Petition to raise Australian age of criminal responsibility to 14 years old garners 200,000 signatures

A petition calling for Australia’s criminal age of responsibility to be raised from 10 to 14 years old has garnered more than 200,000 signatures before being submitted to the attorneys-general. In response to a December 2019 call by the then Council of Attorneys-General for submissions on whether to raise the criminal age, the Raise the Age Campaign put a petition together calling for Australia to embrace the UN recommendation that the age be set to at least 14 years old. Age of criminal responsibility refers to the minimum age at which a child can be charged, convicted and jailed for an offence. Federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus and Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney met with human rights, legal and First Nations-led organisations who handed over the petition on Tuesday. One of the organisations was Change the Record, whose co-chair Cheryl Axleby said the petition sent a clear message to all levels of government. “Today we delivered the clear message from hundreds of thousands of Australians who want to see children looked after in our communities, homes and schools — not sent to prison,” she said. “We thank the Attorney-General and Minister for Indigenous Australians for accepting our petition and for their commitment to #RaiseTheAge. “We are calling on every State and Territory government to heed the medical, legal and child development experts who have been crystal clear: no child under the age of 14 years old should be arrested, hauled before a court or convicted of a criminal offence.” The petition submission comes after, in December last year, the State Government committed to developing a proposal to raise the criminal age to 12 years old at an attorneys-general meeting. “State attorneys-general supported development of a proposal to increase the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 12, including with regard to any carve outs, timing and discussion of implementation requirements,” a communique from the meeting stated. In June last year, then WA Police Commissioner Chris Dawson said calls for the age to be raised to 14 were “not wise”. “I have no difficulty with the age being raised from 10 to 12, but I put that in with a big caveat — it must be subject to proper criminal justice interventions and diversions schemes meeting that need,” he said. “The fact is, children as young as 10, 11 and 12 do commit serious and violent crime. That’s a reality.” WA is facing growing calls to stop locking up children as young as 10, with a recent report laying bare the over-representation of Aboriginal youth in custody. More than 70 organisations have endorsed the report by Social Reinvestment WA which calls for the State to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14. Almost three-quarters of average daily juvenile detainees in WA last year were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, despite comprising just 5 per cent of the population, the report revealed. They were 21 times more likely than non-Indigenous children to be under youth justice supervision. Kimberley MLA Divina D’Anna said she supported the age being raised to 14, while Broome-based Labor Upper House Member Rosetta Sahanna said she supported the age being raised to 13 and would like to see more preventative programs. Children who receive child protection services are nine times more likely to encounter the youth justice system. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are 17 times more likely to be involved in child protection and youth justice. The UN Committee on Rights of the Child called on all countries to raise the criminal age to at least 14 years old — China, Russia, Germany and Spain are among the countries to do so.