Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/The Guardian
You don’t live with mum and dad. School has always been hard – keeping up, fitting in. Then lockdown hits. Classes move online but you don’t have internet access. You fall behind. One day, you skip school altogether.
At a shopping centre, you meet a couple of kids. They seem friendly. They hand you a machete. By the end of the day, you’ve committed a serious, high-profile crime.
This isn’t a hypothetical. Adam Deacon, a child and youth forensic psychiatrist with nearly two decades of experience in Victoria’s youth justice system, says he’s worked with hundreds of children who have experienced such a “sliding door moment” – a split-second decision that changes their life for ever.
“You couldn’t have foreseen this a day earlier, if not for their certain vulnerabilities,” he says.
Such vulnerabilities, Deacon says, were intensified by Melbourne’s prolonged Covid-19 lockdowns – and are now surfacing in crime statistics.
Over the past 18 months, the state’s crime rate has continued to rise, with what has been dubbed a “youth crime crisis” dominating parliamentary debates, news bulletins and commercial radio. The Coalition opposition claims crime in the state is “out of control” and labelled Victoria the “lawless state”, while the government has responded by introducing several new laws, including tighter bail conditions, introducing a “post and boast” offence and later “adult time for violent crime”.
Victoria police in December attributed a 9% rise in the crime rate in the 12 months to September 2025 to repeat offenders, responsible for 25% of crime, with those aged 12 to 17 a particular concern.
A small cohort of 1,176 young offenders were arrested a combined 7,075 times, while children were responsible for the majority of robberies, carjackings and home invasions, police said.
Deacon acknowledges the harm suffered by victims and the trauma they’ve endured but says the only way to prevent such offending is by understanding the children behind it.
Through his work with the community forensic youth mental health service – an early-intervention program for at-risk young people – Deacon sees children at every stage, from those showing “red flag” behaviours such as aggression, fire-lighting or animal cruelty to those in custody.
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While every child’s story is different, almost all share a background of disadvantage, trauma, abuse or neglect, Deacon says. Many come from families with criminal backgrounds, substance abuse or mental illness, others have lost parents and are either living with relatives or in the child protection system.
“When you know their origins, you wonder how they’ve survived in life at all,” he says.
Most also live with complex neurological disorders or disabilities. In recent years, Deacon says, “more and more” children presenting with offending behaviour have autism or ADHD, often diagnosed only when they are referred to the early intervention program or when entering custody. This group, he adds, was particularly affected by Melbourne’s 2020 and 2021 lockdowns, among the longest in the world.
“We all struggled with lockdown to varying degrees, but then we got back on our horse and kept going, whereas these kids haven’t,” Deacon says.
He says he has worked with children who did “literally no education” during lockdown because they lacked stable housing, laptops or internet access. It meant they left school and “haven’t been able to return”.
Deacon says many have been “lured or actively recruited” into organised crime – paid a “fairly good pot of money” to steal cars or carry out firebombings. A parliamentary inquiry into tobacco regulation in 2024 heard children were being paid as little as $500 to commit arson amid the tobacco wars.
“That wasn’t something we were talking about 10 years ago,” Deacon says, attributing the shift to mobile phones, which he says enable organised crime figures to “push a button and get the job done”.
He says he’s also worried about young people’s exposure to inappropriate content online, including violence and pornography. Deacon points to the Netflix series Adolescence, which depicts a 13-year-old arrested for killing a female classmate, saying he’s spoken with many children exposed to similar influences.
The show, he says, also captures the complexity behind youth offending – the “dissonance” of empathising with the killer and his family while confronting the grave harm he has inflicted.
In November, the Victorian government introduced “adult time for violent crime” laws, allowing children who commit serious violent offences to be dealt with by the county court, where they face much longer sentences than the three-year maximum in children’s court. The move was criticised by legal and human rights groups. Deacon says while custody has a role, young offenders shouldn’t be locked away “as if they don’t exist”.
At the same time, the government announced $19.8m to establish the violence reduction unit (VRU), modelled on the 2005 Glasgow initiative that led to radical change in a city once dubbed western Europe’s murder capital.
This week, the government announced $33m for youth early-intervention and community safety programs, including $26.7m for Deacon’s community forensic youth mental health service under the VRU.
The mental health minister, Ingrid Stitt, said the funding would allow the team to continue its important work, give young people “earlier access to the right supports” and keep them “on the right track for a bright future”. Deacon says the funding will allow the service to see children earlier and take referrals from more services, including child protection. It will also cover a new pilot program with schools, targeting children in year 5 to 7 who are showing concerning behaviours.
“It’s easier and convenient to adopt a polarised position around children who engage in these behaviours and to brand them as ‘bad children,’” he says.
“If we think about the why and realise that these behaviours haven’t emerged from nothing … then we can start thinking about how we can intervene earlier and give them a chance.”
• In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.
