0
0
Australians like to pick on the powerless. Older Australians in particular exemplify this trait in the demonising of youth crime. Let’s get one thing straight, the political and societal campaigns against this apparent scourge are not about changing things but about punishment and revenge. The vast majority of us have never been personally affected by youth crime but take up the cudgel anyway out of spite or some such motivation. Those who vote for tougher penalties are not interested in solving what lies at the core of criminality but rather in gaining satisfaction from punishing perpetrators. Youth crime is a trope. Children, as a group, are generally powerless to combat such societal moves, as they aren’t organised and have no social voice.
Politicians Exploiting Youth Crime Fears
In the recent Queensland state election, we saw billboards emblazoned with the smiling smarmy faces of LNP candidates and the slogan – “Adult Crime, Adult Time,” This naked appeal to middle class voters and their fears re-the sanctity of property and person was front and centre in the campaign for election. The facts, however, do not support these societal paranoias, as:
“Youth crime rates have plummeted in Queensland despite claims from both major parties that the state is in the grip of a youth crime crisis. University of Queensland criminologist Renee Zahnow said there was “absolutely unanimous” academic consensus that both of these claims were false.
“There’s no data to suggest that the rates of youth crime are spiralling out of control in Queensland or indeed anywhere in Australia,” Associate Professor Zahnow said.”
Channel 7 Youth Crime Click Bait Agenda
Don’t let the facts get in the way of telling a good story. Especially, as the declining free to air TV networks serve up a constant click bait diet of sensationalism in their news broadcasts and on social media. Channel 7 is the main protagonist of this editorial policy. I call it anxiety porn for old people, as the target audience gets outraged by the one incident, from a population in the millions, of violent home invasion or such like occurring that day or week. Don’t get me wrong, acts of violence are shocking but in the modern world it is a number’s game. Playing upon people’s fears by disproportionately highlighting such things is all about selling newspapers and getting eyeballs on screens so that the network can sell advertising. It is not a balanced reflection of what is happening within a community and it is designed to spark outrage and fear. The election campaign arms of the political parties come along behind to feed like carrion on the mood of the community.
This is how false narratives are established in populations of people. Stuff like youth crime gets blown out of all proportion.
Fears, Fences & Crime Figures Do Not Equate
I have personally visited the homes and properties of thousands of Queenslanders, many of them retirees, through my work. This has enabled me to hear first hand their voiced concerns about home invasion and burglaries. I have seen the fences, locked gates and met their guard dogs. One would think that there was a tsunami of crime being perpetrated across the suburbs. However, a look at the police and insurance report data does not back this up. It is a political and media beat up. The facts do not support the community consensus about youth crime and or crime more generally. This is a psychological manifestation enmasse, a shared false perception. What lies at the root of it? I know from personal experience that this paranoia increases with the size of the property. Those properties, visited with bigger estates, are much more concerned about possible violations upon their homes than the average 0.0632 hectare block resident. It is a well known fact that with greater wealth comes greater responsibility and this translates in many cases to a greater worry about security.
Being Safe At Home
Everybody wants to be safe in their home, this is a given. Cui bono? Who benefits from promulgating a false narrative about the chances of becoming a victim of youth crime? The insurance industry immediately springs to mind. Steel fencing and gate manufacturers and retailers are other beneficiaries of a belief in a crime wave of home invasions. There are many homes around the suburbs now where it is impossible to access the front door without first being manually granted entry via a locked gate from the perimeter of the property. In large parts, however, I think that this paranoia has ben fed from the fact that many of us imbibe a diet of social media via our devices. The content we glean is generalised and not local usually. There is a diminishing presence of local community organisations for us to interact with. Thus, many folk live inside their own walled bubble consuming digital stuff from far and wide. The social media phenomenon is an American thing. Americans, as we can see from the current election over there, are all pretty much batshit crazy and very paranoid. The overall flavour of social media and its algorithms are driven by generating outrage. The recent global pandemic pushed many people over the edge into a belief in conspiracy theories. The result is that more and more when you walk around the suburbs you are assaulted by the barking of dogs through fences and gates. God help the posties and metre readers.
Security cameras poke out from the porches and front walls of homes spying on potential transgressors with their unblinking eyes. This is the world we live in circa 2024. Welcome to friendly Australia in the city.
Picking The Youth Demographic As A Target For Disaffection By Older Folk
The demonising of youth crime is predicated on a couple of things, I suspect. The inability of young people to fight back and dispel the false narrative makes them an easy and attractive target for those with an axe to grind. On a broader human basis older people, often, envy the young for their youth and beauty. This generational jealousy is understandable, as the grass definitely looks greener for the young. Ageing offers a less certain future, one that is shorter and full of decay and degeneration. One group seems to have opportunity and the other a much more limited future. Therefore, any sniff of bad behaviour is seen as a sinful waste of all that opportunity. Bitter individuals derive satisfaction from revenge and punishment. Remember Robodebt and the community support for this pernicious attack on welfare recipients. Still, no politician or public servant has been brought to justice over this. I digress, however, to return to the point. It is, in many ways, a natural reaction when hearing of a brutal crime committed against the innocent to get riled up and want redress – an eye for an eye stuff. This is where this adult crime, adult time sloganeering comes in. This is because this policy is not going to meaningfully deter offenders. Do you really think that in the heat of the moment some damaged kid is going to stop and cooly weigh up the consequences of his or her actions? No, this is designed to sate the community’s desire for revenge. It will destroy a few more already damaged lives of young individuals but it will not do much more than provide state sanctioned vengeance for a tiny minority of crimes committed. The vast majority of folk unaffected by youth crime can feel good about some individual being punished for a long time for their serious crime.
The thing about this state government crack downs on youth crime is that they actually achieve very little apart from condemning a few unfortunates to lifetime’s of incarceration.
How About Fixing The Problem?
If we really want to get beyond people committing crimes then we need to see criminality as a dysfunctional state. We need to raise the societal debate above the private property concerns of the electorate. Chucking lots of people into prisons and running them as cheaply as possible is not going to solve the root cause of criminality. All you are doing is training worse criminals and setting up a breeding ground for entrenched anti-societal attitudes. Punishing already damaged folk and condemning them to lives as losers on the fringes of society has been going for hundreds of years with little to show for it. It costs vast sums of money to run this incarceration system and it does not shift the dial in terms of eradicating criminality.
“Spending on the Australian criminal justice system is the highest it has ever been with governments spending $21 billion in 2021-2022 alone. The construction and maintenance of prisons cost the Australian taxpayer over $6 billion in the last year – an increase in $2 billion over the past five years. This equates to $405 per prisoner per day, or $147,900 per year. It is expected that this number will continue to increase as does the number of prisoners. Australian prisons are almost at 100 per cent capacity and new facilities will need to be built in order to house the growing number of prisoners.”
Gaslighting The Youth Of Australia
The demonisation of youth crime has gained pace and intensified, as we have become an ageing population in Australia. More oldies bitching and complaining about degenerate young Aussies. “Back in my day we would have given them a good whipping with a cat of nine tails.” “The youth of today don’t know how good they have got it.” Channel 7 is there with its lurid crime wave video segments on social media to enrage and shock its audience. The networks tell us that they are dependent upon millions of Aussies losing money on the punt so that corporate bookmakers can advertise their services morning and night on our TV screens. This is the moral equation that we live with in the modern Australia. Homes are vastly inflated so that our banks can earn around $200, 000 profit on each home loan on average. You don’t think these unaffordable residential property prices are contributing to the security paranoia around home ownership in Australia? These scams require a villain and most Aussies are too dumb and timid to take on the big end of town.
The scapegoat of choice are the young and youth crime. The faceless men in suits are screwing you financially so you take out your frustrations on someone way down the food chain instead. Gaslighting the youth of Australia.
The Real Facts On Crime
“Australian Bureau of Statistics data showed that Queensland’s youth crime rate had halved across the past 14 years.
Data from the Queensland Police Service, the Queensland Statistician’s Office, and the Australian Institute of Criminology also demonstrated clear downward trends.
Youth crime rates have fallen in every single state and territory, including Queensland, which remains middle of the pack with the fourth highest rate.”
- (ABC Radio Brisbane, 13 Oct 2024)
This information is available via our national broadcaster the ABC, who has done the work for you in looking up the official data. However, lots of Aussies tune into the Murdoch press instead , which owns all the newspapers in our cities and Sky News Australia. These cesspits of distorted media are driven by vested interests and report what their masters tell them. Dumb Australians take everything on face value lacking the nous to question their sources. Fools are happy to believe the BS they are fed on a daily basis. Fox News is the pinnacle of this right wing alternative news universe, where reality rarely touches down. Stupid is as stupid does.
Think About The Collective Outcome
What do you think is going to be the upshot of our political parties, media and public gaslighting young Australians? All these paranoid home owners and retirees with their high steel fences and barking dogs believing that there is an epidemic of youth crime threatening their possessions and private wealth? Think about it! The division within our nation that this is creating. The haves and the have nots. Political scumbags exploiting fear and divisiveness – Peter Dutton. This stuff will come back and bite us all on the arse hard. The boy who cried wolf. We need to call out the moral depravity of Channel 7 and the sensationalised youth crime porn on our screens. Call out the BS being peddled by state politicians in particular about this fraudulent beat up. Most importantly, have a good hard look at ourselves and what we indulge in via social media. There is no youth crime wave happening in Australia. Let’s start putting resources into giving youth something to do, especially Indigenous youth. Put aside the racism and look at what is available for these young people. We are a nation and not just a bunch of individuals and nuclear families looking after our own interests. We need to create opportunity for our young folk – nurture through positive stuff rather than indulge in negativity and vengeance porn.
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
©MidasWord
