While most of the country’s 11-year-olds spent yesterday meeting their new teachers and settling in for a new school year, one boy was familiarising himself with the inside of a cell – his new home for the foreseeable future.
Believed to be the youngest person ever charged with murder in Western Australia, the Indigenous boy (who cannot be named) appeared at Perth Children’s Court in the morning via video link from Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre – the state’s only children’s jail – with his father by his side.
It was around the same time his peers would have been enjoying recess.
He and three men are accused of murdering a 26-year-old man, who was stabbed to death in the early hours of January 27 outside the Esplanade train station.
As the boy fiddled with a piece of paper, his father displayed the tender touches only a parent can get away with, gently brushing a strand of hair from his son’s face and whispering to him behind his cupped hand, News Limited reports.
Described as small for his age, the 11-year-old was allegedly involved in the murder, described by police as a ‘running brawl’ through the streets of Perth at 3.30am the morning after Australia Day.
In court, he quietly responded to the judge’s questions with either “yep” or “yeah”.
Children’s Court president Denis Reynolds told the boy he would remain in custody if he was not granted bail at his bail hearing in a week’s time – a lifetime in the mind of a child.
Outside court, Noongar elder Ben Taylor said he was disappointed at the poverty and dysfunction that saw young Aboriginal people disproportionately jailed and dying young, News Limited reports.
“I’m very saddened by this, a young 11-year-old boy roaming the streets at three in the morning,” he said.
“Something has got to be done. They’re talking in Canberra about Closing the Gap but as a 76-year-old elder, I’ve seen my people suffer. And it’s still going on. I’m tired of… seeing my people die so young … I’m forever following funerals.”
Today, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull released the annual Closing the Gap report, which showed efforts to raise the life expectancy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had made no progress, the ABC reports.
“The life expectancy gap is still around 10 years, an unacceptably wide gap, and this target is not on track,” Mr Turnbull told Parliament.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said the Government should commit to a target for reducing Indigenous imprisonment rates.
Indigenous Australians make up only about three per cent of our national population, but 26 per cent of the country’s prison population.
The 11-year-old boy’s incarceration is only too fresh a reminder of those statistics, grossly skewed against him.
Top Comments
It's hard to close "the gap" when children are free to do whatever they want whenever they want.....its too late for the family to pretend they care now!
Poverty is not an excuse for murder, sorry. And it's all very well to describe this kid's dad exhibiting gentle gestures toward him - but this kid must have been modelled some awful behaviour to have behaved like that. And whose fault is it that this kid was wandering the streets at 3 am? Why are you excusing Indigenous parents from the most basic of parenting? And how about some empathy for the victim (also Aboriginal)?
Couldn't agree more. Lack of personal responsibility would have to be our biggest challenge going forward in our society - whether we're talking about binge drinking, domestic violence, aggression, crime, anti-social behavour. For every bad act, there's a do-gooder there ready and willing to make an excuse for the person behaviour, oh, he was drinking, she was on drugs, oh, they had a bad childhood, this person's poor, this person didn't have blah blah blah.
When it all boils down to it, we make far too many excuses for people's behaviour and don't make them accountable for their actions. If we have any hope of addressing the really serious aggression and violent issues in our society, then we need to make people accountable.