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.
