07/12/2025
There is a moment in every public conversation about children’s imprisonment when language becomes a weapon. Governments call uprisings “disturbances”, media outlets describe frightened children as “rioters”, and the public is invited to see young people in crisis as threats rather than as children who have been deeply harmed.
That framing tells us far more about the adults in power than it does about the children locked inside these prisons.
Last week at Banksia Hill Detention Centre in Western Australia, six children, some as young as twelve, climbed onto the roof of the facility. Aerial footage showed them removing vents and pieces of metal roofing before throwing items to the ground below.
By the next morning, three of the children had been transferred to Unit 18, the notorious section of Casuarina maximum-security adult prison. Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia has already indicated that the remaining children are likely to follow.
The official response was swift and familiar: condemnation, disbelief, and an insistence that the behaviour is “inexcusable”. The decision to move children into an adult prison has been framed as necessary and justified.
Yet, there has been no reflection on how a situation involving children, not adults, escalated to this point, nor on what conditions push a child to climb onto a roof in the first place.
The truth is far more uncomfortable – these were not acts of defiance but of desperation. Children do not take such risks when they feel safe, supported, or heard. They do so when all other avenues have failed them.
NOT ISOLATED INCIDENTS
The maximum-security facility that incarcerates boys and girls aged between 10 and 17 has been the site of repeated crises. In 2023, a major rooftop protest occurred after prolonged lockdowns lasting up to 23 hours a day.
These lockdowns were not brief or exceptional – they were routine. Children were confined to their cells for almost an entire day, for weeks at a time, with virtually no access to education, programs, or fresh air.
When the situation escalated that year, the response was not care, but force.
One young person later told NITV what happened when Special Operations officers arrived:
They were just saying put your hands behind your head and lay on the floor, if anyone gets up we are firing.”
One of them pointed the laser right on a boy’s neck, she said. “I was scared for him… They made us crawl to them… and then they strip searched us.”
The same child recalled at least four officers with tasers and three with guns, warning that any sudden movement would be met with electric shock.
It is impossible to read that testimony and maintain the illusion that these incidents are about “bad behaviour”. These are children responding to environments that would break most adults.
When the state responds to their distress with weapons, isolation, transfers, and strip searching, the message is unmistakable – your pain is a problem to be controlled, not understood.
Children on the roof were not making a spectacle – they were screaming for help in the only way left to them.
And what do we do? We watch as the very adults who have perpetrated the violence against them drag their small bodies off the roof, only to silence them again by locking them in the bowels of an adult prison.
The response is not protection but punishment, a continuation of the same violence that pushed them onto the roof in the first place.
SILENCING WITNESSES
Banksia Hill is not alone. Across Australia, young people have been trying to communicate the reality of their conditions in every way available to them.
Last year in Tasmania, a child detained at Ashley Youth Detention Centre wrote a letter to the Premier, pleading for change. The letter described constant isolation and neglect:
Even the cows in the paddocks next to Ashley have more freedom than us.”
It should have been a national scandal. Instead, it was treated as a passing human interest story, another sad footnote in a system that has long accepted the suffering of certain children as inevitable.
In Queensland, the Government has gone even further by introducing gag clauses that prevent organisations from speaking publicly about conditions in the youth justice system.
Rather than address the harm, the state has attempted to silence those who witness it.
When children are punished for speaking out, and those who advocate for them are restricted from telling the truth, the outcome is predictable: the harm continues unchecked.
NATIONAL SHIFT
What is happening in Western Australia cannot be separated from the broader political climate. Across the country, governments are moving toward increasingly punitive youth justice policies:
- Queensland’s “adult crime, adult time” laws
- Victoria’s “Adult Time for Violent Crime” legislation, which passed Parliament 4 December 2025
- South Australia’s Recidivist Young Offenders and Street Gangs Legislation
These reforms are framed as solutions to public safety, yet they consistently ignore the overwhelming evidence that youth incarceration does not reduce crime, it entrenches it.
The children inside these facilities are not there because they pose an ongoing danger to the community.
They are there because governments have systematically underfunded the services that keep families intact and communities safe, replacing housing, care and support with surveillance, policing and punishment.
Child imprisonment is not a last resort – it has become the only resort for children who have been abandoned by every other structure.
What is unfolding in Western Australia is not occurring in a vacuum. Across the continent, governments are copying and pasting each other’s most harmful youth justice policies in a race to appear “tough” rather than invested in evidence or care.
Victoria is the latest jurisdiction to join this wave, introducing its “Adult Time for Violent Crime” legislation, a policy ripped almost word-for-word from the Queensland LNP’s “adult crime, adult time” agenda.
CATASTROPHIC HARM
This is not coincidence – it is a deliberate choice to replicate a model that has already caused catastrophic harm to children in Queensland, where children have been locked in adult watch houses, denied education and therapeutic care, and treated as disposable in the state’s political war on youth.
In Victoria, the rhetoric is the same: talk of “law and order”, the invocation of “victims”, and a performative insistence that harsher sentencing will somehow produce safety.
This week, Ministers celebrated the disruption of Question Time by a protester allegedly gluing themselves to the public gallery, using it as another opportunity to double down on the Bill.
They promised they would not leave Parliament until the law passed. They blamed the Opposition for “delaying” its implementation. The message was blunt – symbolic defiance will be met with legislative force.
But behind the theatrics sits a chilling truth – the “Adult Time” law does nothing to address the causes of harm or violence. It simply expands the state’s power to imprison young people for longer periods of time, putting them on accelerated pathways into adult prisons.
It entrenches cycles of trauma rather than breaking them. And, as Queensland has shown, once these powers exist, governments reach for them more and more readily, sweeping up not only children who cause harm, but children in crisis, children who are poor, disabled, Aboriginal, or already heavily policed.
Victoria’s decision to import this model reveals a national shift toward punishment politics over child wellbeing.
Instead of strengthening community supports, cultural programs, disability services, or family housing, the things that actually keep children safe, governments are investing in harsher sentencing regimes designed for headlines rather than outcomes.
What Queensland began, Victoria is now accelerating, and children will pay the price.
SOCIAL AND MORAL RESPONSIBILITY
These punitive shifts are not abstract or distant, their consequences are visible in real time at Banksia Hill. The transfer of the children from Banksia Hill Detention Centre to an adult prison is now being justified as necessary for order and safety.
But transferring traumatised young people into an adult maximum-security facility is not a safeguard, it is state-sanctioned harm.
Unit 18 has been condemned nationally and internationally for extreme isolation, inadequate mental health support, high rates of self-injury, and repeated breaches of human rights.
Moving children into such conditions does not resolve distress – it magnifies it.
If we continue to treat children’s pain as a disciplinary issue rather than a social and moral responsibility, we will keep seeing the same outcomes – more protests, more lockdowns, more injury, and eventually, more funerals.
INVEST IN EVIDENCE AND CARE
If we are serious about community safety, we must invest in what actually works:
- 24/7 therapeutic and cultural supports
- stable housing
- disability care
- family and community-based alternatives
- and Aboriginal-led solutions that keep children connected to culture and kin.
None of this is beyond our capacity. What is lacking is political will.
Children do not climb onto prison roofs because they are dangerous. They climb because the ground beneath them has never been safe.
The question is not why they climbed.
The question is why we still refuse to listen.
THE AUTHORS
Debbie Kilroy OAM was first criminalised at the age of 13 and spent more than two decades in and out of women’s and children’s prisons. Driven to end the criminalisation and imprisonment of girls and women, Debbie established Sisters Inside, as well as her law firm, Kilroy & Callaghan Lawyers.
Tabitha Lean is an abolition activist, writer and storyteller who organises to disrupt and dismantle the colonial project, abolish the prison industrial complex, and annihilate racial capitalism.
Editor: Alison Barrett
Our Source: Croakey
