Introduction by Croakey: As state and territory governments cause serious harm to children with complex, unmet needs, the Federal Government will face increasing pressure to provide national, evidence-based leadership in addressing the youth incarceration crisis, writes Marie McInerney.
Her report follows the launch this week of Amnesty International Australia’s Kids Need Better campaign, and comes ahead of the scheduled release of a Senate inquiry’s report into youth justice and the over-incarceration of First Nations children.
Health experts told the inquiry that Australia has “one of the most punitive youth ‘justice’ systems in the world”.
Marie McInerney writes:
The Federal Government will face mounting pressure to step up on youth justice issues, as states and territories continue to ratchet up punitive approaches, with a Senate inquiry into Australia’s youth justice and incarceration system scheduled to report later this month.
Australia’s former National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds said this week that Australia has gone backwards on the human rights of children with complex unmet needs and is currently making things worse for children, particularly First Nations children, including through the return of restraint chairs and spit hoods in the Northern Territory.
Hollonds told the launch of a new Amnesty International Australia campaign on youth justice that, although her role ended in 2025, she could not walk away from the need for urgent reforms.
“The job is not done, not nearly done. In fact, we went backwards,” she said of the state of juvenile justice across her five-year term.
Hollonds was speaking at the online launch from Finland, her ancestral homeland, where she said the age of criminal responsibility is 15 years.
It is again 10 or 12 in most Australian jurisdictions, after the current NT Government reversed the minimum age of criminality from 12 back to 10 and Victoria reneged on its commitment to raise it from 12 to 14.
That’s despite all the international evidence showing that the younger children or teenagers are when pulled into the justice system, “the more likely they go on to commit more serious crimes”, Hollonds said.
“Crime by children is a symptom of their unmet needs and underlying issues that we’re failing to address,” she said, describing upstream systems such as health and education, which should be helping these children, as “fragmented, uncoordinated, and not fit for purpose”.
“It’s very clear from the evidence that crime by children is predictable and it is preventable.”
But she said Australia, the only country in the world that has removed detention as a last resort for children, suffers from “policy paralysis” — her review of inquiries over the past 15 years revealed around 3,000 recommendations, all largely in alignment, that remain unimplemented.
It’s a concern and frustration shared by leading Indigenous health researchers Professor Pat Dudgeon, Associate Professor Jocelyn Jones, Dr Hannah McGlade and Dr Sharynne Hamilton in the lead up to the 31 August report from a Senate inquiry into Australia’s youth justice and incarceration system.
In a joint submission with non-Indigenous health researchers, including Professor Fiona Stanley, these experts say they are “appalled at the number of inquiries, all of which come up with the same or very similar recommendations, that have been ignored by every state and territory nationally”.
“We have to confess that we are cynical that your inquiry will make any difference to one of the most punitive youth ‘justice’ systems in the world,” they told the Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee.
Harms continue
The Queensland Government said this week it is considering a push by the police union to allow officers to collect a child suspect’s DNA without a court order, while recent changes in the NT to bail laws are seeing children from Alice Springs spending up to two months on remand in Darwin.
“During this time, they are disconnected from their families, communities, culture, and Country, significantly undermining their wellbeing and diminishing any prospect of rehabilitation or positive behavioural change,” said the Alice-Springs based Tangentyere Council’s Domestic Violence Specialist Children’s Services (DVSCS) in its submission to the Senate inquiry.
Amnesty’s new Kids Need Better campaign calls on Australian governments to:
- Establish enforceable national minimum standards of treatment for all children in custody that uphold and protect children’s human rights in line with international law, including the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
- Raise the minimum age a child can be imprisoned to 14 years old across Queensland (currently 12), Victoria (12) and the Northern Territory (10).
- Provide sustained investment in evidence-based, community-led programs that reconnect First Nations children with Country, culture and community.
- End harmful, torturous practices, including solitary confinement, spit hoods and holding children in adult watch houses.
The call for national standards is a new priority for Amnesty and reflects the growing concern about state and territory politics and polices that mean “what happens to a child depends entirely on what state or territory they’re born into”, said Gomeroi woman Kacey Teerman, Amnesty International Australia’s Indigenous Rights Campaigner.
“Essentially, a postcode decides how a child is treated, the justice system’s essentially a lottery,” she said.
Palawa Elder Uncle Rodney Dillon described a system “that’s not designed to help our kids, this is a system that destructs our kids and tears them away from their culture, their family, their homelands, and it puts them into this system institutionalized and keeps them there”.
“We talk about [it] as the quicksand of crime,” said Dillon who is Indigenous Rights Advisor at Amnesty International Australia. “Once they get in it, they never get out of it.”
Dillon told the webinar that Australia’s brutal colonial history is still playing out in the current justice system, with shocking treatment of young people from Banksia in Western Australia, to Don Dale in the Northern Territory, and Cleveland in Queensland – including stifling cells in summer, tear gassing, and setting a dog onto a 14 -year-old girl “because she wouldn’t get out of the pool”.
In Alice Springs, he said, one young boy’s head was smashed into a door by a prison officer, who reportedly said he didn’t care if he got the sack as a result.
Hollonds said that, in her role as National Children’s Commissioner, she had witnessed things “that I can’t unsee”, such as children held in solitary confinement and in concrete police watchhouse cells with no windows, natural light, fresh air, or outdoor area.
“These police watchhouses offer no recreation, no rehabilitation, no education, and shockingly, no visits from family,” she said, adding that children are not just held overnight in such facilities, “but often for weeks and even months” because of overcrowding in youth detention centres.
At a NT police watchhouse last year, when she asked what staff did when children were in psychological distress, she was told they use a restraint chair.
“The Northern Territory, as we know, has also brought back spit hoods and lowered the age of criminal responsibility back down to 10, so we are literally back to where we were before the Northern Territory Royal Commission [into the Protection and Detention of Children] in 2016,” she said.
“It’s wrong that children as young as 10 years old, many of whom are still losing their baby teeth, and whose brains aren’t fully developed, can be imprisoned,” Teerman said.
It’s a shocking contrast with the social media ban recently imposed on children under 15 in Australia, says Satara Uthayakumaran, the 2025 Australian Youth Representative to the United Nations.
This “impossible and unethical” contradiction deems a 15-year-old “too vulnerable, too fragile to safely exist on social media” but permits a 10-year-old to experience a police watchhouse, she told the webinar.
Uthayakumaran said her heart had been broken on a listening tour of juvenile justice facilities last year, where she found “a brutal machine that takes our most fragile, traumatised children and systematically strips their humanity from them”.
One 14-year-old boy in the Ashley detention centre in Tasmania told her: “’They stripped me in my cell. The moment they pulled my pants down, that’s when I stopped feeling like a human.”
Inside Bimbury Youth Justice Centre in the ACT, “just down the road from Parliament House”, a 15-year-old girl pressed a letter into her hands.
It read: “Most of the time, we are locked in our cells for up to 17 hours. No kid in here knows when they will get out. It is impossible to get help.”
Community support
The Amnesty campaign, which aims to generate a grassroots movement, is driven by hope that most Australians, as opposed to their governments, agree that children and adolescents need better.
Earlier this year it conducted a survey that found 91 percent of Australians agree that police and prison staff should abide by minimum standards for the treatment of children in custody, while 88 percent agree that children’s human rights must always be respected and that abuse in custody is never acceptable.
Nearly 70 percent agreed that First Nations community-led solutions connecting Indigenous youth to Country and culture foster a strong sense of belonging, social connection and meaning in life.
Leading Indigenous justice and health researcher Professor Megan Williams attended the Amnesty launch this week, and told Croakey that, “from the evidence cited to the protocols they acknowledged, Amnesty are clear on ways forward: locking up more kids leads to worse outcomes”.
Williams, who is Wiradjuri, said she also felt proud of the intergenerational work conveyed across the launch “with the young people leading, and their acknowledgement of Elders’ efforts”.
She said Amnesty’s independence from government and philanthropy funding and partnerships, and its membership base, might make more progress than Closing the Gap.
“Governments promised through Closing the Gap youth incarceration would be reduced but in some jurisdictions it has worsened,” she said. “Addressing the root causes is the real work; more state intervention is a symptom of a sick system.”
Hollonds said a recent tour of international experts organised by the Justice Reform Initiative had presented on different approaches developed in their countries over the past 20 years that have resulted in “astonishing reductions in crime and incarceration of children”.
What they had in common included political leaders who had the courage to try a different approach, and to tell the public the truth about what works to prevent crime and make communities safer.
They also acted to make the safety and wellbeing of children a priority through improved health, education, and human services, and implemented therapeutic services for rehabilitation and reintegration to the community.
“There is nothing radical in recommendations to use taxpayer funds on evidence-based approaches that have been proven to work,” Hollonds said. “It’s a sober and reasonable approach to addressing longstanding problems in the public interest.”
• See Amnesty’s call to action to people from across Australia; more than 33,000 people have signed this petition, as of 7 August, 2026.
Watch launch event
See Croakey’s archive of articles on human rights and health
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