From Schwartz Media on Daniel James. This is seven am. Alice Springs is making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Violent crimes committed by young people, including a recent shocking attack on a woman and a two month old baby, have left the town shaken. The baby has suffered a brain bleed and a fractured skull, and there are now big questions about how to keep the community safe, what justice should look like, and why crimes like this happen
at all. Today are under woman Catherine Wittele, CEO of SNAKE, the national body representing Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander children, on the underlying issues wreaking havoc on the streets of Alice Springs and what can be done to address the youth crime crisis. It's Wednesday, December eighteenth. Catherine, thanks so much for joining us. You're an arund A woman, you live in Alice Springs. What's it like living there at the moment?
Yeah?
Look, Ella Springs is my home and I'm not only Arunda, I'm in Bundarinya belonging to Ellis Springs.
I'm a to I think most people from.
Alice Springs right now would be having a bit of trouble finding the right word. Everyone's feeling distressed, but distressed doesn't quite capture the distress we feel about the recent assaults. There's an urgent cry for help tonight after the bashing of a two month old baby who's been airlifted to the Women's and Children's hospital with a skull fracture.
The infant was in her mother's arms at their home and Alice Springs when the pair was allegedly attacked by two teenage thugs with an iron bar.
It's the latest in a string of violent incidents in Alice Springs in recent weeks, including the alleged rape of a woman on Saturday night while she was sleeping.
It's unacceptable that we're seeing a baby flown to hospital with a broken skull. It's unacceptable that people were breaking to that home in the first place. It's unacceptable that a woman can be in her own home and be sexually assaulted, and that those events have happened. And for all of us that live in Alice Springs, we feel great distress for that. And I think all of us are thinking about those two cases and feeling it in our guts.
We feel it in our guts.
Can you just tell me what it feels like on the streets and in the homes of people there at the moment.
Ah, Look, there's no doubt that when you go to bed at night, you know, you check your doors a little closer, when you read the papers, when you get onto your social media, you're sort of bracing to see.
What might come next.
And when we think about how close we are to all of those events, you know, one of them happened two doors down from my daughter, and I know that in recent weeks, you know, she's been broken into twice. So this is really close to home for everyone who lives in Alice Springs. We all know someone who has been a victim of crime. But I think a lot of us also know that the current approaches aren't working.
They're not working.
And it was crime in the territory, particularly in Alice Springs, that the new NTCLP government campaigned around fixing and they won in the landslide in August. So what have they done since then to address it?
Oh?
Look, I think what we've heard is that it's hard to do. It's even hard to talk about.
To be perfectly honest, what we've heard is that things like spithoods are now back in legislation and spitthoods are used as instruments of torture.
A controversial restraint and in anty youth prison since a landmark royal commission that could come back into youth if the country Liberal party wins the next.
We have to be really honest about this. Our communities voted for this to happen. Our communities voted that children as young as ten in juvenile detention can be restrained and have spit hoods applied.
When those hoods are applied.
We know that something is going really really wrong with the behaviors of child in a detention center. We also know that when children behave like that in a detention setting, it's because they have no access to their parents or the people that love them. The chances are that they haven't had access to the supports and tools that they
might need. So we know in the Northern Territory, for example, the majority of children in the detention center have significant learning disabilities that were never identified and never responded to, and they'refore the supports that they need aren't there, and what you get is an extraordinary outburst of behaviors which
are really symptomatic of someone who is traumatized. The other thing we've seen, of course, because I mentioned the age of ten, was the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility. Pre Liberal Party has promised to lure the age of criminal responsibility from twelve to ten to four drunks into mandetry alcohol rehabilitation. Now increasing the age to fourteen was actually a recommendation of the Royal Commission into child detention in the Northern Territory. It said, raise the age, get
rid of the spit hooods. So what we've seen is that age of criminal responsibility going down again. The other thing that we've heard that communities are incredibly distressed about is in increasing the number of children that will be put into juvenile detention settings. Those children, particularly from Central Australia, will be moved up to the top end, so that's thousands of kilometers away from their family, so it means they will have no contact with their families while they
are going through extraordinary hardship. And when I talk about these things, I've got to be clear what we're not saying that there shouldn't be punishment for criminal behavior.
No one's saying that.
Our first response has to be the law and order response. There is no way around that. But the second thing is we can't keep doing what we've been doing. And what we're looking at has not happened overnight. It hasn't happened in the last election cycle. It didn't happen in the election cycle before that. It has been happening to us for decades and decades and decades. We keep coming up with the same responses and expecting a different outcome.
Coming up after the break. Why young people offend and what could be done that will actually make a difference, Catherine. The Police Commissioner Michael Murphy has said that the nature of offending is changing our springs. Why do you think we're seeing the level of violent crime at this point similarly rise on the streets of other springs.
We keep treating crime with the same response. Increasing criminalization increases crime. The younger you have contact with the criminal justice system as opposed to a diversion system, the more likely it is you are to be a repeat offender, the more likely you are that those offenses will increase in severity, and the more likely you are to have ongoing contact with the justice system for the rest of your life. And all those really terrible life outcomes that
are associated with that. You can read any criminal expert in the world. They will tell you that when children or young people or adults even are then returned to the same environment and you haven't worked on what was causing it, then you can expect a return in that behavior. And again, if you look at the event that resulted in the harm of a baby and that involved two young people, I'd put money on that at least one of them, if not both of them, have had significant
contact with the child protection system. And when we see these things, the immediate response is to punish parents, punish families. When again, if you start unpacking what those system failures are, the chances are that right at the beginning there was poverty. The other thing that I hear from mob on the ground and is that people have been going to look for help and saying, look, we're worried about this particular person, and they say they do things like report it to police.
Police respond to crime. They don't respond to a report that someone's walking around. That's not their job. They respond to crime. What we know again is nationally and internationally, the evidence shows if you have a diversionary response to this. In actual fact, rather than punishing a crime that's already happened, the criminal behavior or offending behaviors disappears in about seventy five some places, we'll talk about eighty five percent success rates.
Actual fact, when you're talking about reducing crime, that is the model of practice that has the most impact.
Can you tell me more about that, like what would a diversionary program look like and what sort of diversionary programs are effective in that part of the world.
If you're truly doing diversion right, it means that every child has their own plan. So you've picked up that maybe there's a child at risk, and you now have to work out, well, what's going on in this child's life? And again, poverty is going to be there, almost without fail, poverty is going to be there. Does this child have somewhere to sleep? Has this child? Does this child need
some developmental screening? How do we ensure that we are giving that child the support they need to handle external stimuli.
I heard a story the other day.
Actually, it's quite an extraordinary story, and it's a bit of work done by the NPY Women's Counsel and Alice Springs and they've gone out to Immunpa community and they've said to the children out there, because you know, there's a lot of people that have a lot of things to say about our children in Central Australia, but not a lot of room for their voices to be heard. And they asked them, if you could have superheroes, what would they look like. And the first thing they said
was May, which means food. So the first superhero these children identified was food. The second superhero was in Ma, So what is my Inma means dance song and they said, well, what do you need in MAA oh? Because inma makes us feel happy and strong. And again, if you apply what inma and song mean in a therapeutic model, they are actually tools of healing, which this makes sense. The third thing they identified was love. We need the love of our families. We feel safe when we were in
our families. And the fourth one was jukopa, So that's a law, law that tells you how to behave how you might want to understand your environment, what you do in an environment when you feel fearful, where you go to for support. And then they said to them listen, you might have heard about the other superheroes. Haven't you like Superman and Spiderman? And oh, we know them, And they said, would you like a superhero like that? And
so they started thinking about that as a superhero. And one of the superheroes they came up with in that frame was Regina.
She's a cobweb girl.
And that particular superhero has the powers to throw her net into Alice Springs to catch the naughty kids. And again this is the language of children, to catch the naughty kids in that net and then very quickly bring them back home to the families that love them with those other superheroes that they identified can care for them. In that example, those children in the middle of the who probably have English as a fourth or fifth language,
identified a hierarchy of needs. The other way that the hierarchy of needs is described is you can see it in the UN Convention.
On the Rights of the Child.
Those children understput inherently what they needed to be successful in life and the tools that were required in order to respond to the world around them. Those are sorts of things that when we're talking about a juvenile diversion tactic, we need to be addressing and we need to be putting that child's voice front and center in that so we actually understand what's going on.
So, Catherine, Northern Territorians no better than anyone else that the federal government can have a role to play in that part of the world. What role should the Federal government be playing in this response, if anything at all.
Oh, the truth of it is that what we're looking at Nalla Springs is a system failure from all levels of government. And there are three levels of government at play in the Northern Territory. So the federal government they hold the big leavers, that's where the bulk of the money comes from. So the federal government really does need
to look at the need in the Northern Territory. A lot of the work I work on relates to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, and one of the fundamental calls in that is about shared decision making, talking to your community about what it is they might actually need, what is actually missing in your community. There's no point in coming up with a program that was developed in Sydney and applying it in the Bush. It's making sure that your places, like the Northern Territory are getting the
funding that they need. Needs based funding for things like domestic violence. That is an extraordinary driver of offending behaviors because it drives.
Children out of the home. They don't feel safe in their home.
It means looking at being innovative and actually saying, well, what we're doing is failing. Let's listen more to community voices and genuinely investing in community design to say, right now, what is it that you need, what is it that's happening, and how do we stop this happening.
Catherine, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
A few months ago I traveled to Alice Springs to take an in depth look at the crisis there. What I found was that youth crime is a symptom of a series of interventions big and small, into the lives of Aboriginal people. To hear my three part report, search this is Alice Springs wherever you listen to podcasts. Also in the news today, a crackdown on protester writes and a plan to bolster social cohesion will be part of the Victorian government's response to the suspected terror attack on
the Addas Israel Synagogue. In a press conference, Victorian Premiatre Cinta Allen said she has had enough of a protests that have caused disruption in the state, and may leed to outlaw protest in the vicinity of places of worship. New South Wales is planning similar changes following a rally outside the Great Synagogue earlier this month. And North Korean troops sent to support Russia and their war against Ukraine
have been killed during combat. North Korea sent more than ten thousand troops to the region, with about thirty now killed in the battle in Russia's Cursed Border region, according to the Ukraine's military intelligence agency. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. We'll be back with you tomorrow with an on the ground report from Damascus in Syria.