While most of the country’s 11-year-olds spent yesterday meeting their new teachers and settling in for a new school year, one boy was familiarising himself with the inside of a cell – his new home for the foreseeable future.
Believed to be the youngest person ever charged with murder in Western Australia, the Indigenous boy (who cannot be named) appeared at Perth Children’s Court in the morning via video link from Banksia Hill Juvenile Detention Centre – the state’s only children’s jail – with his father by his side.
It was around the same time his peers would have been enjoying recess.
He and three men are accused of murdering a 26-year-old man, who was stabbed to death in the early hours of January 27 outside the Esplanade train station.
As the boy fiddled with a piece of paper, his father displayed the tender touches only a parent can get away with, gently brushing a strand of hair from his son’s face and whispering to him behind his cupped hand, News Limited reports.
Top Comments
It's hard to close "the gap" when children are free to do whatever they want whenever they want.....its too late for the family to pretend they care now!
Poverty is not an excuse for murder, sorry. And it's all very well to describe this kid's dad exhibiting gentle gestures toward him - but this kid must have been modelled some awful behaviour to have behaved like that. And whose fault is it that this kid was wandering the streets at 3 am? Why are you excusing Indigenous parents from the most basic of parenting? And how about some empathy for the victim (also Aboriginal)?
Couldn't agree more. Lack of personal responsibility would have to be our biggest challenge going forward in our society - whether we're talking about binge drinking, domestic violence, aggression, crime, anti-social behavour. For every bad act, there's a do-gooder there ready and willing to make an excuse for the person behaviour, oh, he was drinking, she was on drugs, oh, they had a bad childhood, this person's poor, this person didn't have blah blah blah.
When it all boils down to it, we make far too many excuses for people's behaviour and don't make them accountable for their actions. If we have any hope of addressing the really serious aggression and violent issues in our society, then we need to make people accountable.