‘At the crossroads’: Offenders are getting younger and younger – and the crimes are more violent

The Lotus Nail Studio in Tregear in Sydney’s west was winding down just after 6pm one Saturday late last month when the three hooded figures walked in, demanding cash and brandishing a hammer.

Closed-circuit television shows one of the figures lunging with the hammer at the salon’s sole worker, a terrified 55-year-old woman who asked not to be named.

The most disturbing aspect of the alleged crime was that the would-be attackers were aged just 11 and 12.

Across the city in Narellan Vale earlier that month, a group of teens and pre-teens allegedly swarmed a bottle shop, fighting staff and stealing cases of drinks. Five boys, aged between 12 and 15, were charged.

“I couldn’t believe that was happening here, and they are so young,” said Santiago Wu, whose mother owns the store.

The two incidents are tiny pieces in a mosaic of youth crime that police and experts say is seeing younger and younger children sucked from the fringes of the criminal world into violent criminal acts.

Youth crime rates across the state are mostly either stable or trending down – with the exception of murder and some forms of assault.

Widespread use of encrypted phone apps and social media has allowed children to transition from misdemeanours into more serious violent criminal activity very swiftly, in some cases within weeks, experts say.

The Australian Federal Police warned a federal parliamentary committee last month that “Australia is at the crossroads of a tsunami of youth crime” as online platforms and tools become more secret, sophisticated and popular.

“It has certainly lowered the barrier to entry into organised crime,” says Detective acting Superintendent Jason Smith, acting head of Taskforce Falcon, the NSW Police squad charged with combating gang warfare and organised crime.

Of the 530 people arrested by Taskforce Falcon so far this year, almost 50 have been children, the youngest being 14. Most are being paid peanuts.

“Call it market forces or whatever you like, but the saturation of the market with young people willing to take on these roles has resulted in a drop in the amount of money being paid,” Smith says.

“We’ve got young people essentially throwing their life away for $500.

“The problem is that there is a never-ending supply of young people who are willing to become involved. These people are being exploited by organised crime figures living overseas because they’re cheap, and they’re expendable.”

Data collected by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) shows fewer young people are becoming entangled in the justice system than in recent decades.

“Young people today are much less likely to commit crimes,” Jackie Fitzgerald, executive director of BOCSAR, says.

It’s not accurate to speak in terms of a youth crime wave, despite the involvement of children in high-profile gangland hits, she says.

The latest figures, which cover up to June this year, paint a nuanced picture of youth crime across the state.

Central and inner south Sydney have the state’s highest youth crime rate, while the eastern suburbs have a higher youth crime rate per person than areas such as south-west Sydney and Blacktown.

This is because the city and the east are often entertainment or social destinations for young people and accessible by public transport, and the influx of young people – a tiny proportion of whom commit crimes – skews the numbers, BOCSAR says.

“The trend is steady, and if there is a tsunami of youth crime it hasn’t shown up in the numbers yet,” Alex Simpson, an associate professor of criminology at Macquarie University, says.

Fitzgerald says average youth crime rates in western and northern NSW are higher than almost all parts of Sydney.

“Sydney gets a lot of focus, but there are communities outside Sydney that are dealing with levels of victimisation and offending [that] are much higher,” she says.

“Many people in these communities have safety concerns that people in Sydney cannot relate to.”

The apparent uptick in the number of violent crimes, including murder and assault, which appeared to begin just before the COVID-19 pandemic, follows a decade of relatively few violent crimes being committed by young people.

“Over the last five years we’ve seen roughly 10 young people charged with murder, and that’s higher than we were seeing a decade ago,” Fitzgerald says. “But if we expand our view, we can see that 20 years ago, there were many more kids being charged with murder.”

The numbers of murders for which children are charged are small, usually fewer than a dozen a year, and therefore are barely visible in the overall crime statistics.

But the recent spike is concerning criminologists who are unsure whether the spate of violent crimes by children is an anomaly before a return to lower levels of violence, or something new.

“It is a post-COVID phenomena,” Associate Professor Garner Clancey, a criminologist at the University of Sydney, says.

“On the back of the pandemic we’ve got a whole new landscape that’s been affected by the ‘manosphere’, kids spending more time online, kids being de-schooled, the rise of the ‘crimfluencers’. Their exposure to anti-government commentary, pornography, deep fakes is much higher. Our prevention strategies need to be recalibrated.

“So it’s an interesting time and there are some novel aspects. There’s a general world on social media [of] ‘crimfluencers’ and people who are generating content built around a gangster lifestyle online.”

Clancey describes a globalised world of organised crime that has become wearily familiar to police over the past two years.

The model features the big bosses who remain offshore, outside the reach of Australian law enforcement. They co-ordinate crimes such as arson, theft and public-place shootings from encrypted apps, using a series of middlemen who are not connected to each other, before orders for crime jobs filter down to young people in NSW, who have no idea who they are working for.

In subsets of online culture, “posting and boasting” about relatively minor crimes on social media can act as a “calling card” for adult criminals to recruit them, he says.

“It is a bit like online grooming, but unlike with sex offending, there’s a sense of volition. The evidence suggests they go in with their eyes somewhat open.

“With the ‘posting and boasting’, it shows a willingness to do certain things, and shows they have certain skills. These acts require a degree of thinking and planning and executing, and you have to know how to do things, like steal a car or burn a tobacco shop.”

The grooming process can be alarmingly swift, Clancey says.

“From what we know, it’s definitely not years, more likely weeks or months. Sometimes quicker if there’s a bit of cash.”

Smith agrees, but says officers in Taskforce Falcon mostly encounter a “hybrid model” where calling card-style recruitment is accompanied by in-person approaches by criminals, or links via family members.

A caseworker who works with young people involved in gangland crimes in Sydney says family connections are probably the strongest indicator of involvement.

“In most cases with young offenders there is the cousin, or a parent, or sometimes a long-standing friendship network that provides the entree,” says the caseworker, who asked not be named because they are not permitted to speak publicly about their work.

“Apps are a tool but behaviours can be seeded, often quite early, by social life, family life and background.”

A BOCSAR report, published in December, sought to isolate which factors were most likely to bring children in NSW into contact with the justice system.

It used information from seven government departmental data sets, including the police, juvenile justice, health and education departments, and examined the anonymised records of all people born in NSW in 1998, 1999 and 2000.

Gender and Aboriginality were the biggest factors in whether pre-teens came into contact with the justice system, but as children grew into teenagers, school attendance became by far the strongest predictor of whether a young person would be involved in crime.

“By the age of 15, we see that the model is essentially only making predictions using school suspension data, indicating that observable behavioural indicators become increasingly influential in later adolescence.”

The most recent survey of young people in custody by government agency Youth Justice NSW found the majority of children who participated in the research had had one or both parents incarcerated.

New NSW bail laws have had a big impact on the number of young people being locked up in youth detention centres with a 34 per cent jump since April last year when the rules came into force. The laws removed some of the discretion from judges to grant bail for 14- to 17-year-olds if they had a previous property or car theft charge. Most of the young people detained by the state are on remand, not serving sentences.

“There are large numbers of young people churning through the system, but there is strong evidence that this does not actually reduce crime,” says Mindy Sotiri, the executive director of the Justice Reform Initiative, a research group at the University of NSW.

Sotiri cites examples of overseas reforms that focus on keeping young people out of detention, where they are liable to be influenced by other offenders, leading to reductions in youth crime.

In Scotland, the prison population of children is zero after reforms in 2024 shifted the focus from punishment to child welfare, and youth crime rates appear to be falling, though it is too early to assess the long-term effects.

“There absolutely has to be consequences [for youth offending] and there is a role for detention,” Sotiri says. “But the common thread running through success stories in this space is a recognition that punishing children is not how you reduce crime.”

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