David Penberthy: Hit-run fatals in Adelaide show soft Youth Court, parents creating generation lacking in responsibility
WAYWARD youths seem to breeze through the Youth Court safe in the knowledge that they will have to do something incredibly bad to wind up behind bars, writes David Penberthy. Now three people are dead.
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IT is being suggested that the attempt to apply adult sentences to the youths accused of killing Lucy Paveley might offend international covenants on the rights of the child. What a total perversion of the rights agenda that would be.
Our state is set to pass new laws, drafted in response not to the death of Mrs Paveley but Nicole Tucker on the Southern Expressway last October. Because those laws have not been officially enacted yet, the pedantic argument goes that they might be trumped by international law.
Perhaps we need to redraft out international human rights agreements, to enshrine the human right not to be killed while driving to work by an allegedly stolen car driven through a red light by an alleged gang of teenage hoodlums.
The death of Lucy Paveley has at its centre a story about two types of families. One is loving, cohesive, hardworking. The others seem seriously dysfunctional, and were probably never functional at all. It appears the products of those latter families are accused of taking the life of a fantastic parent.
A pained and angry community is demanding change. Given that this is the third road death in similar circumstances in just 18 months, we should do no less.
Many of you reading this column will have teenage children. You probably have in the past few days spoken to your kids, your partner, about the circumstances in which Lucy Paveley died in a hit-run accident involving two vehicles which police say were stolen in home invasions.
The case raises many questions about how you run a family. Who lets their 13-year-old or 14-year-old run wild overnight? What type of parent doesn’t know where a child that young is at any given minute of the day? And when your child does get into trouble, what do you do about it? Do you teach them about humility and remorse? The need to face the consequences of their actions? Do you even bother going to court, or does that job fall to the guardian who has been entrusted with their care?
I hate every horrible fact about what happened to Lucy Paveley, but it still seems wrong to hate the people accused of doing it. I have heard people say that the world would be a better place if the perpetrators had died. I can understand the anger that drives such brutal sentiments. But you would have to suspect that those involved were simply behaving the way they have been allowed to act, or taught to act, through the absence of any viable role models, especially male role models.
As AnglicareSA chief executive Reverend Peter Sandeman said this week, the 18-year-old man charged over these offences may have been the most senior role model the younger members of this posse had to look up to. It was an especially charitable remark, given that Rev Sandeman’s organisation is reeling from the loss of Ms Paveley at AnglicareSA, where she worked as a much-loved aged-care nurse.
There are issues with this case that predate the role of the criminal justice system. Again, as Peter Sandeman observed this week, by the time these types of youths make it to court the first time, the die has already been cast in terms of their behaviour. While government cannot solve every ill in society, and without wanting to take gratuitous potshots at the much-maligned Families SA, there are child protection issues that predate the first contact these young people have with the justice system.
But as for the justice system itself, you have to wonder whether our youth courts, in their own well-intended way, are in fact replicating the moral ambivalence that defines the families these children inhabit. The worst thing you can do to a child is teach it that life comes without consequences.
It is the toughest gig in parenting, as it creates arguments and dramas, but if you opt out of it, and let your kids literally get away with murder, you are setting them up to be brats and failures down the track. It is debatable whether the youth courts share or reflect this mainstream belief in personal responsibility. The courts should deliver what these families have never provided, a clear and firm sense of consequence.
Instead, we seem to have a philosophy not of zero tolerance, but zero intolerance, where wayward youths can breeze through their teenage years safe in the knowledge that they will have to do something incredibly bad to wind up behind bars. All of the anti-drug education talks about the concept of gateway drugs, where low-level flirtation with cannabis can lead the user into tougher drugs such as ice.
You can see the same pattern with criminal conduct, where the young shoplifter or schoolyard bully graduates from pinching CDs and belting his classmates to car theft and robbing strangers while they sleep in their beds.
We need to get a hell of a lot better at interrupting that continuum of behaviour. We are letting it escalate to the point where people must actually die before the justice system starts considering serious, life-altering sentences for young offenders.
The counter-argument goes that if you send these people to youth detention they will only become hardened and learn the ropes from more senior crims. If that is true, then that argument strikes me as a defeatist indictment of the manner in which youth detention currently operates.
Beyond that, the best answer to the argument about the inefficacy of imprisonment is: so what? Incarceration is not just meant to be about rehabilitation, it is also meant to be about public safety. After three deaths in 18 months, you can spare us the academic theorising about the whys and wherefores of locking up the young. Too many people are dead already.
It is here where the civil liberties argument should end. Not around the “rights” of those accused of doing genuinely terrible things, but the real rights of those who are doing nothing other than waiting for the lights to change while driving to work.