Youth crime driving desperate parents to desperate measures... like kidnapping them and flying them overseas, writes Ann Wason Moore

When parents are forced to fly their 13-year-old son out of the country to escape the Gold Coast’s youth crime gangs, you know the system is broken.

Think our youth justice system isn’t broken?

This will change your mind.

Last week, Laura* was forced to all but kidnap her own 13-year-old son and fly him out of the country to escape the influence of the eshay ‘gang’ he joined just six weeks ago.

What is an eshay you ask? Find out here.

Her husband has quit his job to accompany their teen to New Zealand and the family are using the equity in their house in order to fund this last radical last-ditch attempt to save their son.

And it’s proof that when it comes to the issues of youth crime, it’s going to take a bloody big stick to make a change.

It’s an awful situation, these kids are committing crimes – but they are just kids.

Yet if we don’t save them from themselves, someone will be killed – whether that’s themselves or a victim. including them themselves

And that’s exactly why Laura had to take this drastic action, because no one else could help. Not teachers, not police, not the legal system.

Laura still doesn’t understand how her son went so swiftly and severely off the rails. As far as she knows there has been no trauma, no bullying and their family is a safe and happy place with two professional and loving parents in charge.

Aussie Eshay starter pack. These are the signs your child might be an eshay.

Yet, within a matter of weeks, her son started associating with the wrong crowd on social media, and the next thing she knew he was stealing cars, driving up and down the M1 at 200kph-plus, and posting videos of it all to Instagram.

“Any mother would do anything to save her kids, but I knew I couldn’t stop him. I’ve tried and failed,” she says.

“So last week we got him on a plane to New Zealand, it’s the only way to break this cycle. While he’s in this country, he’ll just jump on a bus and come back … or find a new crowd on social media. They all know each other.

“They all take advantage of the Daniel Morcombe rule and just hop on a bus without paying.

“It’s broken our family. My husband is with him in NZ and I’m here with our other children, but we’ll keep this going as long as we have to in order to save him.”

Laura says she knows society will blame the parents … and it’s something she already does to herself.

But still, she can’t figure out where she went wrong.

“I think about it all the time, but he was a good kid and we are a strong family,” she says.

“It was never about money, even though he’s stealing all the time. We’re not on the bones of our feet and he’s had access to my ATM card … it’s about the thrill of the crime.

Eshays _ young crims who dress in Nike TNs and wear bumbags _ have been blamed for a spate of recent thefts at Indooroopilly.

“We could see the justice system was not going to stop the behaviour, so we took our own action. He was never going to willingly leave a thrilling adrenaline-packed life of crime with all of these juvie thugs when there were no consequences. 

“Older juvies had educated him on his rights and that juvenile detention was a cool place if he ended there since that’s where all their mates are.

“Someone was going to die on the road – either him or someone else – so we had to get him out.

“We’re hoping by taking him to the wilds of NZ he can get that adrenaline riding quad bikes, surfing, swimming … a natural and legal high.

“But how many other parents can do this? We’re funding it through our home equity because my husband has had to quit his job to do this and luckily we have family in NZ, but what do other people do?”

Laura says the police have worked with her as much as they can but are just as exasperated as she that they are essentially toothless against young criminals.

She says her desperation peaked when she reported her son as a missing person and he was found with a knife.

Eshays are characterised by their love for Nike TNs, and sometimes rob others of their shoes.

“We had made an appointment for him with a psychiatrist and we basically had him under house arrest so we could make sure he made it to the doctor,” she says.

“We had an overnight vigil watching him but then at 10am he just ran right through us, physically bowled right through us, and ran through the front door.

“We chased him in our car, found him and dragged him in. It looked like a child abduction and someone reported us to the cops, who then showed up with three paddy wagons in our front yard.

“The police understood the situation but said he needed to go to the hospital for a mental assessment, not see a psychiatrist.

“So we waited three hours at the hospital but then were told they could do nothing because our son had no mental health record, no criminal conviction … they said we should have gone to the psychiatrist.

“When my son heard that he just said ‘I’m gone’ and ran. The next time they found him he had the knife.”

Laura says three of their family members had to bodily flank her son to get him on a plane to Melbourne, where they stayed in a BnB while waiting for his passport to be processed before leaving for New Zealand.

Supplied Editorial Eshays: These teens brag about taking drugs and posting images and videos on social media. Source: Instagram

She says while this will surely be her darkest Mother’s Day, she at least has some hope now he is out of the country.

“He’d gone missing three times, had stolen countless times, was in a car crash with three other teens wrapped around a tree, has had drugs on him … it’s a relief to finally do something.

“Police did all they could, but there is only so much they can do. I don’t know what the solution is, but it has to be radical, just like what we did.

“Youth crime is spreading like a cancer and we have to cut it out somehow..”

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And someone needs to make that call before more children lose not just their innocence, but their lives.