Almost half of all young people in detention in Australia are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, even though the overall number of children going to jail has fallen in the past five years, research shows.
Young Indigenous people are only 5.8% of all young people aged 10-17 in Australia but make up 49% of all young people in detention, according to the latest data released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).
Indigenous children were younger when they entered the criminal justice system than their non‑Indigenous counterparts, and more likely to be from remote and lower socio-economic areas. Young people from very remote areas were six times as likely to be in detention as those from major cities. Young people spent an average of six months in detention. The majority of all young people in detention were unsentenced or awaiting trial, the AIHW found.
More than a third (37%) of Indigenous young people were first in contact with the criminal justice system when aged 10 to 13, compared with just 14% of non‑Indigenous youth.
Cheryl Axleby, the co-chair of Change the Record, an Indigenous-led coalition of welfare and legal groups, said she was appalled by the latest report.
“This paints a really clear picture of exactly how our criminal legal system is working – it’s targeting poor kids and black kids,” Axleby said.
“On top of that, First Nations kids are more likely to be targeted and dragged into the criminal legal system when they are extremely young. It is outrageous that Aboriginal children in primary school are being arrested by police.”
The AIHW found that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth detention rates have fallen over the past five years, but remain disproportionate. Since 2016, the rate of Indigenous young people in detention fell from 161 to 117 per 10,000. The rate of non-Indigenous young people fell from 9.5 to 7.2 per 10,000 over the same period.
While rates of youth justice supervision varied among jurisdictions, the Northern Territory fared the worst – 108 of the 115 (or 94%) young people aged 10 and over in the NT youth justice system were Indigenous.
The AIHW acknowledged efforts to raise the age of criminal responsibility in Australia from 10 years old. Some jurisdictions, including the NT, are considering raising the age to 12.
But the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recently deemed 12 was too young. Since 2019 the UN has recommended that nations increase their minimum age to at least 14 years which, according to the AIHW report, reflects research in child development and neuroscience which provides evidence that children aged 12 and 13 have not fully developed the capacity for abstract reasoning.
“Once again the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has confirmed what we already know: if governments are serious about closing the gap and giving our children the opportunity to grow and thrive they must raise the age to at least 14 years old and end the discriminatory and punitive policies that are driving our kids into the criminal legal system,” Axleby said.
