A recent survey suggested 87 per cent of New Zealanders believe youth crime has reached “crisis point”.
Ram raids, robberies, car thefts, high-speed joyriding and brazen shoplifting incidents have dominated the headlines, sparking outrage and safety fears. But the stats don’t match the perception and in fact, the number of children and youths aged 16 or under coming before the courts has halved over the past decade.
At any rate, action is needed to curb youth offending - but what? By whom? And how long will it take?
Senior journalist Anna Leask travelled to Australia - which has the same youth crime issues on a bigger scale - to look at how everyday people are taking the issue into their own hands and making a real difference.
Read her full report below.
The boy is barely a teenager but he’s been on the police radar for several years already.
They’ve managed to get him involved in a community youth group - idle hands are the devil’s plaything, and exceptionally so with young offenders and rascals.
He’s doing well. They’re setting him up with life skills, everyday essentials, a safe place.
His offending has tapered, but then he steals a phone from the community centre.
Incredulous but calm, the youth workers sit him down for a chat.
“Mate, we gave you a phone, a sim card, made sure you had credit - what on earth made you take this one?”
The youth hangs his head, takes a beat.
“My phone doesn’t have a torch,” he says sheepishly.
“They’ve cut the power at home again, mum hasn’t got any money to pay the bill ... I had to do my homework and that phone had a torch...”
Stealing is a crime. The kid is an offender.
Like so many others - there is rhyme and reason to his choices. He is just trying to survive. He wants to be better but the adults in his life are failing him. He doesn’t want to live in a dark, cold house.
But he doesn’t get a say in that. He’s just a child. So he does what he can to get by.
To most people, kids like him are the face of the youth crime epidemic - thieves with no care or respect who are deviant, reckless, dangerous and simply not as good as other kids.
While the top cohort of youth offenders certainly need to feel the full force of the law, the majority are just kids with no idea what they are doing. No hope, no worth, no idea.
They are offenders, but they are increasingly lost, neglected, abused, unstable, unskilled children just surviving each day the only way they know how - the only way they have been taught and shown.
Everyone is calling for action, sick of the ram raids, car thefts, high-speed joyriding - the damage this anti-social behaviour causes to the community.
Blame is apportioned to the police, the Government and its agencies, schools, parents, drugs, vaping, social media, video games and former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern herself.
The hard truth is - there is no immediate fix to this. There is no silver bullet.
The offenders cannot change because the rest of society demands it.
There is no one law change, punishment, bootcamp, cash injection that can “cure” youth offending.
But there is a way forward, and it’s going to take every single one of us to make it happen.
Youth offending in New Zealand - what we know
For the past year, reports of brazen violent and anti-social offending by young people have been in the news almost daily.
Authorities acknowledge there has been a spike in crime, but there is ongoing debate over exactly what is causing it and whether it is just a blip - attributable to post-Covid complications - or part of a longer-term trend.
On a standard Tuesday in the Youth Court at Christchurch, 32 youths appeared before a judge.
They were facing a raft of charges from minor shoplifting to brutal physical and sexual assaults.
Stats provided to the Herald last month confirm that 80 per cent of ram raids involve young people and that they make up 16 per cent of offenders held to account for retail crime.
Stats also reveal:
- An estimated one in 20 New Zealand children are known to police for offending before reaching 14 years of age.
- Boys are twice as likely as girls to offend as children.
- Māori children are approximately three times more likely than non-Māori to become known to police as an offender by age 14.
Extensive research shows that early identification and intervention are vital to steer the children onto a more positive path.
And intervention is exactly what the new Government has promised.
National’s youth crime policy outlines a “crackdown” on youth crime - by “creating more tools to respond to the most serious and persistent young offenders”.
Those tools include military-style academies with a “rehabilitative and trauma-informed care approach” to help the top cohort of young offenders “turn their lives around and reduce their risk of reoffending”.
The first pilot is scheduled to be operational by mid-2024.
Legislative changes are also being “worked through” that will enable “stronger consequences” for young offenders, including a new Young Serious Offender (YSO) category, “targeting the ringleaders of crimes”.
The YSO applies to offenders aged 10 to 17 who have committed a serious offence - ram raids, aggravated burglary, serious assault - at least twice.
Consequences include being sent to a military academy, electronic monitoring, or being subject to an intensive supervision order in their community.
Supervision orders mean consequences for actions while the young offenders remain connected to their families and support networks.
The Government has promised funding to “empower community groups to break the cycle of offending” by providing funding.
Police will also be given greater powers to “tackle” gangs, believed to be driving much of the current youth offending with youths “stealing to order and committing ram-raids as a form of gang initiation”.
Naturally, it will be some time before we see what if any difference these changes make.
But the merits of ground-level, community initiatives run by everyday people directly targeting the most high-risk and at-risk youth offenders is already patently clear in Australia.
Little people with big people problems
Joh Leader gave up her full-time job as a paediatric speech pathologist in New South Wales to throw all of her energy at “finding community solutions for kids instead of jail terms”.
She was sick of seeing kids miss out, struggle and end up on the wrong path and she wanted to do more.
Kids were missing important appointments because their parents could not afford to travel, they could not read or understand information sent to them, weren’t present or, because of drugs of health issues, weren’t able to engage.
Leader was increasingly worried about the situation and one day had a revelation that would change her life.
“I knew we had to take the services to the people,” she said.
Leader launched a programme to help kids in kindergarten and year one (four and five-year-olds) who weren’t meeting literacy levels.
A number of specialists including speech and occupational therapists went to see the kids at school, court, at the methadone clinic if that’s where they were with their parents.
“Wherever it was we would just take it to the kids and make sure their ears were clear, they were eating good food, having dental check-ups,” said Leader.
“We got 93 per cent of those kids within normal limits in six months, and they were doing it pretty tough. After 12 months of doing that, we thought, ‘If we can do that 40 kids, why can’t we do that with way more kids?’”
In 2011 LeaderLife was born, an organisation with a ”very simple mission of helping kids live their best life”.
Initially funded by the state, LeaderLife now operates mostly from grants and donations which they pour into all of the services their youngsters need from physical and mental health to legal and everything in between.
They now operate from a suburban house - a combination HQ and drop-in hub, where their “little people” can come for whatever they need - advice, mentoring, food or just a chat and a hug.
They host programmes on-site starting with helping the 5-12 age group develop social and emotional intelligence, awareness and confidence; another for young males aged 13-18 who are at risk of disengaging from education and have had emerging contact with the criminal justice system; one that offers a “safe space” to foster and facilitate connection to services and support.
And recently they invested in a lime farm, giving the older kids a place to learn skills, work and give back to Dubbo.
“Sometimes a cup of tea and a yarn is the best support,” said Leader.
“If people really, really knew what these kids are going through - I’m talking serious domestic violence, neglect, total disconnect from big people helping them to emotionally coach through the really ugly, hard feelings; no food, poverty … I think if they actually understood that, there would be a different perception of why kids do what they do”
Leader said when she decided to take her work to the community she had no idea how or where to start.
She called on Bernie Shakeshaft, who runs the hugely successful BackTrack youth programme in Armidale, NSW and his advice was short and firm.
“You need to do something - think big, start small, start quickly.”
“Around that time there were 12 young people in Dubbo doing 90 per cent of juvenile crime - they were literally turning the town upside down… so then it was getting all the right people around the table with the idea of trying to work out ways to keep them out of juvenile detention,” said Leader.
No child or teen is forced to be at LeaderLife, they all want to be there. And they keep coming back, even when they’re in trouble when their lives are upside down. Often they are the first call when a teen has been arrested.
How do Leader and her team do it?
“One of our biggest underlying values is ‘draw don’t chase’. It’s like wild horses running in the bush, you don’t keep running after them,” she said.
“And having good adult mentors, role models, healthy relationships.”
LeaderLife - like all BackTrack’s network - works on a model of care called the Circle of Courage, which Leader says is “one of the most researched models in this whole world around how to engage disengaged kids”.
“It encompasses four things - think of a pizza in four slices; to have any harmonious group relationship, family - whatever it is - you must get four things right,” explained Leader.
“They must have a sense of belonging - kids don’t go where they’re not wanted. They must be generous, they must be able to give back to the community and other people but also be able to receive that generosity and they must have independence - we call that ‘own your own s**t’ - having autonomy over your decision-making. And you must be learning new skills.
“You get those four things right and everything will be in beautiful balance, usually.”
Programme co-ordinator Mel Singh says turning up is crucial.
“When you make a commitment to a young person, it’s a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour-a-day commitment. You can’t be not available.
“I think it’s easy for kids to be labelled as bad. Here, we don’t believe any child’s bad, we believe that they make bad choices. And at the end of the day, the relationships will steer them back on track. The power of the relationship is huge.”
Singh is often asked to come to the police station or support youths to court – both by them and their parents. She never judges but does work with them to make them see what they have done and why.
The conversations are regularly heartbreaking. She recalls one youth who was angry he hadn’t been remanded in custody after a court appearance.
Singh asked him what was so bad about his life on the outside that he would prefer to be locked up.
His response? “Everything”.
“It can be confronting, it can be worrying. It can also be a privilege in a way that a young person trusts you enough to be there in their darkest time,” Singh said.
Success is not measured by Leader and her team by complete life turnarounds, a complete stop to offending.
It’s seeing youngsters make better choices and develop.
“They could make a tiny baby step forward, then they could make a huge, backwards leap. So, it’s just inch-by-inch,” Singh said.
She and Leader appreciated juvenile detention was necessary for extreme or dangerous offending.
But they said it simply did not work for most kids because when they got out, nothing in their outside world had changed.
“It’s like putting a kid back in the dirty bath,” Singh said.
“If a child is punished and put in jail where they’re actually safe, there’s routine, they’ve got consistent, somewhat caring people, there’s rules... and when they come back out and we keep putting them back into the same situation, we’re going to get the same thing.
“Kids that get locked up are longing for a sense of belonging.... they are lost ... don’t know who they are, where they fit in society.”
Leader said the biggest mistake authorities were making was “thinking we know what kids need”.
“It’s got to come from young people and their families around what they want. They have to have autonomy and sovereignty over where they’re heading,” she said.
Many kids that come to LeaderLife have no concept of a “normal” life. Some have never seen any adult in their life with a job; some only see their parents in prison; some have grown up where stealing to survive is just how the world works.
“When you know better, you can do better,” said Leader.
“And I think we’re so good at rewarding puppies and dogs when they’re doing the right thing with the cuddles – but I don’t know if we’re particularly good at doing that as a society for children. Because you’re always picking up on the s**t not often do you say, ‘Oh my God, you’re being such a beautiful person, I love being in your company right now’.”
“Uncle Frank” Doolan is a big part of the LeaderLife way too. He’s a Willae Wiradjuri man of the Tubbogah people and has been living in Dubbo since the 1980s.
He’s worked in the community for decades and Leader says he has “an incredible knowledge and wisdom around what works best for kids”.
His approach is simple: kids just need somebody to listen.
“The kids are out of control ... social media and the competitive nature of kids is part of the causation, but it’s not the only reason kids are doing what they are doing ... it has got a lot to do with trauma and inter-generational trauma,” he said.
“If you rearrange the letters in the word ‘listen’ it spells ‘silent’, and I’ve learnt over time that is often is the best way.
“And the reality of the world at the moment is... I see people buying pet food and I know they don’t have any pets, that’s the price of living right now. So if we’re all under pressure - how much pressure are the kids under?”
Doolan said before LeaderLife there were a good 35-50 incidents a day in Dubbo involving youths. His work then felt like “a finger in the dyke”.
He said Leader introduced a “circuit breaker” into the community - a new way of seeing and doing things.
“Punishment on top of punishment, it’s no good ... All it means is the most traumatised kids from the most traumatised place provide cannon fodder for prisons,” he said.
“There is a huge disconnect between young people and us. We’ve created an environment where they feel it’s us and them - we fail to engage them and even if we do it’s to get them to do what we want them to do. What Joh and Mel do here... there’s a bit of light at the end of the tunnel here - rather than the light from an oncoming locomotive.”
Doolan said every person in a community was part of the solution, each had a responsibility to make sure no child was left behind.
“You’ve got to do stuff that lets people know and feel they are valued. If kids feel like they’re welcome, and feel like they’re loved - you’re going to get a different result,” he said.
“And there should be a possibility of redemption... not just jail, where they just come out with issues on top of issues.”
Doolan said it was impossible to get it right with every kid - but every kid deserved the effort.
“You need a bit of humanity - kids don’t want to be bad, and I find that what kids really want is affirmation. If you have a dog and every time he does something wrong you give him a kicking or flog him with a stick, he’s going to break the chain and go for your throat.
“I know from my own experience that what you need to do is have empathy ... your pain is my pain. And if you can have that they can feel that. If the young person feels it ... there’s a wonderful strength and power in connection.”
Keep them out of jail, whatever it takes
Bernie Shakeshaft refuses most government funding for his organisation, BackTrack.
If he takes the money, he can’t do things 100 per cent his own way - which is a way that works, and has done for dozens of youths since 2006.
The key to his success is permanency, being a full-time omnipresent and stable figure in troubled kids’ lives. Not just putting them through a course and sending them off on their way.
BackTrack was established after Shakeshaft had enough of seeing local kids fall through the cracks of “a system that couldn’t meet their complex needs”.
These youths were trapped in a cycle of homelessness, substance use, psychological distress, juvenile crime, disengagement from school, and unemployment.
They were turning the town upside down and Shakeshaft, with almost 30 years’ experience in social work, decided to “do something”.
That is the key to any community making a difference to its youth crime issues, he says.
“Every community is different. I don’t think there’s any one single answer – but ‘do something’ is a good one, that would be a common denominator. And do it because you care. If you’re not passionate about it, then it’s probably not going to work,” he said.
Shakeshaft started small with volunteers and a shed where he gathered together his first cohort of troubled kids and his working dogs. The former stockman’s idea was to match the at-risk teens with puppies to train - teaching a sense of responsibility, purpose and empathy.
They went on to compete in dog shows, which kept them busy and out of trouble but also helped them develop healthy relationships and basic life skills most had never had a home.
BackTrack has grown since then, as has a network of similar organisations across NSW and Queensland.
Shakeshaft said there was one solid reason BackTrack worked.
“You cannot get kicked out of BackTrack, full stop,” said Shakeshaft.
“You don’t do 12 weeks or 26 weeks or six months, then kick them out and get another group of kids? We would have been better off not starting with those kids because I think you do more damage than you do good, getting them the sense of hope and then walking away from them.
“Our mission is to keep kids alive, out of jail and to help them chase their hopes and dreams – for as long as it takes.”
The youths Shakeshaft takes on - boys and girls - are aged between 10 and their 20s.
Some of the kids live at Warrah, a property Shakeshaft owns.
At Warrah, the residents are supervised closely and have to live by the rules and under their self-imposed mission statements including “own your own s**t”.
Some of the older Backtrackers live in the stand-alone units Shakeshaft has built out the back and pay rent. All do chores. All are expected to behave, to be home on time and be respectful.
“They’re from mostly single-parent homes or living with grandmas. The majority are already disengaged from the education system. There’s a lot of couch surfers - so no stable accommodation, a lot of Indigenous kids with drug and alcohol issues, a lot with mental health issues.
“They lack a sense of belonging or connection to something and they’ve had to deal with big adult problems as young kids ... all come from some kind of traumatic background and have lack of genuine good relationships in their lives.”
Shakeshaft says every “bad” kid is fixable - with the right people. And those are rarely found in detention centres or at “clinical” state-run programmes with a “one-size-fits-all” approach.
“Why are we prepared to spend so much money on something that doesn’t work - or makes it worse? It’s back to that punishment thing - they do something wrong, lock them up, throw away the key,” he says.
“Look at what Queensland’s done, building two new juvenile detention facilities - we know that 80 per cent of kids are going to be back in there inside of 12 months.”
Some of his kids, before BackTrack, were locked up “10, 11, 12 times”. But since engaging the likelihood of that happening is “really slim”.
“Why? Because we know if we can surround you with other people who are not necessarily involved in that world .... help with accommodation, food, the drug and alcohol stuff, then the chances of staying out are much higher. "
One of Shakeshaft’s long-term BackTrack boys spoke about his experience.
“I grew up in a house full of domestic violence. Dad was in and out of jail a lot, mum wasn’t at home a lot. I never really had much as a kid ... it was pretty rough.
“I was in a lot of trouble at school - I didn’t fit in at school very well, so I was always in strife hanging with the wrong crowds.
“I came to Backtrack when I was 13 or 14, they just started to give me a little bit of guidance around things I never got taught at home. Then I did nine months in juvie.
“None of the system works at all - locking boys in cells for 12 hours a day, solitary confinement, sitting in a cell that’s dark, with no bloody blanket. That’s crazy - that doesn’t help, you can’t lock kids up like that for six months and expect them to be fine.
“The only thing that changed me was myself.”
Shakeshaft accepts there’s a place for detention when youths have been convicted of serious offending. But even then he feels it does little to address their issues or help them develop.
And expecting young offenders to change their ways simply because they’re sent to do a lag, to Shakeshaft, is a ridiculous notion.
“Lock them up, that’ll teach them. Teach them what? They all come out better criminals,” he said.
“Imagine if we tried to get you to change - to walk into your boss’ office and tell them to get f**ked, to go in when you want, to steal the company car or take the tyres off, when you go to court roll in your thongs and tell the magistrate he’s got no idea what he’s f**king talking about, steal whatever you had to steal to get by.
“It would be a friggin difficult job, right? It’s just as difficult to get these kids to change – because it’s not what they’ve grown up with, and we only know what we know.
“How do you change that? Inch by inch. You’ve just got to hang in for the long haul.”
Shakeshaft is hands-on with his team and the kids every day, every night. He goes with them to court when needed. He agrees to have them at his property when they’re released on bail.
He’s all in for these kids. Always.
The day before his interview for this report he’d been woken at 6am by one of his older boys - who now works for him - drunk out of his mind and distressed.
“Then I had to spend half a day with him, while he sobers up and goes through the tears,” he said.
“This morning I get a text message from him apologising - and I said, ‘You don’t need to apologise mate, that’s what we’re here for. And how lucky am I that you trust me enough to come out here in that state, get me out of bed at 6am on a Saturday?’
“You’ve got to take it back to your own life - who were the big people that you looked up to? If you have good big people that you look up to, that you idolise, then you’ll copy. And that’s what we do here - put big people around them.”
There are a few simple mantras the BackTrack kids have to adhere to - simple, but memorable, effective:
“You f**k it, you fix it.”
“Leave your s**t at the gate.”
And it’s clearly getting through.
“We’ve got the lowest juvenile crime stats in this town, anywhere in any local government areas in New South Wales. It’s pretty crazy,” Shakeshaft said.
BackTrack has a huge community buy-in because of the results.
People see the change and appreciate the work being done. They’re quick to hire BackTrack kids who have trained as welders, mechanics, delivery drivers.
“It’s not impossible, but it takes time and you got to have the patience for it,” said Shakeshaft.
“What is success to us? The kid’s alive. The kid’s got a job, they have a dream and they’re working towards that. And some of those dreams may take a lot more time.
“These kids need some hope. And then it’s just about keeping putting opportunities in front of them over and over and over. And somehow it works.”
The first seven BackTrack boys, known by Shakeshaft as “the Magnificent Seven”, are a good indicator of how the programme can work.
Of the group, six have jobs, most have families, one owns his own home, another owns a business.
“And they were wild men, they were seven red hots,” Shakeshaft explains.
“They just drop back in whenever it suits ... one was in hospital because his f**king liver’s given up from trying to drink his pain away and he had nowhere else to go, we let him back in.
“Cos you can’t get kicked out of BackTrack. You can choose not to be here, but you can never get kicked out.”
Where the wild kids were
Lexi’s a slight, quiet girl who hides behind her silken dark hair. She is weary of everyone, warm only to those who have proven that she can trust them.
She’s 16 but you can tell her experience of the world is much older.
Her parents are heavy drug users. Separated.
By 13 she’d moved out to live with her boyfriend. There was domestic violence with him but where else could she go?
Lexi bounces from house to house, but spends a lot of time at her “dad’s baby mama’s place”. There’s not much room with five younger half-siblings, whom she always ends up looking after because their mother just doesn’t get out of bed. She hates leaving the little ones alone.
Her school attendance rate in 2023 was 2 per cent - just four of the 200 days she was expected to be there.
It’s no surprise when she’s either babysitting or exhausted and starving after being up all night because she has nowhere to go.
She’s just one of the kids in Lake Cargelligo, rural NSW, who would be “doing drugs or dead” without Down The Track (DTT).
DTT was started by Lana Masterson in 2016, focusing on disengaged and marginalised young people aged 10-20 in the remote communities of Lake Cargelligo and Murrin Bridge, an Aboriginal community.
Masterson moved there from Sydney a year earlier with her police officer partner and was stunned at the level of youth offending, which was in her words “through the roof”.
Her partner was doing massive overtime hours driving kids to and from youth custody in Wagga - almost three hours each way after she’d finished her normal duties.
“There were massive amounts of juvenile lock-ups, just ridiculous for the size of our town. The community was unsettled, people were just talking about how bad the issue was - but no one was actually doing anything,” Masterson said.
“I came from a very sketchy background ... lots of drugs, lots of getting in trouble with police ... so I felt like I had a lot to offer. I could see myself in a lot of the kids that were getting in trouble.”
Masterson said the support of her grandparents helped her to change her path and she felt like Lake Cargelligo was her chance to give back.
“Whatever they were doing just wasn’t working ... I went to my partner, and I said ‘who are the five wildest kids in Lake Cargelligo? Give me their names and addresses and I’m gonna go have a yarn,” she said. “I got in the truck, went around, knocked on the door and introduced myself, and said, ‘how about we go and do something’?”
Masterson learned quickly what was driving the terrible behaviour - boredom, poverty, truancy, absent and or neglectful parents, drug and alcohol abuse, mental health issues, learning difficulties, disengagement.
So she got them all together again and took them out fencing.
And as they worked, learned, and occupied their usually idle hands, Masterson did what no one else had ever done for the kids - she listened.
Rounding them all up and taking them to work soon became a daily thing.
Sometimes the victims of their offending came along and worked alongside the kids - giving them insight into the impact the crimes had in a space the youngsters felt safe, where they could really hear and understand.
Alongside fencing, shearing and mustering opportunities followed.
“Within six months all five had full-time work and didn’t get locked up from that point. So that’s when I knew that I was on a bit of a good thing. It worked, what I did and it kind of just grew from there.”
Masterson, inspired by what Shakeshaft had done, established DTT.
Alongside the mentorship, practical education, training, and wellbeing support she created employment for the youths in the form of a food truck and event catering - things that also help them to give back to the community.
The DTT team also collects hundreds of kilos of native seeds for local replanting projects and jumped in to help locals anywhere they could when flooding ravaged the area.
Some youths attend DTT full-time instead of school, others are part-time. All get the chance to learn new skills and obtain licences, trade certificates.
The kids are not easy - their lives are unstable in ways most of us cannot imagine. But Masterson and her team are committed to getting up each day and doing what they can.
“Our mission is to keep kids alive, out of jail and thriving. We want to help them achieve their hopes and dreams ... with no young person left behind,” she said.
“I live and breathe this. The last thing I think about before I go to bed is, are these young people okay? Who’s had a feed tonight? Who’s got warm blankets? Who’s up waiting for other people to go to bed, before it is safe for them to go to bed?
“When I wake in the morning, it’s who’s had breakfast? Who’s going to school today? People think it is just a youth programme, it is so much more than that ... This is not just a job. For some of these kids, this is life and death.”
Katy Quinn is a Lake Cargelligo local and has worked for DTT since the early days.
“Sticking to rules and teachings that are not relevant just doesn’t work in this age - we need to do things different,” she said.
“There are kids in our cohort that, if we weren’t there - they’d be in some pretty deep s**t.
“If you push them, they don’t come back ... if you work at their pace, letting them have control of their own decisions, it makes them stay ... at the end of the day - it’s about them isn’t it?”
Quinn said the key to helping is getting to know them and their story – finding out what is behind their actions rather than pushing them into “one-size-fits-all” punishments and programmes.
“Some don’t know what jobs are and how to have them, they haven’t seen parents – and sometimes grandparents - with jobs or licences so don’t know what adulting looks like,” she explained.
“They only know what they know ... we have a 7-year-old at the moment who we’re working with, his older brother is already engaging so it’s a case of looking at early intervention.
“Around 80 per cent of our kids have gone into jobs ... it’s pretty amazing what they’ve done - it gives the other kids hope.”
Masterson said the proof DTT works better than traditional methods for wrangling young offenders was in the stats.
“There is less offending, and the level of offending is a lot less as well - it’s not as aggressive or violent as it was,” she said.
“Probably one of my favourite things to see is that change in the community – when a kid does get employment and it has a bit of a knock-on effect, and it actually motivates or inspires somebody else in the family to go, ‘Oh, they’re doing all right, I’m going to have a go at that’.
“For us, it’s about creating as many new experiences and opportunities as possible and putting them in front of the kids and saying ‘take it or leave it, but it’s there if you want to try it’. That seems to really work well for us.
“You literally don’t know what you don’t know. So it’s up to us to find those opportunities and keep presenting them.”
Masterson said back in 2015, the community was “very, very different”.
She is proud of the work she and the DTT team have done so far.
“If I’d have had something like this when I was growing up, I wouldn’t have done all the drugs, I wouldn’t have been in all the trouble, because I would have had somewhere that I felt like I belonged.
“If a kid feels like they’re valued, and they’re being heard and respected - it changes things for them. So just give them a shot, show some belief.”
She acknowledged it wasn’t all smooth sailing though - no kid’s journey was linear or easy.
“We’re working with some pretty wild kids and although you might see moments of progression, you’re gonna have moments of kick-back as well,” she said.
“I don’t think there’s a bad kid - that’s not a thing. I think sometimes as a community we drop the ball and maybe we don’t offer enough inclusion and opportunity. And that’s when kids fall off the wagon.”
It took a while for Lake Cargelligo locals to trust in DTT’s work and mission. Now, the results and benefits are clear and the community buy-in is strong.
“It’s not a silver bullet, it’s not going to work for everyone - but it’s the best we’ve got. There’s nothing else,” said fish biologist Professor Adam Kerezy, who lets DTT use his land for its camps and other activities, and works personally with the kids.
“We’re not there yet, but at least we’ve got a positive programme that we can help with - which is important to us, something we can help with long term. We’re happy to help.”
His partner Alison Wheeler – a teacher – added: “The problem is every other programme is so short-term ... we need 20 years at least to change anything. We need the same programmes, the same people. You’ve got to keep showing up and treating them the same way.”
Peter Skipworth’s family has farmed at Lake Cargelligo for a century and is a big part of the community. He is passionate about supporting DTT and getting involved however he can.
“I’ve lived here my whole life, and every other thing that’s come along - mostly government-funded - falls off.
“Sometimes you trust them [young offenders] and it backfires – but you can’t stop ... If you don’t stump up, who will?”
The hardest ‘normal’ to break
In Toowoomba, 125km west of Brisbane, there are at least 130 young people homeless on any given night.
Many more are doing it tough - tougher than people could ever imagine.
When Jen Shaw was a teenager her mother and stepfather were addicted to drugs - her home life was “chaos”.
“I was never in care … I think I walked myself into child safety a couple of times and said ‘hey, I need help, my mum’s a drug addict. And they were like, ‘what are we going to do with a 14-year-old’... they went ‘f**k she’s too hard,” she said.
“I hit the streets of Toowoomba because it felt safer.
“I never went to juvie but all my mates did. I was jumping in and out of cars or stealing from the shops. I was trying drugs. Alcohol was always my thing, thank God - a lot of the kids I grew up with got stuck on heavy drugs and I reckon that’s what changed the trajectory for them. I was a drinker, which isn’t any better, but it was easier to overcome.”
Shaw couch-surfed, slept rough, had her first child at 15. She was depressed, tried to overdose.
The next morning as she sat on a set of stairs, tired and groggy, she made a vow that eventually changed her life.
“It was probably the lowest moment of my life, I reckon ... I didn’t really have any future.
“I remember making a promise that everything I’d been through was going to matter for somebody else one day,” she said.
In 2017 Shaw - now a mother of seven - set out on a mission to help as many of Toowoomba’s young people as she could.
“I’d always had this vision to do something for kids,” she said.
“For kids who had been let down, put in the “too hard” basket, slipped through the cracks and left behind, forgotten. I wanted to set up a place that they could get love, support and a chance to get back on track.”
In recent years Toowoomba recorded some of Australia’s highest rates of youth unemployment and incarceration.
In 2019 Shaw opened Emerge Cafe with a view to break the cycle by employing local kids doing it tough. Along with the job, she and her team worked with them to fulfil their own hopes and dreams.
As word began to spread other kids would come to the cafe every day asking for help - they were hungry, homeless and most just wanted connection with people who would not hurt them.
In 2023 Shaw’s mission moved into a new chapter. She purchased a house and land outside Toowoomba and opened House 360, a place where young people can live safely with supervision and support.
While Shaw can’t accommodate all the kids in need, she can help those who are most vulnerable.
The house has rules, the young tenants pay rent and do their share of the chores; and they have to be motivated to undertake appropriate employment.
Shaw has big dreams for the rest of the property - a vast vege garden, aquaponics and chickens. Not only will they harvest their own food, jobs will be created.
Abbie and Crystal (not their real names) were living at the house in mid-2023.
Crystal, 17, had dangerous and severe mental health issues.
Abbie, 14, was addicted to pure methamphetamine by the age of 12 and was just getting clean and working out her next step.
Before Emerge the girls had no one in their corner. Not a single adult.
Abbie’s mother had taken off after years of being beaten and raped daily in front of her kids. Abbie’s father then turned his abuse on her.
It’s no wonder she got involved with the wrong crowd and started to offend. She stopped going to school and then got expelled for her behaviour.
“My sister told me I was going to end up dead or in jail for the rest of my life,” she said.
“Most people think we are just ferals, we’re just bad people - but they don’t know our stories, they don’t know what we’ve been through that makes us who we are and do what we do.
“It’s not easy to change but with the right people in your life you can do it. It feels good to be here, I’ve learned that I’m worth it and to believe in myself.”
Shaw runs a food truck and her kids work catering huge events. She gets them into programmes, get licences and training certificates. Her husband is a boxer and runs classes.
Just a week before Shaw was interviewed for this report one of the young people she worked with was killed.
The 18-year-old was travelling in the passenger seat of a stolen silver Holden Commodore when it veered of the road and smashed into trees.
“I knew of her for a long time, but over the last 12 months we were really close,” said Shaw, the loss still raw.
“She lost her girlfriend in a car accident, exactly the same scenario and I feel like that window of time is where we lost her in terms of changing her life.
“I picked her up from jail seven days before she died and I said to her, ‘Do you need me to be tough on you or do you need me to give you distance?’ And she said, ‘Be tough on me’.
“I didn’t even get the opportunity to get to that part. She got out of jail on the Friday and on the Saturday morning she was using ice again.
“That’s the hardest part … that you don’t get to have another crack at it.”
Shaw’s mission statement summarises her passion for helping.
“We will do whatever it takes to help as many young people as possible for however long it takes - and no matter how hard it is.”
She said while her cohort of kids were tough and hugely damaged, they were also “resilient and brilliant”.
“I meet kids who are 11 and they’re drug addicts ... And their parents have their own issues - unhealed trauma, substance abuse ... with these kids, even the stuff that their brain can’t remember, their body remembers and feels - from the belly to those younger years.
“You only know what you know ... and that is the hardest normal to break.”
One of Shaw’s proudest achievements is Tyreece. An enlarged photo of the boy hangs in House 360, to serve as inspiration for other young people on their journey from hardship to healing.
At just 9 years old, Tyreece moved out of home.
He lived on the streets, fell in with the absolute wrong crowd, became well known to police.
“When I was about 12 I started breaking into houses, stealing cars … I always wanted to change but I just didn’t know to or when to. I just kept doubting myself,” he once told Australian current affairs show The Project.
Then he had a chance meeting with Shaw who asked: “What’s your story? Do you want a job?”
She taught him to “never be ashamed of where you came from” and changed his life.
He had dreams of joining the army - and bolstered by the Emerge team, that is exactly where he is now.
Shaw said most of her kids had a similar story. Family violence, fleeing home, living on the streets, addiction, crime to survive.
“Abbie never thought she would ever be good enough to get a job. She’s only 14 and had written off any possibility of working... now she is thinking about going back and finishing school, which is a huge change,” she said.
Crystal said before Emerge she had no hope, her world was dark and lonely.
“I was in and out of motels because no residence wanted me - I was very suicidal, I smashed things up, I went to hospital for self-harm all the time, I abused workers and threatened them,’ she said.
“Nobody understood my mental health.
“I made friends with some of the Emerge kids and they helped me. I feel safe here. I don’t do any of that bad stuff anymore.
“I got a job, I got my licence and I feel more independent. At the Emerge house, it feels like a family, like a real home. Now I never want to leave here.”
To “normal” people, fast-food jobs and a full day at school sound like miniscule accomplishments.
But for Shaw’s kids - they’ve had to climb treacherous mountains to even get a glimpse of such milestones.
“These kids don’t wake up and go ‘you know what, when I grow up I want to be a drug addict or a criminal’,” she said.
“These kids are battered ... they’ve lost their childhood - we take them back to being kids again ... It’s just about introducing a different concept to locking kids up.
“It’s hard work ... but I always think back to that promise I made sitting on the set of stairs.
“At the end of the day, when a kid is having a tough time, it only takes one adult to show up for them. And at Emerge, we don’t stop.”
Change your mindset - change their lives
Everyone in the youth offender space agrees that early intervention is one of the key factors in reducing crime and antisocial behaviour.
In Queensland, a team at a trial programme called Resolve are going above and beyond to find the kids that need that intervention the most.
Resolve operates under Youth and Family Services in Logan City, part of the wider metropolitan Brisbane area.
In 2022 the Resolve programme - partnered by Griffith University and Queensland Police - was given Federal Government funding for a two-year trial.
The aim? To find and engage with young people aged 10-16 through outreach activities in places where they gather - then support and coach them one-on-one to live their best lives.
One of the outreach activities sees coaches driving around Logan’s “hot spots” at night, talking to youths about why they’re out, what’s going on in their lives, and what they need to do better.
Youths who connect with Resolve are paired with a coach whom they meet with several times a week for three to six months of “intensive training”, where they work through their personal situation, what they lack and need, their risks, barriers to getting back on track and most importantly – to help them explore and pursue their hopes and goals.
The coaches help their young match reconnect - or connect - with school, work, training and prosocial activities in the community.
Their mission is, effectively, to find the kids most at risk of crossing over to criminality then find out what’s pushing them to that life, and help to point them in a better direction.
While every kid’s circumstances were unique - they all wanted the same fundamental supports.
“Young people want safe places, engaging and educational activities, fun - in a non-judgemental environment,” said Resolve programme manager Vicky Allen.
“We know that effective programmes have welcoming staff, they’re accessible, well-resourced environments, engagement that facilitates rapport and trust - and consistency, the same adults working with them.”
Allen said the outreach was having a “tangible impact” on the top cohort of youth offenders and, incredibly, most of the kids had self-referred to Resolve.
YFS client services manager Daniel Brookes said custody should never be the first option for youth offenders.
“Community safety is important - but the cycle is not going to stop unless you try and intervene early,” he said.
“If we don’t focus our efforts on those young people that are at risk now ... we’re just going to end up building more detention centres.”
Brookes said a big roadblock was community’s perception of what a youth offender was, who they were.
“My conversations with people in the public, or family, etc, that have that thought process around ‘just lock the kids up’ - once you explain to them why the young people are in the position they are in in the first place with a lot of factors outside of their control and to what programmes like resolve can actually do to stop that stream of young people transitioning through the [detention centre] cycle.
“A lot of the time people say ‘yeah, now I can actually see what he’s doing, where he’s coming from, and how that could be effective’.”
One of the keys to Resolve’s success so far is the consistent relationship between coach and young person.
“Young people sometimes just don’t know what support that they really need - they have an idea, but maybe can’t articulate it very well,” said Allen.
“Through building the relationships with young people, so seeing them repetitively every week, and being able to get a feel for what’s going on for them, I think the coaches are quite skilled in being able to identify where they have issues ... but the young person might not recognise that at the beginning.”
Brookes said people outside the youth work space did not really understand the “why” of offending and antisocial behaviour.
“It’s easy for the general public to point the finger and make assumptions, to drive past a group of young kids pulled up by the police and say ‘what have they done’ or ‘they’re so naughty’.
“A lot of these young people are looking for positive mentors or friendships or family, and they end up hanging out with the older kids because if you need to find your place or feel a part of something, you’re going to follow what you think is cool. And that’s when they get in trouble.”
Allen said changing the landscape of youth crime needed a willingness from the community to understand the issues better.
“Community has got to want to understand the underlying things and they’ve got to want to see what’s going on out there,” she said,
“It takes a village to raise a child ... we can come on board and the coaches can work with the young people but we’re not always going to be there forever, so we need the community on board too giving them a helping hand.”
Brookes and Allen agree there is no easy solution.
“I don’t know if there’s a silver bullet ... But definitely the gap that we’ve identified and continue to see is that early intervention isn’t given enough time, it’s not funded enough. Governments don’t invest enough in that space, because they’re too busy to find ways to prevent things like zero repeat offenders,” Brookes said.
“You’re never going to stop it if you’re not preventing it from the beginning.”
Allen said: “And usually it’s a cycle - the parents would have experienced that as well.”
“When you actually unpack it, you really do see that they are just people that need some help.”
Anna Leask is a Christchurch-based reporter who covers national crime and justice. She joined the Herald in 2008 and has worked as a journalist for 18 years. She writes, hosts and produces the award-winning podcast A Moment In Crime, released monthly on nzherald.co.nz
