By Gayaa Dhuwi (Proud Spirit) Australia

Across Australia, children as young as ten can be arrested, charged and detained under criminal law. This approach disregards current understanding of child development, trauma, healing and wellbeing, and continues to disproportionately affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. This position paper argues that raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility is a necessary shift toward justice systems that respect community-led ways of caring for children. Social and emotional wellbeing is defined not just by individual mental health, but by a child’s connection to family, community, culture, spirituality and Country. When these connections are disrupted, and when services respond with punishment instead of care, these children are pulled further from what keeps them grounded and well. Raising the age of criminal responsibility is one action that helps shift systems back toward connection, community and support. Despite a growing national consensus that the minimum age of criminal responsibility should be raised, implementation has been inconsistent and slow. The continued criminalization of 10- to 13-year-olds in most jurisdictions is in direct contradiction to the commitments made under the National Agreement on Closing the Gap.

Recommendations

1. All jurisdictions raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 14 years, without exception.

2. Children under 14 no longer be subject to detention or prosecution, and instead be offered culturally safe, community-led responses.

3. Governments invest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-led social and emotional wellbeing programs and initiatives for children.

4. All reforms have Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander governance mechanisms and are co-designed with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, including children, families and Elders.

5. A nationally consistent approach be implemented, to ensure fairness across jurisdictions.

6. Governments improve data transparency and collection, particularly relating to social and emotional wellbeing, disability and diversion outcomes.

7. All reforms reflect Australia’s human rights obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).

Turner, AUS: Gayaa Dhuwi (Proud Spirit) Australia, 2025. 9p

By Anna Piil Damm · Britt Østergaard Larsen · Helena Skyt Nielsen · Marianne Simonsen

Objectives The questions of when and how society should sanction juvenile offenders are subject to ongoing political and scientific debates. In this study, we use a policy reform that lowered the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 14 years for a 20-month period to investigate whether lower age limits of prosecution and conviction in the legal system affect juvenile crime. Methods In a quasi-experimental design, we compare monthly crime rates for cohorts of 14-year-olds before, during, and after the temporary reform while controlling for the downward trend in youth crime. We use population-wide administrative registers (N=162,959 individuals) to estimate individual-month panel data models as well as a range of robustness checks. Results We find no evidence that lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility reduced the probability of committing crime among 14-year-olds. In fact, we observe an important increase in reported crimes during the reform, most evident among 14-year-olds with prior offending records. We find no reform effects on crime rates among 13-year-olds and 15-year-olds and the reported findings of no general deterrent effects are consistent across different crime types and robust to model specifications. Conclusions The age limits in the legal systems vary greatly across different jurisdictions and political discussions of when juvenile offenders should enter the criminal justice system are enduring. The findings from this study highlight important policy implications as the “tough-on-crime” motivated reform did not have the intended crime-reducing effects.

Journal of Quantitative Criminology , April 2025, 27p.