That children are our future is a cliché. It recognises the respect that children deserve. But the frequency with which the phrase is repeated suggests doubt about whether due respect is given practical effect. Some recent reports and documents confirm that doubt.
They include the submissions made to the Victorian Commission for Children and Young People on the use of isolation in the Victorian youth justice system and its final report, reports and court evidence about the treatment of children in Barwon prison, the preliminary report by the Northern Territory Royal Commission into Child Protection and Youth Detention Systems, and an article surveying research into the extent of physical, verbal and sexual abuse of children in Australia.
We need only to imagine ourselves as a child subject to the practices described in these accounts, to find them scarifying. The recurring images of children lying in the foetal position, a sign of acute traumatic stress, in solitary confinement, hooded or surrounded by guards say it all.
When we set them against the results of research into the biological and psychological development of children sketched in the Commission for Children report, detention, prolonged lockdowns, isolation and a culture of punishment are destructive and counterproductive.
The NT Royal Commission report echoes others in saying that decades of inquiries into the patterns and conditions of incarceration have produced few lasting results. Public concern is drawn to evidence of catastrophic brutality but ignores the underlying and persistent chronic dysfunction.
The custodial treatment of people, however tightly regulated to ensure respect for those detained, inevitably drifts back to a punitive regime. We should then ask why public outrage at cruelty to children is only episodic, and why the compass bearings of detention regimes, however set to the true north of remediation, always swing back to punishment.
Part of the answer may be found in the research estimates of the prevalence of abuse suffered by children. They differ widely, depending on the definition of what constitutes abuse, the composition of the group surveyed and the questions asked. Although the statistics are unreliable, on a conservative estimate they indicate that about one in 20 children have suffered emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
This would mean that only a small minority of the friends and schoolmates of most children would be affected, and that their plight would escape adult attention. Where a higher proportion of young people suffers, as the research indicates in the case of