Opinion Piece – What We Do and How We Know What is Needed

Cries and Screams: A Trauma-Informed Response to Youth Crime in the NT

In our work with young people at Anglicare NT, we start from the premise that there is no such thing as a bad child. It is sometimes a difficult premise to maintain. We too are adults and products of our society, so we understand the statements in various media (including social media) attaching responsibility for the “crime wave” to the young offenders, those “undisciplined brats” who should just go home and behave themselves.

We try to be disciplined in maintaining the premise that there is no such thing as a bad child so that we can look beyond the behaviours and listen to the needs that the behaviours are crying out for. An example illustrates the point. Does a baby who cries because of an unmet need get labelled as a ‘bad baby’? Of course she is not undisciplined, evil or dysfunctional. She does what she needs to do. Perhaps her survival is at stake. The cries however are neither convenient nor pleasant. The cries are a call to action and lead us not to blame the baby or discipline her, but to meet the need that caused it.

As a child gets older things become more complex. We assume the child has the freedom and responsibility to make choices. It is often their ‘choices’ that don’t agree with our values, and elicit our judgement that they are bad children. It is complex because it is partly true. They do have more freedom and responsibility as they develop from babies to adults. But they do not have the same abilities as an adult, no matter how much they look like or act like adults, and even less so if their development has been hampered by trauma, poverty, violence, health issues, addiction and other social disadvantages.

Young people are not adults. The higher functions of a human brain are not fully developed until the mid-20s. The principle in the example of the baby remains true; unmet needs result in cries and screams. The cries and screams of children and adolescents with unmet needs are not played out in placid and convenient behaviours. The behaviours will often be disagreeable, anti-social and sometimes illegal. These are not young people amusing themselves with risky and thrilling night-time activities just to have fun at other peoples’ expense. They are surviving; that is, meeting their own survival needs in what we call mal-adaptive ways, perhaps because they don’t have, or have exhausted, the adaptive responses to adversity that we all use.

A case review – meet one of our young people with a history of trauma and unmet developmental needs (and remarkable self-awareness):

“Mum and Dad have always dumped me since I was small. No-one’s there for me, no one cares for me. I wish I didn’t exist, I’m unwanted, I was a mistake, that’s why Mum and Dad don’t want me. Mum only cares about grog. Mum and everyone around me is mad and a mess. They all just drink their life away, they get beat up by their men and then one of them gets locked up. What kind of life is that?! I look after myself, I’ve always looked after myself. I don’t need anyone. I went to hospital because, well… I didn’t want to let myself die.  I really hate my life. Honest. And I hate this place, I want to get out of this town. Honest.”

This young person’s experience of the world has been shaped by instability and an absence of any consistent, attuned and nurturing adults. Her parents both used alcohol and extreme violence, and her network of safe and caring adults was compromised as a result. She was eventually removed by child protection and placed in Out of Home Care, but the Out Of Home Care system was unable to fulfil her needs and so she returned home.

So what is the connection between this kind of childhood and the anti-social, criminal behaviour plaguing some of our communities? One young person identifies the answer very well: “I don’t care if I get locked up and go back to Don Dale. I hate my life, honest. I might as well just go break in cos my life is #$@&%*!? anyway.’’ Rather than label this young person as ill-disciplined or evil, we look deeper and find a different story, which we begin to tell back to them:

• you grew up unsure if you were important enough for anyone to care about you, or knowing you weren’t because this was consistently demonstrated to you;
• when you cried or sought attention or behaved badly, your lack of importance to the people around you (or their capacity to let you know you were important) was reinforced by further rejection;
• being treated unfairly (something that usually happens many times every day), gets too much for you some days and there’s no one to listen even if you could articulate it, or no one who will do anything about it even if they could;
• when you have no options left, no choices to make, no power left in your life, there is one choice you still have the power to make. That choice may take you to a place you shouldn’t want to go, but it actually looks OK from where you now stand – choices such as to “do a break-in, go to court and go to Youth Justice Detention (‘Juvey)”.

On many occasions, hearing an alternate version of their story from an adult who is trying to tune in to their experience helps young people make a better choice. Mostly these young people regularly express that they want to do the right thing. But when you have very limited choices, the loss of freedom in Youth Justice Detention (‘Juvey) is inconsequential. When you have only instability, the routine of time in detention looks appealing. And three meals a day with a place to sleep feels like a place to belong – even with the reputation of our juvenile detention centres.

What is needed.

These young people must have their real needs met. They don’t need smart phones or branded shoes. Their needs are survival needs, emotional and human needs. Their behaviours are their cries for the things they need to survive: the more desperate the needs, the louder the screams. When we as a community insist that these behaviours stop through growling and punishment, suspension from school, bad press and social media defamation, legal prosecution or diversionary measures, etc., we are asking young people to silence their cry for survival. It is a biological fact that when a severely neglected baby stops crying, she starts to shut down emotionally and physically. These desperate screams from the young people in our communities can not stop until we listen to them; until their essential needs are met.

Of course young people’s crimes are not acceptable in our community and must be addressed. We’re advocating that they are addressed in the proper way. Sometimes the crimes are responded to with strategies that divert the young person away from the criminal justice system, and supports are put into place to meet the needs being expressed. We should be insisting that the diversion occurs, well before anyone has to suffer the indignity and fear that results from being a victim of crime. Do we want to continue to wait until the cries and screams turn into crimes before the help is provided?

There are people in the Northern Territory who know what is required to end the “crime wave” (sic), but they are not in government. They are not even adults. They are young, hurting, surviving. Some adults are listening and learning. We need to keep listening so that we can learn to respond in ways that make a lasting difference for young people. So that real needs are met. We need brave adults who are prepared to engage, to see the world from a young person’s perspective and to engage with them, consistently, kindly, thoughtfully and firmly. We need adults to act in ways that aren’t always intuitive but that are informed by young people, by evidence and by science. This approach is known as ‘trauma-informed’ practice. We also call it “respect, listening and hope”.

Chris Warren, Intensive Youth Support Service Program Manager, Anglicare NT
David Pugh, CEO, Anglicare NT