Australia is incarcerating children as young as 10 years old — breaching international standards — and Indigenous children are the worst affected.
While young Aboriginal people make up only 6% of the population, 58% of young people in prison are Aboriginal.
Of the people aged 10 to 17 in detention or community-based supervision, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander youth incarceration is 15 times higher than any other race.
85% of Australians identified the rights of children as important to them personally, or as of importance for others. This reflects an onus on Australians to safeguard the fundamental rights of future generations.
In 2012 the Committee on the Rights of the Child(CRC) said that Australia’s juvenile justice system required substantial reform before it would meet international standards, noting, for example, that children in Australia are held criminally responsible from the age of 10, two years younger than the CRC’s internationally acceptable minimum.
LIVE works to lobby the Australian Government to cooperate with the states and territories and Indigenous organisations to reduce the number of Indigenous youth incarcerated Australia wide.
