Rights in detention

Late last week, I was at the joint national child protection and youth justice forums in Brisbane, and I was asked to sit on a panel to talk about youth detention centres – particularly around upholding children’s rights, and what that looks like in youth detention settings.

It’s a very interesting question, because I’m sure by now you would have realised I hold particular views about children’s rights and detention. I think it’s important from the outset to recognise that children’s rights and youth detention are concepts that don’t sit well together at all. In fact, the two often collide and cause great tension in young peoples’ view of their detention experience; societal perceptions and assumptions about young people in detention; and also the workforce’s capacity to play its part in the goals or aims of such places (aka rehabilitation).

If I were to say what happens most often in a rights-based conversation about youth detention, it’s that rights get weaponised. A seemingly never-ending debate between the rights of children, the rights of adults, the rights of the workforce, the rights of citizens and the rights of different groups of marginalised or vulnerable people in our communities. Don’t get me wrong – looking at and understanding how we can best uphold all of these rights is important and worth our consideration. But it’s easy to get embroiled in a battle between whose rights are more valid and real than the other. A tiresome diatribe that has driven the most logical minds to despair, caught in a game of slingshot between ‘David and Goliath’. And, in my experience, those who are most vulnerable to rights violations find it hardest to have their needs considered and met.

What I come back to, which is grounding and real, is the words of children and young people when we talk to them about their experiences. When reality does bite. When they talk to us about hoarding toast because mealtimes depend on staffing numbers, when seeing a doctor or a nurse is something that feels like a blessing rather than a basic request or the thinness of blanket is a topic of conversation with other young people who boast they have the best blanket in the unit.

It was hard to sit on a panel and have this conversation knowing all too well that only a few weeks earlier was the tragic passing of a second young person in detention in Western Australia. When children and young people are dying in detention, or because of detention, our society needs to own this. We need to look past punitive punishments and start talking about justice for children and young people. We need to look past achieving the bare minimum to meet children’s survival needs in detention…and instead look at things like how this young person can be the best version of themselves and participate in a healthy and fulsome way in our community. We must look to human identity, dignity, spirituality, connection and culture. We must look to trauma and mental health recovery.

So when I was posed the question – what does upholding rights in detention look like – I had a few reflective challenges for myself and the audience:

• Rights would be upheld when children and their trauma are treated with care and humanity.
• Rights would be upheld when children receive a rehabilitative model of care, as they are promised legislatively and through service model intent.
• Rights would be upheld if we believe kids when they tell us stuff, the good stuff and the bad stuff and the hard stuff to hear.
• Rights would be upheld when we recognise and put effort into the talents of the people that work day to day with children.
• Rights would be upheld when we stop trying to hide our poor conduct across all services we provide them.
• Rights would be upheld when civic society stop demonising children with trauma and extend the hand of compassion.
• Rights would be upheld if we could confidently say to ourselves that if it were my child who lost their way – whose heart hurt so bad that they ended up in a detention setting – that this place is where they need to be to rebuild and recover. That just like if they were sick and needed a hospital, we could say that we were confident, assured and thankful for the care and nurture they would receive, and that this place would support a rehabilitation journey.

Do you know anyone who could look at youth detention in Australia and say those things are true? Some days it seems like a near impossible task to imagine how we can steer a system that by its nature inhibits these very rights. But that is what we owe to them, and we can’t afford to stop trying.

As intense as that conversation was, I want to share with you something very important that happened during this panel presentation. A voice of determination, a voice of frustration and a voice of pain spoke loud and clear. A community member who was sick of listening to bureaucrats called everyone in that room out…those on the panel, those sitting at the conference tables, those sitting in conference seats.

They called out the never-ending promises of reform, the never-ending disconnection between conversations and commitments. They spoke of the very real despair children and families face why bureaucrats exchange pleasantries and polite handshakes.

They weren’t on the panel, but they were right to speak, they were right to call us all out… the promises of reform and the pleasantries in which we entangle ourselves in only serve to insult those who experience a detention sector that has seemingly struggled to hold up its end of the bargain… as a young person said to us in March this year:

“I believe they [kids] should be put into a rehabilitation detention centre.

Not like this, but more so to encourage them and show them like that they’re loved and they don’t need to do crime to fit in with a group of people.

But more so that, um, they’re like…they don’t need to put themselves out there to the wrong people to feel that they have a community.”  

When we talk about things that could change the youth justice system for the most impact, I urge us to stop “The Battle of the Rights”. Stop pitting children’s rights against adults’ rights. Stop pitting workers’ rights against children’s rights. This is not helpful. There is no hierarchy of rights, we own rights because we are human. If our systems create these oppositions, then it’s a sign that something is very wrong.

The change we need to see is not hidden in some secret or sacred scroll, I truly believe it is in plain sight and it is in the small stuff. It’s in the everyday interactions, the everyday conversations, the opportunities for kindness that we extend ourselves for. These are the things that make the most difference in people’s lives. Yet it seems we have a system that overwhelmingly forgets this is the fundamental part of doing the best job we can possibly do. I am determined to ask our sector to show up for those kids that so many have walked away from in the past. For us to model compassion, forgiveness and right way justice.