If a child is too young for TikTok, should they be strip-searched?

NSW Premier Chris Minns met his South Australian counterpart, Peter Malinauskas, this week for their social media summit. The event was a two-day talkfest with one question at its centre: should we impose a minimum age to access social media?

Malinauskas originally floated the idea of age restrictions for users of TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat before the federal opposition, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese picked up on it last month. Albanese is promising action by the end of the year.

Albanese and Minns have both said that 16 seems like the right age. They share the belief that younger children need to be protected from harm and cannot take responsibility for their own safety.

But this age limit has not sat well with juvenile justice advocates, who note that in most Australian states – including NSW – children as young as 10 can be held criminally responsible for their actions and, indeed, can be jailed.

If children do not have the cognitive or emotional wherewithal to stop themselves from making mistakes or being taken advantage of on social media, advocates – including the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services – have queried why it is appropriate for them to have criminal liability.

Attempts to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 – as recommended by a report prepared for Australia’s attorneys-general in 2020 and the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child the year before – have been politically fraught.

Governments do not want to be seen as soft on youth crime. Earlier this year, Victorian Labor walked back its support for raising the age of criminal responsibility to 14 by 2027.

And, as Michael McGowan reports in today’s Sun-Herald, NSW Police have continued to strip-search children at similar rates after a promised review by the NSW Labor government failed to lead to any changes to the practice, which can involve forcing minors to remove their clothing in public places, and teenagers being instructed to squat and cough when police believe they are concealing drugs.

The review – which the government has repeatedly stressed is informal – was spurred by shocking revelations that girls as young as 12 and 13 had been strip-searched by NSW Police last year.

In the 12 months since NSW Labor promised that Police Minister Yasmin Catley would “meet with key stakeholders in the coming weeks”, she has only held three meetings.

In the 2022–23 financial year, some 51 NSW children were strip-searched. It is a harm that Transport Minister Jo Haylen and Racing Minister David Harris decried in opposition, but neither responded to our reporter’s questions last week.

Although there are valid criticisms of the efficacy and implementation of a social media ban, Minns is right to want to protect NSW’s children. But it is a failure of his government to ignore the harm occurring to children the same age in their interactions with police.