Popular opinion is always ambivalent about children. If you say children are the future, show concern for education, deplore the harm done by abuse, and advocate on behalf of needy children, you will get a good hearing.
But if you alarm people with story of youth gangs, claim that kids are out of control, and demand that they be locked up, punished severely, deported and subjected to other indignities, you are also likely to win support. We love reassurance that good kids will make for a better future of our society. We are easily made afraid that little monsters will turn the future into a nightmare.
At present fear seem seems to be winning. Throughout Australia harsher penalties are imposed on offenders, including children. They are remanded in custody and not returned to their families. They are included in the adult justice system rather than in child welfare. Governments spend money on new child prisons. Institutional staff give priority to security rather than to rehabilitation, to control rather than to respect, authority rather than to mentoring.
The satisfaction derived from this emphasis on punishment in the treatment of children is fleeting. We may feel momentary relief that a dangerous little villain is being dealt with. But the cost of imprisonment is lasting and heavy: a still malleable child whose path might have changed is stunted in their development and sent to a preparatory school likely to graduate to a lifetime in adult prisons. This is a heavy price to pay in terms of human happiness and the public purse.
The reliance on imprisonment in youth justice inevitably leads to a system in which relations between children and staff are authoritarian and conflictual, facilities are understaffed and crowded, bored and disturbed children are kept in cells, lip service is paid to rehabilitation and morale is low.
These conditions lead to violence, vandalism and to such abuses as those revealed in the photographs from Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. There is momentary public revulsion followed by enquiries that lead to cosmetic change. But the root of the problem — the penal approach to child offending instead of a child welfare focus — remains and reproduces the same conditions.
The summary conclusions on detention by the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory are notable for their straightforward language. They echo the judgments of child workers, doctors, psychologists and x in other parts