Refugee parents send children away from Melbourne’s teen crime scourge
EXCLUSIVE: DESPERATE refugee parents are banishing their children to Africa to get the youngsters away from Melbourne’s teen crime scourge.
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DESPERATE refugee parents are banishing their children to Africa to get the youngsters away from Melbourne’s teen crime scourge.
Police say parents are regularly sending young troublemakers back to their homelands, including South Sudan, Sudan and Somalia, to break the cycle of criminality.
Leading Sen-Constable Tony Brewin said: “I understand where they’re coming from but, you know, you’re sending your kid to the second-most dangerous country on the planet (South Sudan), behind Syria. That’s a real worry.”
One Melbourne mum, Zaynab* — who the Herald Sun has agreed not to identify to protect her child — says she felt she had to send her troubled 15-year-old son to Africa.
READ ZAYNAB’S STORY BELOW
Zaynab, who escaped the war-torn region to give her family a better life, even wants authorities to consider a “three strikes and you’re out” policy for problem youths.
The Herald Sun today also reveals how one violent gang of teen thugs terrorised service station and fast-food outlets across Melbourne. The Children’s Court yesterday rejected our request to show even pixelated images from some of the attacks.
But dossiers detail how the thugs wielded sledgehammers, baseball bats and machetes in the rampage.
Children sent to Africa stayed with relatives or went to boarding school to straighten them out, police said.
MORE: VIOLENT MELBOURNE TEEN GANG LEAVES TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION
Sen-Constable Brewin said: “It’s often at the end when the kids have been charged with numerous offences.”
Desperate mum Zaynab said: “We need to work with the government to tell young people if they do something wrong for first time, second time, third time, (we will) deport them to their country.’’
Some of the families are understood to feel they can’t properly discipline their children amid fears child protection officers will take the youngsters away.
Most of the children come back and resettle well into Australian life, though not always.
Other despairing parents are taking extreme measures such as dobbing their children into police, or trawling the streets at night to track them down before the law does.
Frontline detectives say despite myths, many offenders come from two-parent caucasian households and attend good schools.
Operation Cosmas Detective Acting Sen-Sgt Ivan Bobetic said parents were the “silent victims” of Victoria’s youth crime scourge.
“It’s very simplistic to blame parents for it in a lot of cases. They’ve got kids who are beyond their capabilities as parents in so far as they just can’t control them,” he said.
“These kids are falling in with the wrong crowd, or for whatever reason they’re falling into the crime sphere and it’s a heartbreaking thing.”
Detective Sen-Constable Gavin Hiku said: “We’ve had some first-time offenders where the parents have brought them in where they’ve seen them on Crime Stoppers. I had one where a young girl — her mum saw her, rang us and said: ‘That’s my daughter’.’’
Supt Paul Hollowood said parents he’d spoken with felt a “sense of helplessness” and were “at their wits’ end”.
Intervention as early as kindergarten is needed to make a difference amid fears even by age 10, behaviour is ingrained, police say.
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A SINGLE mother of six, Zaynab, has sent her teenage son back to Africa, voluntarily expelling him from the world’s most liveable city to a far less pleasant locale.
A knock on the door in September from police with a search warrant was the catalyst, she explains softly.
A couple of years earlier, her son, 15, had begun running with a group of older youths. He skipped classes, slept in most days, and stayed out late with his new “mates”.
He often disappeared for days at a time, prompting her to file missing person reports with police in the hope they’d find him before he found trouble.
At other times, she would arrange for a friend to mind her five other youngsters and walk or drive the streets herself, searching for him.
That knock on the door from police brought all her fears to life.
“The police say he was with another group bashing one boy in the Fitzroy Gardens and stealing some wallets, phones — stuff like that,” she said.
“They didn’t find the wallet but they did find a hat from the victim. When they asked my son … he said he swapped it with another boy.”
Zaynab feared he was being sucked into a downward spiral.
She would have liked to have taken a firm hand with him, but said her concerns that child protection authorities would intervene prevented her from doing so.
“I know in this country you can’t do much. You can’t yell to your son, you can’t discipline them,” said Zaynab, who arrived in Australia about a decade ago.
Talking with her son just didn’t get through to him.
“I say: ‘Why you walking with them?’ He say: ‘It’s my friends.’ He’s a kid. He doesn’t understand.”
She said the boys he had been hanging around with believed serving time in a youth detention centre was easy.
“There’s other kids, they did (crime), and they went to Parkville. When they come back … they say: ‘Oh, you only go three months, four months, you will come back.’ It’s not a big thing for them,” she said.
Taking her son to Africa and leaving him with extended family had been “very hard” but the radical step had “totally changed” him, she said.
“There, one house. He wakes up, he eats, he sleeps, he prays five times a day. He goes to school,” she said.
“He will come back, but not now. I told him he will come back when he turn 18. I’m sure, 100 per cent, when he comes back he will know the good thing and the bad. I will not let him come back until he says, ‘yes, I did wrong things and I apologise to you and I’m going to work very hard to make it up to you’.”
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