In the last 12 months, 368 youths were given a caution for assault.

Almost 600 were handed out for property damage, while more than 100 caught with weapons

or explosive off were also let off with a warning.

Yet many of the offenders escaping with a caution have already committed up to 10 crimes.

We have around about 570 odd young offenders who are in this category of regular offending,

high-risk offending and offending that's causing huge trauma.

That's a report from 2017.

The most recent indicators available from the Australian Bureau of Statistics

cover the period of 2022 and 2023.

According to those numbers, the overall youth crime rate,

that is, the instances of police taking action against people aged between 10 and 17,

dropped by 6% from the year before.

However, the situation varies from state to state.

New South Wales, Victoria, the Northern Territory and Tasmania have all seen increases

in youth crime, while Queensland and Western Australia have seen decreases.

There are recent standouts in certain communities, like

Western Australia's Fitzroy Crossing, which has seen a 43% reduction in crime in 2024 from the

previous year. The debate around the handling of youth offenders in Australia has raged for many

years. The boys and girls' homes that housed so-called

troubled kids around Australia produced some of the most violent offenders our country has ever

seen. And many of those places came in for criticism during the Royal Commission into

institutional responses to child sex abuse in 2017. Of course, statistics are, by their nature, impersonal.

...