When Violence Hits Close to Home: Reflecting on Youth Crime and Community Safety
The news hit me like a punch to the gut yesterday. Two kids – a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old – stabbed to death in Cobblebank, not far from where I live here in Melbourne’s west. Twelve years old. That’s barely older than my daughter was just a few years back, when her biggest worry was whether she’d make the school basketball team.
I’ve been scrolling through the discussions online, and the range of emotions is palpable. There’s grief, obviously – how could there not be? There’s anger, frustration, and a deep sense that something is fundamentally broken in how we’re handling youth crime in this state. But what’s really getting to me is the feeling that we’re all talking past each other when we should be finding solutions.
The immediate response, predictably, has been calls for tougher sentences. Lock them up longer, charge them as adults, bring back the days when justice meant punishment. I get it, I really do. When something this horrific happens, the gut reaction is to want someone to pay, to feel like we’re doing something concrete to prevent it happening again. But here’s the thing that’s been nagging at me – if harsh punishment was the silver bullet, wouldn’t we have solved this already?
Someone in the discussion made a point that really resonated with me: our youth justice system is trying to do rehabilitation on the cheap, and failing at both punishment and reform. We’ve got kids cycling through underfunded facilities that neither deter them from reoffending nor give them the tools and support they need to build different lives. It’s the worst of both worlds.
The deeper I dig into this, the more I’m convinced we’re looking at this backwards. Everyone’s focused on what happens after kids commit violent crimes, but what about before? One commenter suggested that ending poverty would be step one – and they’re not wrong. When you’ve got families struggling to put food on the table, when kids are growing up in homes where violence is normalised, when there’s no hope of a different future, is it really surprising that some turn to gangs?
Walking through my local shopping centre last week, I watched a group of teenagers hanging around outside the food court. They weren’t doing anything wrong – just being kids – but I noticed how quickly adults moved past them, how security kept a close eye on them. We’ve created this environment where we’re simultaneously afraid of our young people and failing to support them. It’s a toxic combination.
The user who mentioned the need for “massive intervention support” on a family-by-family level is onto something. We need teachers who are properly resourced to identify kids at risk. We need social workers who can actually spend time with families instead of being overwhelmed with impossible caseloads. We need community programs that give kids alternatives to gang involvement. All of this costs money upfront, but surely it’s cheaper than the cost of violent crime – both in human terms and economically.
What frustrates me most is that this shouldn’t be a left-versus-right issue. Everyone wants safe communities. Everyone wants kids to have opportunities to build good lives. But we keep getting bogged down in ideological debates about whether we should be “tough on crime” or focus on rehabilitation, when the evidence suggests we need elements of both, properly funded and thoughtfully implemented.
Those two boys who died in Cobblebank deserved better. Their families deserve justice. But so do all the other kids out there who are at risk of either becoming victims or perpetrators of this kind of violence. We owe it to them to move beyond the knee-jerk reactions and start having serious conversations about prevention, intervention, and yes, appropriate consequences when prevention fails.
Maybe that means voting differently. Maybe it means volunteering with local youth programs. Maybe it means pushing our local members to prioritise long-term solutions over quick fixes that look good in the headlines but don’t actually work. What I do know is that we can’t keep having the same conversations every time tragedy strikes, expecting different results. These weren’t just statistics – they were children, and they deserved a chance to grow up.