Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander disadvantage

The Salvation Army provided a submission to the Australian Human Rights Commission Inquiry Youth Justice and Child Wellbeing Reform Across Australia.

The submission was informed by consultation with The Salvation Army’s Youth Justice management staff and frontline workers, the youth team, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander team. The submission also drew from elements of our Early Years and Early Childhood Education and Care submissions regarding early intervention and child-centred models.

The key themes of the submission are:

• The factors our services see which contribute to youth engaging with the youth justice system. We discussed poverty and socioeconomic disadvantage, childhood trauma, engagement with child protective services, mental ill-health, living with a cognitive disability, school disengagement, and intergenerational trauma and systemic discrimination.
• The need to focus on early intervention and prevention, sector training and education, and enhancing cultural awareness in order to uphold the rights and wellbeing of young people across the youth justice and child protection settings. We point towards a justice reinvestment approach.
• We outline three key reforms across Australia and internationally that are achieving positive outcomes in the youth justice sector.
• We urge the importance of a national approach to youth justice, and the need to raise the age of criminal responsibility and develop a national statutory child protection system as starting points.

Many of our recommendations come down to the need for youth justice and child protective systems to be child-centred, trauma-informed, and through a reform agenda focused on prevention and early intervention.