Transcript — Youth Justice: Prevention better than cure
Kathleen Payne:
Hello and welcome to a special mini series on youth justice we're running within the Sentencing Matters podcast.
Voiceover (music): Sentencing matters - a podcast that informs, engages and advises on sentencing issues in Queensland.
I'm Kathleen Payne, a member of the Queensland Sentencing Advisory Council. The Council's role is to inform, engage and advise on sentencing matters in Queensland. One way we do this is through our sentencing seminar series.
Our youth justice seminar looked at the journey of a fictitious young person called Jake who finds himself involved in the criminal justice system. He has teenage parents where drugs, alcohol and violence are prevalent. His dad is Aboriginal, and the family live in a regional centre of Queensland. Jake's parents split when he is seven, and when his stepdad gets abusive, child safety gets involved. Jake ends up in out-of-home care. By the time Jake's 10, he's struggling at school and has a reputation as a difficult kid. While truanting one day, he's caught for shoplifting. This is his first interaction with police.
Step forward to 14 and Jake's only marginally involved with school and is now in a residential care facility. Jake's in and out of trouble with the police until he is charged with trespassing, possession of a dangerous drug, endangering property by fire and wilful damage. At 18 years of age his parents are long gone. Jake hasn't finished school, he's out of the youth justice system, and he has a reasonable juvenile criminal history.
In our youth justice seminar, we had a panel of guest speakers discussing Jake's life. One of the panel members, Detective Superintendent Cheryl Scanlon, is joining me for this edition of Sentencing Matters to further discuss Jake's life course from a policing perspective. Cheryl has a distinguished career and has served with the Queensland Police Service for more than 30 years. Cheryl was, until recently, the Operations Commander for the Child Safety and Sexual Crime Group in the Queensland Police Service. She is now the Chief Superintendent for the Crime and Corruption Commission in Queensland.
Hello, Cheryl. Good to see you, and thanks for joining me on Sentencing Matters podcast.
Cheryl Scanlon:
Thanks, Kathleen, and great to be involved with the process of the podcast series and the panel and the story around Jake's life.
Kathleen Payne:
Thanks, Cheryl. We're really grateful that you've agreed to come and speak with us today. Cheryl, I understand for a large part of your career you've been involved in dealing with young people such as Jake from both a juvenile crime perspective, but also children who fall victim to crime in areas such as child abuse. I'd like to reflect on your career for a moment. Could you tell us a little bit about how you became interested in working for the police?
Cheryl Scanlon:
I joined the police at 19, so I was a young and bright-eyed country girl when I came to the police service. And if I look back on 30-odd years, first of all I don't know where it's actually gone, but from a very early part of my career I was interested in working with young people.
Shortly after the end of my second year in the late 1980s, I finished up working in the Juvenile Aid Bureau, as it was known back then. They're known as Child Protection and Investigation Units now around Queensland. So I started out a plain clothes career in what was then the Woodridge Juvenile Aid Bureau in the '80s, and throughout the 30-odd years I've been in and out of various positions all the way through the ranks. But most of my career I've had jobs that actually touched on areas of, or heavily involved in juvenile crime or child protection. It's been one of the things that have been very stressful, but there've also been very enjoyable parts of my career.
And so having been an officer in charge of a child protection unit into the early 2000s for a number of years, a Detective Inspector managing CIB and CPIUs, then onto regional crime coordinator work, and then here as Child Safety Director in Brisbane, I guess you could say I've probably had one of the more extended careers in the organisation working in juvenile crime and child protection.
Kathleen Payne:
And obviously, over that time, Cheryl, it's a vast career that's spanned, as you say, from plain clothes officer in Woodridge all the way to commissioner. You would've seen over that range of time, even, a massive development in technology that's impacted on crime and impacted on juveniles within the system. Is there any particular challenges that you've seen arise that weren't around when you first started your policing career to do with criminal justice relating to children?
Cheryl Scanlon:
There's probably two things that are dramatically different. I mean, I was a child of the '60s, and when you look at the development of children these days and the way society has changed, more dramatically so, I think two of the most critical issues in the work that has contact with the police department, particularly to do with young people, is, first of all, about the social complex environment that children live in these days and that's very different to the lifestyle of the '60s and the '70s and the '80s.
The other thing amongst that is social media and the exposure that young people have to media and social media. It simply wasn't the case when I was a kid growing up that we had the internet, the access to other things that children have from a very young age at the end of a device these days, so I guess, in that sense, society has changed considerably over those decades.
Kathleen Payne:
And would you say, Cheryl, that world is any safer or less safe today as opposed to in the '60s, or is it just that with the development of social technologies, texting, children having access to those devices, that there's additional challenges that have arisen but safety may not have been impacted?
Cheryl Scanlon:
Some of the concerns you might have had about safety of a child decades ago is actually quite different now. You don't have to leave your house to have someone target your child, whether that be bullying or potentially a child being a victim of some sort of online sexual abuse. That can come right inside the door of your home simply through a device. We moved away from, while stranger danger and those things were very widely spread messages, and it does happen still from time to time. Sometimes the risk is closer to you, the risk is people you know or people who can access your child.
Similarly, children who are involved in juvenile crime, or young people who fall into offending, it's much more easily accessed, I guess. There's lots of things you see on social media about what's acceptable, and some of the violence and the level of violence that you see in what children are exposed to these days is vastly different. So there's lots of factors. It's a much more complex world we live in, hence, as a parent, need to be in tune with that and sometimes it can be a real challenge for parents to protect their children. You can't wrap them in cotton wool. They have to get out and experience the real world.
So yeah, I think it's challenging on a whole range of fronts these days compared to probably a rather simple existence that we had decades ago.
Kathleen Payne:
Because one of the things, Cheryl, I think that you've touched on that parents obviously have a great concern over these days, is whether their child is involved in sexting or not. I wonder, for our listeners, could you tell us really what is sexting, and then what the police approach to that is? Because something that can, as you say, creep into a house inadvertently, it can be going on under a parent's nose. Obviously if it's discovered it can have catastrophic consequences for a lot of people involved. Could you tell us about that?
Cheryl Scanlon:
Sexting relates to the act of taking sexually explicit images or videos and distributing that material to friends or to other people via mobile telephone or a communications method.
In most circumstances, sexting between adults consenting is not a criminal offence. Children sometimes can be committing offences if they're involved in that and they're sending it to another child, or if they're encouraging another child to participate in that because it is an offence to send child exploitation material via a device.
One of the things that we've done in the Queensland Police Service, certainly in my time as Child Safety Director, is that we have looked at reforming our policy around that because it is something we do see between consenting young people, and as opposed to only having one way to resolve that as in entering the juvenile justice system or dealing with a child under the Juvenile Justice Act. We've broadened that policy to allow for an alternate approach which is educating young people where they're doing the practise of sending explicit images of children or themselves as a child to another child.
That's really about keeping pace and policy changing to keep pace with things that are happening in the community. That's not to say that we won't conduct a criminal investigation where we have someone who is menacing or harassing another child or coercing a child to provide a sexual image. There's still an offence committed. So it's about broadening that to allow police to assess it on a case-by-case basis, and where there is an occasion where we might be able to offer some educative strategies, that may be a better resolution.
So it's really just widening that so that we can take a different approach. Not all parents agree with that, but, again, it's a case-by-case basis where we will be speaking to those young people and to their parents about what's occurred and then examining that. So we might deal with that from an educative point of view, but if the same person who was involved in that continued that behaviour and continued to send images to other children, that might then fall into whether the child is menacing or harassing others by doing that. It's just one of the tools in the kit for us to be able to manage those types of matters when someone complains to the police about that.
Kathleen Payne:
So in the case of Jake, for example, if we scroll back a couple of years, he's in a residential care facility, say, and he's 16, there's a whole group of 16-year-olds in that residential care facility with him, Cheryl. They're sexting to each other because they think it's fun and funny. Can you talk us through what happens? I think in those residential care facilities there's an adult present who might report it to the police. Assuming that's been done, what actions do the police take?
Cheryl Scanlon:
Well, that could be, again, a scenario where if they are young people that are engaged in that practise, they would have to be examined on a case-by-case basis if they are consenting and willingly participating. It may be a case where we might consider education as opposed to taking action.
Having said that, if someone was distressed by that, if there's a child that's been coerced in that and not a willing participant – that might alter the way we deal with it. So we would still apply the provisions of the Youth Justice Act, but, at the end of investigating it, it could be that we provide an educative strategy about not doing that because you're committing an offence by sending those images.
Kathleen Payne:
But if Jake doesn't heed the warning, he could find himself before the courts.
Cheryl Scanlon:
Could do, if that persisted and those indecent images were sent of genitalia to others, we need to try sometimes to work a little bit differently with young people in explaining that. Look, very real scenario when young people get together. Peer group pressure plays a part in some of that as well.
Kathleen Payne:
Speaking, Cheryl, of residential care facilities, I understand you've done some valuable work in that space also to reduce call-outs by the police to those facilities to manage and deal with matters that arise. I wonder if you wouldn't mind telling us first about residential care facilities, what they are and how children end up in those facilities, and then what work's being done to reduce the call-out rate.
Cheryl Scanlon:
Residential care facilities are dotted around many areas across Queensland where young people who end up in the care of the Department of Child Safety can end up co-located and living in housing that is not with their parent or their formal guardian. So residential care facilities are often places where young people that are having a range of issues could be located together.
We see large numbers of call-outs for the police to those residential facilities because sometimes they could be running away, there could be disruptive behaviour in the house, there could be assaults, there could be other things occurring there. So one of the things that we've worked on is particularly around our missing persons area because young people, when they're placed in resi care, as you'll often hear it called, if it's not working for them and it's very challenging, they will take to flight at times and be running away, or being in a position where perhaps they want to return home when in fact they can't. So that becomes quite challenging because then residential care facilities have to examine whether they report the child missing to the police. Then this cycle of the missing child reported missing comes back to residential care, missing again the next week. It's one of the real challenges for us.
There's been some good collaboration between Department of Child Safety and police as a consequence of the Tiahleigh Palmer matters and QFCC report of 29 recommendations around children missing from out-of-home care, and a lot of that work has been around, again, about strong policy development about what to do, when to report a child missing. Many of the call-outs relate to matters that probably aren't police matters at all. They actually need to be resolved in the residential arrangements rather than calling the police. That's not to say we won't deal with a missing person report or other issues, but historically that creates work for police. And then what you have is police called into a situation, young people interacting with the police when in fact they don't need to.
So it comes down to the management of that residential care facility about having suitably qualified youth workers and people to manage those residential care facilities, which is challenging to attract staff and to maintain those things for other organisations, but it does have a knock-on effect for the police, because whilst we're called to those minor matters, there can be something, a serious road crash or a serious domestic violence matter, when the call is for service in busy areas.
Kathleen Payne:
Cheryl, you've had such an interesting career. I want to ask you a question. Midway through your career, if you had a magic wand and you could wave it over criminal justice in relation to youth areas, would there be one particular thing that you would like to see improved or changed in that space?
Cheryl Scanlon:
Midway through career? I'm on the downhill run into the fourth decade. But, can I say, probably the thing that is the most critical piece of trying to work towards where this goes into the future with children who are offending is that prevention is always better than cure. I've never seen a child, in my experience, or a young person, who comes to our notice, they don't become a recidivist overnight. Often there is things way back from when they were very small or as a young child, and the example given during this panel about the scenario of Jake is indicative of those kinds of things that you see. Children don't become bad overnight, is my personal experience of it over many, many years, is that prevention and guiding children very young is critical .
Getting kids into school, back into education. This young fellow in the scenario, exactly the sorts of things you see. Difficult history, then unable to settle in school, unable to maintain routine, mixing with a different cohort of young people then starting to offend. That is the greatest challenge is those very early formative years are critical because by the time you get to the eights to tens in amongst that, these things are usually starting to run off the rails.
Kathleen Payne:
When they're eight to ten years old.
Cheryl Scanlon:
And sometimes even younger. So one of the really key pieces, and it comes down to being able to provide a child with all the necessities of life that they need, and that's not always possible. That's why we end up with children in care, that's why we see families break down, that's why organisations like the Department of Child Safety and the Department of Communities exist in many respects.
But it's a critical piece that prevention piece early on and about how you guide that. There will always be young people who will end up in the juvenile justice system, there will always be young people who are unable to exit that because they will end up offending into adulthood. That's a fact of life, unfortunately, is that they will then go on to become adult offenders. But there is real prospects for young people who even early on when they start to offend, if you can divert those young people, and often the police department and police officers for many, many years have cautioned thousands of young people who we never see again. They come into the system, they might be involved in shoplifting, or some wilful damage, or something at that level, but mostly you'll find there is stability at home.
Kathleen Payne:
And support.
Cheryl Scanlon:
To be able to guide and support that is that here's a learning, they've made a mistake, they’ve committed an offence. We deal with that. So that supportive environment to put a child back on track is important.
So when you see children who have a particularly difficult, challenging run-in like Jake, for a whole range of reasons, the odds are against them and it's really very difficult without that support, that nurturing, that peace around them that guides and steers that out to keep them on track. So, parenting’s critical...
Kathleen Payne:
It is, isn't it?
Cheryl Scanlon:
...is my message. And whether that be with their own family or with another family and the stability. And children need to understand — we've all been kids —the important thing is there are consequences for your actions. If you don’t learn what those consequences – if there are no consequences, that opens the way for, I suppose, a different attitude to where it will take them during adulthood, because if there are no consequences, you might not see a behaviour change that will prevent offending.
Kathleen Payne:
But I guess that's the beauty of that sexting policy or approach that the police take is there is a consequence. You'll be educated by the police, the matter's investigated, but it doesn't necessarily result in a juvenile whose first contact is over something relatively minor that is a bit inadvertent, they don't realise what they're doing. They're educated and they're diverted away from the system as opposed to one mistake and you're in the system, and that is a life changer.
Cheryl Scanlon:
The youth justice provisions, the Youth Justice Act provisions provides for that — it always has done —we've had the options since that act was around and even before that, before we had legislation. I was a police officer in a time where there was no Youth Justice Act, and that's where cautioning came from. That actually came from the police department making the decision that we would caution young people...
So the sexting policy is not a new concept. We've had it for decades. But it's about the approach to that. So it's a very difficult complex piece of work for a child that when the child comes to the notice of police at that stage and you see a young person like Jake, there are a lot of complexities even before we have an option to engage with that child that make the path laid out a difficult one.
Kathleen Payne:
Yeah, particularly in Jake's situation, I think, where the parents aren't in a position to provide the guidance that would be ideal at that point. It does seem to me an uphill battle for someone in that position, but does really emphasise the need for, even if it's not the parents, some kind of adult support at that point, like you say, that's consistent and points him in the right direction so that he heeds the warning that he might be lucky enough to get.
Cheryl Scanlon:
And peer group pressure and young people getting engaged with the wrong crowd or other young people who are offending, that's a very difficult thing to break for a young person who gets involved with the wrong crowd. For a parent, that's tough work as well. And there are occasions where you will see a child who has had education, who's had everything provided and a stable home life, but they will meet up and become involved with other young people who can be very persuasive and very engaging, and then you can have a scenario where a child will, or a young person, will get involved with other young people who are probably not what their parents might choose, but before you know it, they're off down the track and they can be offending as well.
So it's not exclusive to children with a background like Jake. It can happen across all areas. But as I said, in my experience, you don't see recidivist property offenders or recidivist criminal behaviour. You don't see that develop overnight. There are usually other surrounding factors that lead to significant offending behaviour.
Kathleen Payne:
Cheryl, one matter that's been in the press somewhat lately is how the community responds to juvenile crime, particularly when the community has a sense that young people are offending and it's causing members of the community some angst. On the other hand, of course, members of the community have expectations about the community in which they live and how law enforcement officers manage that to secure a safe environment for all. I wonder, Cheryl, could you tell us about how police manage those expectations?
Cheryl Scanlon:
It's a very difficult position for the police to be in often because our job is to keep the community safe. Victims of crime are very much at the forefront of how we do our business.
Some of the distress caused in the community is where you have recidivist juvenile offenders who are involved in prolific property crime. So if you're a mum and dad with a young family, and out there doing the best you can to raise your family, and your home is being broken into or your car's being stolen, that's very distressing. That is the lifeblood of mums and dads in the community when those sorts of things occur and it's a damaging impact for them. So if there are recidivist juveniles, police will take action. We need to. That's our job.
So as much as we are in a position where we need to also try and do the best for a young person who comes to our notice, and there are plenty of opportunities for us to work with young people very early on and throughout their contact with us, whether it be a cautioning process, or youth justice, or whether it gets to the point where we have to place a child before the court, we have a responsibility to keep the community safe, and the community expect that. Police do need to examine those things in terms of ensuring that the public have confidence in us to do our job as well.
So whilst there's an opportunity to work with young people in the juvenile justice system, we also have to balance that against there are victims of crime in the community and that offences are being committed, and our job is law and order. So yes, very relevant question at the height of some of the issues that we're seeing with some of the areas where we get hot-spotting in juvenile crime.
Kathleen Payne:
Well, thank you, Cheryl, for your insights into the role of police and young people and young offenders, and particularly in relation to Jake's circumstances and the challenges he faces. I really do appreciate your time speaking with us this morning.
Cheryl Scanlon:
No, thank you. It's been an informative series for me and certainly the panel was a great opportunity and a unique process to examine the story of a young person.
Kathleen Payne:
I hope you enjoyed this edition of Sentencing Matters, part of our mini series on youth justice. To hear other editions in this series or to view the recording of our sentencing seminar on youth justice, head to our website: sentencingcouncil.qld.gov.au.