Two confused narratives are running in Australia. Both feature children and youth. Both seem motivated by different anxieties. In the first instance, and one most prominently featured in the Queensland election just held, the demonic offender, the child as terrorising criminal, blemished and unreformable. The second, one most prominent at the federal level, is the mania that children are perennially at risk of being spoiled, be it from social media, offensive images, or radicalising subject matter.
The issue of the demon child stalking the streets of urban Queensland has become galvanic. As mythology, it flies in the face of the rather duller fact that crime rates in the state have fallen across almost all categories over the past 20 years. Looking at an LNP petition launched when Labor Premier Anastasia Palaszczuk was still in office, we find the following hysterical observations. ‘Everyone knows of someone who has been hurt by Labor’s youth crime crisis.’ Figures cobbled together, citing 2015 as the cutoff point, are impressively terrifying: assaults, up by 220 per cent; break ins, 54 per cent and car theft, 116 per cent.
Queenslanders aged between 10 and 17 are said to commit more crimes than the general population. This is hardly surprising – every state has registered similar trends. The Bureau of Statistics, however, has identified a closing rate between youth offending and the general population. In 2011, there was a 31.5 per cent gap between the two. By 2021-2, it had shrunk to 5.5 per cent.
The LNP election campaign has, however, baulked against such empirical solidity. Their slogan is unimaginatively stated as ‘Adult time for Adult Crime.’ It is one pursued despite the squalid conditions facing youth in detention, the sort that make rehabilitation obscenely impossible. As things stand, all three Queensland youth detention centres are operating, according to the Queensland Auditor General’s June 2024 report, over their safe capacity by an average of 23 young offenders a day.
The chief executive of Queensland Council of Social Service, Aimee McVeigh, also makes the uncontroversial point that the LNP policy, far from making the public safer will ‘put more pressure on our already maxed-out youth detention centres and send more children to adult watch houses.’ To further add to the detained population of youth will also add, not subtract, from the alleged scourge of such crime. Nothing is more inviting as an incentive to commit further crime than lengthy stints in prison.
At the federal level, the child has also been the object of concern. On one level, youth is also seen as dangerous. But here, the emphasis is on corruptibility and spoliation of character. In his annual threat assessment delivered in 2022, Mike Burgess, the chief of ASIO, Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, warned that, ‘The number of minors being radicalised is getting higher and the age of the minors being radicalised is getting lower.’ Children as young as 13 were ‘embracing extremism, and this is happening with religiously motivated violent extremism and ideologically motivated violent extremism.’
In October this year, Burgess’s mood in that regard had only hardened. Addressing a summit examining the harms caused by online platforms to their young users, Burgess claimed that the latest spate of terror cases ‘were allegedly perpetrated by young people’, including one as young as 14. The demonic catalyst, one previously seen as a vehicle for enlightenment by digital utopians, was the internet. ‘The internet,’ lamented the ASIO chief, ‘was a factor in every single one of these incidents, albeit to different degrees and in different ways.’
Other figures in the business of law and order are also of like mind, heavily hinting that regulation and restriction to shield adults in general, but children in particular, is the answer. In his April 24 address to the National Press Club in Canberra, Australian Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw expressed his concerns that children and vulnerable groups were ‘ being bewitched online by a cauldron of extremist poison on the open and dark web’ . Social media platforms were particularly at fault in this regard. ‘The very nature of social media allows that extremist poison to spray across the globe almost instantaneously.’
'The subtext here is not merely one of education but one of censorship, with social vulnerability and a child’s innocence being used as pretexts for making restrictive policies.'
The tone of Kershaw’s speech is paternalistic, and nostalgic – the typical symptoms of one hankering after a lost innocence. Typically, such sentiments are associated with youth. ‘We used to warn our children about stranger danger, but now we need to teach our kids about the digital-world deceivers.’ The view ‘that people are not always who they claim to be online; and that also applies to images and information’ had to be constantly reiterated.
The subtext here is not merely one of education but one of censorship, with social vulnerability and a child’s innocence being used as pretexts for making restrictive policies. Indeed, the eSafety Commissioner, an office already suggesting control over permissiveness, has been aggressively promoting a policy to insulate Australia from the perceived wickedness of the world wide web, using the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth) with gusto.
The current occupant of the office, Julie Inman Grant, has made her intentions clear in what we, and more specifically children, are entitled to see. Her attempt to make Elon Musk’s X Corp platform remove links to a livestreamed video featuring a stabbing attack by a 16-year-old at Sydney’s Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church in April was telling. Despite the Federal Court finding her efforts to be a discrediting case of jurisdictional overreach – Inman Grant had wanted an unenforceable global ban to be put in place – she has vowed to continue to protect the sacred from the profane.
The broader moral here, be it in terms of debates about youth crime, or the susceptibility of children to ideas not otherwise approved of, is one of caution. Caution that policy makers are being ingenuous in pursuing an agenda that protects children’s welfare, permits their development while still favouring broader community security. That balance, in Australia, has not been met. This is a country haunted by demonic youths and sacred children.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University.