Ellen Phiddian
Cosmos science journalist
The minimum age of criminal responsibility has become a hot-button issue in state and territory politics. But how well do people actually understand it? According to a West Australian study, the answer is “poorly”.
The study, published in The International Journal of Human Rights, draws on interviews from 69 members of the West Australian public.
According to lead author Dr Suzanne Rock, a criminologist at Edith Cowan University, 94% of participants “were unaware that children can be arrested, charged, remanded in custody, sentenced, and incarcerated as young as 10 years old”.
The minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) is the age at which a person is legally deemed capable of having committed a criminal offence.
In 2021, the United Nations recommended Australia raise the age to 14, but the federal government declined and referred the matter to the states and territories.
“More often than not, it’s young Indigenous people or young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who are being over-represented in our justice system,” Rock tells Cosmos.
The current minimum age of criminal responsibility in most Australian states remains 10, although many states are considering or have passed legislation to raise it to 12 or 14 in future.
Victoria raised the age to 12 earlier this year, while the Australian Capital Territory raised it to 14 in 2023.
The Northern Territory raised the minimum age to 12 in 2023, but the new Country Liberal Party government in October, days after being sworn in, passed a law to lower it back to 10.
“The public don’t know a lot about criminal justice and processes or kind of what happens within that sphere, particularly in youth justice,” says Rock.
“We know from the research, though, that once we inform the public or participants about the issues that we’re talking about, they’re able to inform their opinions and decisions.
“And generally, they’re a lot more lenient than you’d be led to believe from what you see in the media.”
The research team asked criminology students to interview adults they knew, but weren’t close with, to gather data for the study.
The interviews were conducted in 2021. Subjects were mostly (70%) female, and almost half (49%) were under 30. Participants didn’t have any professional experience or education related to the justice system, but the group was more well-educated than the national average, with most participants having, or completing, a university degree.
Interviewers asked participants about their childhood, the age at which they thought they attained maturity, and their thoughts on the minimum age of criminal responsibility. Towards the end of each interview, the interviewers gave participants a factsheet with the UN recommendations and comparisons of Australia to other countries.
Rock says that 65 of the 69 participants didn’t know the MACR was 10 years old in Western Australia.
“The reactions from that were one of the more interesting things from the research, for me anyway, because they were using words like ‘shocked’ and ‘outrageous’ and ‘ludicrous’ when they found out that it was 10 years old.”
Most participants believed the MACR should lie between 12-18.
“There was confusion, and it’s legitimate confusion, as to why there were differences between social responsibilities or things like the age of consent being 16, and criminal responsibility being 10,” says Rock.
Rock says that recent publicity may have changed public understandings of the MACR, compared to when the data from this study was gathered. Understanding might also vary from state to state.
“There’s been so much in the media – it’s been quite widely publicised in the news, particularly around the Northern Territory, raising the age to 12 and then coming back down again to 10, which was really disappointing,” she says.
“It would be interesting to do further research into that now, maybe Australia-wide, to see what those understandings were.”
Despite believing the age should be raised, most participants in the study didn’t think there was much they could do to achieve this.
“For me, that was quite telling – that the public don’t realise the power that they have to effect change,” says Rock.
“It’s about realising it doesn’t always take you going to protests, or putting a lot of time into it, for people who are time-poor.
“It can just be an email that’s sent to your local MP – that’s one way to get involved and get the ball rolling. Even sharing things as well on social media to get the message out there.”
