More than a dozen organisations have formed a coalition to push the New South Wales government to raise the age of criminal responsibility to at least 14, arguing the status quo is harming young people and entrenching social issues.
The group includes key agencies including First Nations organisations, legal and human rights groups, peak bodies and unions, each with different perspectives on why the change is overdue and how it can be done.
Campaigners hope a renewed push will convince the Minns Labor government – elected in March – to revisit the issue with a fresh perspective after more than a decade under the Coalition.
In most Australian states, including NSW, children as young as 10 can be charged, convicted and incarcerated.
The UN recommends 14 as the age of criminal responsibility, an approach also backed by doctors, legal experts and the recent disability royal commission.
The lead campaigner for Raise the Age NSW, Emily Mayo, said the change of government meant the time was ripe to revisit the issue.
“What we do now hurts children,” she said. “It harms families and it hurts communities and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t deliver.”
Mayo said it was possibly the first time that such a broad and influential group of organisations – which includes Antar, the NSW Council of Social Service and the teachers’ union – had united on an issue.
She said the group had “a sense of hope and a sense of promise” that Labor would raise the age, although the premier, Chris Minns, has not indicated that his government would.
“What we hope to do is to have discussions with the government in the coming weeks and for them to commit to raising the age to 14,” Mayo said. “We are meeting with the attorney general in the coming weeks. That’s really promising.”
The Northern Territory government raised the age to 12 in August. Victoria has committed to raising the age of criminal responsibility to 12 by the end of next year and to 14 by 2027. The ACT government has introduced legislation that would immediately lift the age to 12 years and to 14 by July 2025.
Figures from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (Bocsar) revealed that in the 12 months to December last year, almost 3,000 children aged under 14 were “proceeded against by police”, meaning they had interactions with officers, including being taken in for questioning or being charged.
Over the same period, 1,115 children had matters go to court, 1,647 were cautioned and 188 children were referred to a youth justice conference.
The NSW Aboriginal Legal Service managing solicitor of children’s criminal practice, James Clifford, said the current system had “a lot of negative impacts and very few benefits”.
“Having represented children as young as 10 regularly in courts across NSW, you can really see the deleterious effect that having children that young involved in the criminal justice system has on them and how it follows them throughout their lives,” he said.
Analysing Bocsar data from 2019, the NSW Bar Association found only two children were sentenced to custody in that year, but in many of the 207 court cases recorded, the young people were remanded in custody or denied bail.
In NSW, over the past financial year, 56 children aged under 18 were strip-searched, including 25 underage girls, three of whom were aged 12, police data obtained by the Redfern Legal Centre recently revealed.
Eleven of the teenagers and children who were strip-searched were Indigenous.
Earlier this year, more than 60,000 people signed a petition urging the NSW government to raise the age and stop allowing children as young as 10 to be arrested, handcuffed and strip-searched.
In 2021 the attorneys-general of every Australian state and territory agreed to move toward raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12.
Justice advocates said raising the age only to 12 would have a minimal impact on youth imprisonment rates.
In April, the NSW attorney general, Michael Daley, indicated the government would consider recommendations and findings presented by the age of criminal responsibility working group to the standing council of attorneys general.
Daley declined to comment when contacted on Tuesday. Instead, his office referred Guardian Australia to a communique from the attorneys general meeting in September.
The communique states that Daley and his state, territory and federal counterparts agreed to come to their December meeting with their respective positions on reform.
