UNHEARD: The Facts Around Indigenous Juvenile Detention In Australia Are Shocking And Outrageous

Many people across Australia will be familiar with the ongoing battle to correct racial injustices against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the country.

However, something they might not be aware of are the cold, hard facts around Indigenous juvenile detention.

This is the focus of episode four in the UNHEARD, a six-part documentary series that looks at the various racial issues that plague Australia.

Titled 'The Targeting of Indigenous Youth', the episode is a sobering and confronting representation of how we treat some of the most vulnerable people in the country.

Indigenous children are 22 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous children. They are the most incarcerated children in the world.

Take a moment to take that last sentence in.

It's a horrible statistic that belongs to Australia and there are systems in place that perpetuate this horrible reality continuing.

Indigenous children in Australia are more likely to go to jail than they are to go to university.

A whopping 53 per cent of all youth (aged 10 to 17) in juvenile detention are from Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander backgrounds. In the Northern Territory, there have been times when the entire youth juvenile detention population has been Indigenous people.

That's despite Indigenous Australians only making up 2 per cent of the country's population.

The country still allows children to be taken out of their family unit and placed in out of home care, with some advocates saying it's reminiscent of the Stolen Generations.

The devastating reality though is that there are now more children in out-of-home care than there were children taken in the Stolen Generations.

There are around 20,000 Indigenous people in this type of care at the moment, which can have major impacts on these people's identity and links to their culture.

There's a massive push in Australia at the moment for states and territories to increase the age of criminal responsibility.

Advocates say raising the age from 10 to 14 will help keep kids out of the juvenile detention system and hopefully break the cycle of young people getting criminal records before they can even get a pen license.

If you want to learn more about Australia's problem with the targeting of Indigenous youth head to Amazon Prime to watch the fourth episode of UNHEARD.

To support the fight against racial injustice visit ladbible.com/unheard

Featured Image Credit: LADbible Australia

Topics: Australia

Stewart Perrie

Stewart Perrie is a Trending Journalist at LADbible. His first job was as a newsreader and journalist at the award winning Sydney radio station, Macquarie Radio. He was solely responsible for the content broadcast on multiple stations across Australia when the MH17, Germanwings and AirAsia disasters unfolded. Stewart has covered the conflict in Syria for LADbible, interviewing a doctor on the front line, and has contributed to the hugely successful UOKM8 campaign.

@stewartperrie