best bang for our buck lies in terms of prevention, really. Prevention and also the early intervention within some of those very unique critical developmental windows are really, really super important for changing the trajectory of children's development. Going to the 2024 AEDC data, which is uh, you know, data that we collect nationally that looks at uh children's development across five domains as they enter school. We've mentioned this on a previous podcast that for the Northern Territory, we have the most developmentally vulnerable children in Australia, the highest proportion, I would say. Uh, and we do know that now our 2024 data tells us that there are more children starting school developmentally vulnerable than on track, right? What we also know in the NT and nationally is that the social emotional domains are showing us data that those domains are getting worse, basically. So, and social emotional, it really is the social domain is about how children manage the social world with their peers and adults, getting along with other children, responsibility and respect, uh, you know, readiness to explore new things. And emotional maturity domain is really about how children experience and manage their feelings and behaviors. This sounds very congruent with what we were talking about later, right? So prosocial, helping behavior, anxious and fearful behavior, aggressive behavior, hyperactivity and inattentive behavior, et cetera. So when the AEDC talks about social and emotional domains, it's basically asking: can this child connect with others? Can they manage their feelings and behavior well enough to cope at school? Or cope in general, right? So this is the space, coming back to your question, Lauren, about where do we need to invest? This is where it needs to happen. And being very clear that in these social and emotional domains in the Northern Territory, our 2024 AEDC data told us that 22% of NT children are starting school, that sorry, sorry, starting school vulnerable in the social domain compared with 10% nationally. So we're more than double in that space. And in the uh emotional domain, it's 18% of Northern Territory children starting school vulnerable compared to 10% nationally. Uh so it's the AEDC is basically this sort of flashing red light, if you like, that kids are finding self-regulation hard. And yet our youth justice system response is getting more punitive. And what we know helps in these situations, supportive, nurturing environments that co-regulate with children. How do children learn to regulate? They learn to regulate through the co-regulation with other adults. So adults that can regulate themselves come in and support children during those hard times when perhaps they're showing those concerning behaviors or early meltdowns or whatever we want to call them. And it's through their calm, supportive nurturing in those moments that children learn how to do it themselves. They also learn in those moments who their safe people are and who and how to ask for help. And that's the other piece in this as well. These children that are ending up in our criminal justice system, in our youth justice system, uh, who are they asking for help? Have they learned how to do that? Have they ever experienced a safe adult that can help them with that? A lot of them probably have not. So I think a true investment in this sort of early identification of when things are not on track for children, whether it be due to, you know, neurodevelopmental disability, whether it be trauma, early parenting, uh, and when that isn't working, you know, housing instability and we're getting into those very lovely, gray, complex areas. And this is why I guess that the punitive conversation works so well politically during election cycles, is it seems like a lovely fix to get very management focused and punitive focused. But the fact is, the only way we're going to have a dent in this conversation is if we're willing to engage in these hard conversations and uncomfortable solutions that involve us looking at our society and saying, do you know what? There's just not the equity measures sitting there to assist some children and families that start at a lower rung than others. And I'll come back to something we spoke about in our first podcast. It tells us that our community genuinely believes that some children and families are worth more than others. That's my soapbox. You've heard it.

SPEAKER_01 36:39

Yeah, I think that's um that's true. And it is politically expedient and it does have an immediate effect, which lots and of people in the community, that's what they're looking for. Is that okay, yes, we get the generational change push, we get it, but we're not seeing anything right now, and we need to see something right now, and so locking people away is a really politically expedient answer. And it will have a short-term effect, right? Because you take some of the worst and some of the repeat offenders off the streets, and we just don't talk about what happens when they come out in however long it is. Sal, I have a question for you coming off the back of Sarah's contribution just now. Strengthening families versus family accountability. What do you think of that conversation in terms of the public discourse around some families just need to take more responsibility for their kids?

SPEAKER_00 37:38

Yeah. Uh look, it is certainly what I have witnessed and learnt, and a project that I'm working on at the moment in another jurisdiction. We know that these children are in the main neglected. Certainly the children that we see in the territory and in other regional and remote areas of Australia. We also know that that neglect is poverty-driven. And so it goes to, you know, what you were talking about, Sarah, about, you know, there are some children who are worth less than others, and I think there are some families that are worth less than others. And so we have, if I if we take a child who has been born into a family that is experiencing poverty and has only experienced poverty, and we know that associated to poverty, there will be alcohol and substance abuse. We know that a dwelling home in inverted commas looks very, very different to perhaps what we three our construct of what home is. There will be many, many people coming in and out of that home. It will be awake 24-7, it will not be safe, there will be a very unhealthy mix of adults and children. We know there isn't enough food. And so often one of the precursors for children going out and searching for things is searching for food, is searching for nourishment. And I understand, you know, I think I think I understand when people say, you know, families have to be do better, they have to be responsible. If you're going to have children, you've you've got to look after them and raise them well. And that makes complete sense to me. I read that in a book about in a tale, in a Jane Austen novel. I get it, and I'm with them the whole way. And yet any family is difficult, but when you put families into a constant context of such extraordinary levels of poverty, extraordinary levels of inequity, extraordinary levels of we are other, extraordinary levels of having their heart, their spirituality, their being stripped from them, and it continues to this day. I suspect it is very hard to be responsible for a child, let alone for yourself. And to think that all parents, regardless of where they are in the world, have gone into having children in this, yes, we're going to make sure that before we procreate, we're going to have all of these things in play. You know, I met my husband, and three months later we went, oh, we're pregnant. You know, there was no we didn't have anything, like we had a hell of a, yeah. So I think these constructs that we put around families, uh, again, it's we're trying to put people into a box. And I'd actually like, I'm going to ask you both now, and for our good kind folk who are listening, I would like you to draw a square, be it on a piece of paper, be it on your tablet, or even with your finger in the air. I'd like you to draw a square. We're all drawing a square. You're all drawing a square. And what I'd like you to do in the top hand right corner of that square, I'd like you to write draw a diagonal line that goes somewhere from the top line of your square in the corner to somewhere on the right line of your square. So you're drawing a triangle in the top part of that square. And I want you to look at your square, even if it's your imaginary one that you've done with your finger and you've got that triangle in the corner inside the square. I want you to give that triangle a number, a percentage of how much that makes up of the total square. And just write that number. And then by default, what does that leave the rest of the square being in terms of a number? What's the percentage? Now let's say your number in your triangle was 10 or 20, or if you're particularly mathematically inclined, you had digits in there and lots of things after the dot. My gut feeling is the percentage in that triangle is going to be less than what it is in the square. And so I'm looking at you two to say, so what were your numbers, Sarah? What was your number? 16. Oh, what was your number? 13. Okay. So I now want you to think I want you to imagine that that square is our policy settings. And I would like to suggest that the bigger number that you had is that we craft policies to serve a system which is the bigger part of the square. And in that corner of the triangle, are the people who we are supposedly serving in that square in that triangle. And I think disproportionately, particularly in settings like this, child protection, youth justice, adult correction, I think the criminal justice system, housing, we serve the system more than we serve the people. And definitely part of that tiny we triangle are the families of these children.

SPEAKER_01 43:36

Yeah. Powerful. Very, very powerful way of looking at it. You're absolutely right. We love talking about systems, don't we? And you are absolutely right. And it makes it much easier to just continue with this blinkered, it's not my kids. So you just it's easier to not think about them as children. They're somebody's children. Somebody's brother, somebody's sister. Boat makes it much easier to for people to put the blinkers on and go, youths. There were youths up my street last night. There were, you know, and that level of being able to emotionally disconnect.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

Can I just add one thing to that, Lauren? Because you mentioned victims before, and we cannot forget victims. And children and teenagers are absolutely capable of perpetrating horrific crimes. I also put the victims in that tiny triangle at the top because the system is not keeping everybody safe. The system it'd be a bit far-fetched if I said, but I'm gonna say the system creates the victims by not actually addressing the root causes or challenges that we need to address. So by focusing only on the kids that do need that absolutely things need to happen, we're allowing the rates of victims to increase.

SPEAKER_02 45:15

So I have to ask the question then, because as my brain is working and I'm thinking about my my wee triangle with my children, families, and victims sitting in there with the rest of the system. And within obviously that system is guided by policy that's been or legislation that's been written by people. And people in that little triangle, by virtue of their status in life, I will say, very rarely get the opportunity to write those policies or have impact on those policies. Why aren't we getting this right? Like why aren't we seeking to create policies, legislation, whatever it is, to build a system that serves those people to keep people safe?

SPEAKER_01 46:07

I'm sure we all have a view on why not. I think unfortunately political expedience is some of it. It becomes very topical at election times. You know, if you have a law and order election, it becomes a little bit of a race to the bottom, if I'm honest, and who can out-tough each other on crime. And that doesn't really take into account anybody's voices, then, does it? It becomes about political slogans and what's going to work out there in the you know, the public domain for getting votes on who's going to be toughest on crime. And that doesn't, to be fair, I mean, that doesn't take into account the voices of families, victims, or young people at all. And I will say that one of the things that young people have spoken to me about over many, many years and that I've seen them present when they've had the opportunity, has been around youth crime and the way that young people are perceived in the media, in our community. They don't have a voice in it. And they definitely raise it when they do have the opportunity to. And so we have to look at ways that we can create those mechanisms, I think. So if we were to flip that question, say what would it take to properly involve those people in policy development, in how our politicians are reacting to issues, what would that look like? I think that would be probably a lot more hopeful a conversation and potentially one that we should be having. I think there are young people who've come out of the system who are making a good go of their lives, who would have a lot to offer about how the system impacted them, what worked, what didn't work, and it might be hard for some people to hear, but I think those are important voices in the conversation. Their families are important conversations to have. You know, it's it's just rather than being so dismissive bringing people in to have those conversations, I think we'd have a much stronger system.

SPEAKER_02 48:37

My question as well is also because I think it's very easy for Joe Public to say, politicians this, politicians that, oh, they're all this and they're not actually doing anything to help us. Being very mindful, present company, you know. But if politicians are very focused on I'm serving my voters, and my voters are telling me that this is important to them, and they're also telling me that this is what they want to see. You know, and as a, I'm gonna speak as a lay person here rather than, you know, the health professional that I am, from what I looked at in the 2024 election here, it it was very much a crime-focused election. And one party perhaps responded in a way that resonated with more people. And so my concern is: do we have a community out there that's getting harder, less empathetic, less willing to look at the complexity or being less patient around how long some of these changes may actually take if we are taking a more holistic view of what it takes to interrupt cycles of, say, poverty that can lead to uh, you know, disrupted lives and challenging behaviours and later, you know, uh criminal behaviours, I suppose. Um, that that concerns me. Or or is it just people get fed up with the same conversation over and over? So they're looking for anything that might affect change.

SPEAKER_01 50:19

I'll throw it to Sal in a minute, but I think it's a bit of both, to be honest. Uh social media has a lot to answer for, I think. And I don't mean that in a, you know, in the way it sounded, but uh there was once upon a time when you found out something happened on your street because you were chatting to your neighbour. Now you might find out about something that happened because it's in the community group for your suburb, and that same incident can be uh presented on social media maybe five different ways, and people often can think that there's more going on than there is. That's one case. I have seen that happen in communities where they think there is a lot more going on than potentially there is, or more than certainly is getting reported to police, notwithstanding that some people don't report. But I just think you hear about it more, it's reported more. We have a 24-hour news cycle now that we never used to have, and it sells newspapers, it gets listeners on the radio, and there is definitely an element of that at play because that then turns into how people feel moving about in their community. People feel more unsafe because they're reading about it all the time, they're hearing about it all the time, and that happens, you know, regardless of kind of where the stats are. If um if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 51:43

I believe that generally everybody wants to feel safe. The business owners who rock up and the windows are smashed or they've been broken into people who've had uh I can but imagine the horrific experience waking up and somebody in your bedroom violent crimes. I think whoever we are in society, uh there is a uh the survival instinct to be safe. I think, however, the solutions that we offer one, there is one that really gets the fireworks and the kapow, let's go hard. People have been hurt, people are losing money, people um are having their lives damaged, if indeed worse, and I think they are legitimate calls. However, if the only solution that has been perpetrated since, oh my goodness, time immemorial, is to do hard back and then to ridicule all the other solutions as being too soft, for me, we haven't had the debate around what does safety look and feel like for all of us. How do we get to safe? How do we get to safe? Because I think if we can identify avenues to safe and between we three and the cherry tree, and to you good people listening, we know there are many avenues to safe. How do we get to safe?

SPEAKER_02 53:23

And as you're talking, what I'm thinking about in the early childhood space, when we think about relationships, we're thinking about co-regulation, we're thinking about setting up relationships with children that have, using circle of security words, a secure base and a safe haven. It's very, very clear that safety for a child is created through lots of nurturing, lots of love, uh, lots of being delighted in children, lots of that co-regulation. But safety is also created through boundaries. It's through no. It's through, yeah, this is really hard. And I can see that you're really hurting, and still the answer is no. It's not actually created through you can do whatever you want. And so I think, you know, the going hard and then the going really, really soft. Why are we having conversations at polar opposites when actually the truth lies somewhere in the middle and the evidence supports the truth lying in the middle?

SPEAKER_01 54:36

The truth does lie in the middle. I agree with that. And I think the public discourse, yes, is very much at two opposite ends. And you can talk about that in terms of a whole range of different topics that the conversations are happening in parallel at two completely separate ends, and the answer is somewhere in the middle. And putting kids back at the centre, which is I think where we ended the last uh episode. But I just wanted to ask before we do close up, because we could talk about these issues all day and we can't. So, what gives you genuine hope then about community safety and about young people? What would give you hope? What what do you think would give the community hope? What conversation would you like to see starting out there in the community? And how do we start it?

SPEAKER_00 55:28

I would like everybody from Joe Blow Citizen, mums and dads, absolutely the kids themselves. Lauren? Politicians want to be politicians, people who work in government systems everywhere. I'd like to leave I'd like to leave you with something. We need our heads to think things through. We need our hearts to hold what matters, and we need the guts to see it through.

SPEAKER_02 56:01

I feel like I can't say anything after that. That would have been a lovely way to end. 100%, 100%. In terms of what gives me hope. Again, being very focused on the early years, what I see are lots of conversations about how we can support children's social and emotional growth. And some of that conversation is happening in early learning settings, some of it's happening in places like toy libraries, in play groups, in child and maternal health services. There's some excellent people out there who are doing the work. They are doing the good work, supporting families. And that gives me lots and lots of hope. I also see on social media that there's people in our jurisdiction and in others that notice things. So if something like a circle of security has been cut from a particular program, they are out there advocating and they are informing decision makers how important it is to provide these types of programs that come around parents and inspire their reflective abilities within parenting, that ability to be able to look at how are my actions affecting the relationship with my child and how is this affecting my child's ability to learn to regulate, et cetera? So they are they are out there also doing that hard work. And also, whenever you hear, you know, other community organizations in the NT, we've got our Aboriginal community-controlled organizations doing some profound work in this space, legal services that are contributing massively, you know, coming around children and families, youth workers and other people, young people obviously, offering their stories, being vulnerable in this space. Like all of those people give me immense amounts of hope. We just need to stand behind them and elevate some of these people in their own right to share their stories and be part of that solution.

SPEAKER_01 58:10

Totally agree with both of you, as always. Not as always, but yes, as always on this topic. But I totally agree. I think young people, let's continue to elevate the positive stories about young people. I bang the drum about that and have been doing for about 15 years. There's more good stuff happening out there in the community with our young people than there is negative things. And we should really elevate them, listen to them, include them in community solutions. They give me great hope. Whenever I'm feeling a bit flat, if I do a little bit of a session with a group of young people, I feel really elated afterwards because young people have got such hope and they should have such hope. And I think if we kept that at the core, that we want young people to feel hopeful and optimistic about the future and what their future can hold. I think that we will take different approaches to issues like this. I give a massive shout out to all the people who are working in our communities to provide activities for young people and families and those who are struggling. I think at the end of the day, it's about us all making sure that we are listening and understanding these issues more. As Cell says, using your head and your heart and having the guts and the bravery to do the things that are actually harder to do, but have better payoff for us as a community longer term. So what I'd like everybody to think about really is if we did invest in prevention rather than punishment, what would that look like in your street? What would that look like in your school? What would that look like in your community? And let us know what you think about this issue. We know it's a a big one, and we'd love to hear the positive stories about what's happening in your street, your town, your community, and your jurisdiction. So we can give them shout outs too. And we'd love to catch you next time.