I’ve sat across from enough of these kids and their families over the last 20 years to know the pattern by heart. A 14-year-old walks into Children’s Court on charges of aggravated home invasion, carjacking, stabbing or robbery, gets bail, and is back out the door before the ink dries on the paperwork. Then the re-offending starts again. And again. The same faces. The same postcodes.
Victoria’s own Crime Statistics Agency numbers from the 2025 calendar year make it impossible to pretend this is just “a few bad apples.” Children were responsible for 57.6 per cent of all carjackings, 52.6 per cent of home invasions, 47.8 per cent of aggravated burglaries and 62.4 per cent of robberies. Police arrested 1,223 children a combined 6,997 times. A tiny core of repeat offenders is driving the chaos, twenty teenagers alone were linked to hundreds of break-ins and nearly four hundred stolen cars in one period! Even when the overall youth offending rate has shown recent dips in some MSM reporting, the serious violent stuff remains stubbornly high and heavily concentrated among the same groups.
