Thursday, 20 November 2025

 Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (22:41): (2168) My adjournment tonight is for the Premier. The Premier has been crowing about her backward plan for children as young as 14 to face adult courts and adult jail sentences up to and including life. Now this week she has name-dropped Scotland’s violence reduction unit, but what she has proposed this week bears little resemblance to that integrated model. The Scottish Violence Reduction Unit is one piece of a comprehensive child-centred system. Scotland has adopted a whole-of-system approach that keeps children out of courts and out of custody wherever possible. Practitioners across Scotland are required to work together – schools, health, social work and police – to support families and take action at the first signs of difficulty, not wait for crisis and then punish. In Scotland matters involving children are dealt with through the children’s hearings system, a lay, welfare-oriented tribunal that brings together the child, their family and agencies. Only a small minority of children are ever prosecuted in criminal courts in front of judges. When secure placement is needed children go to secure care units, not prisons. The policy intent is to avoid detention entirely where possible. Under-18s in Scotland are being removed from young offender institutions so they are not held in prison settings. Even serious violent youth crime is framed as the behaviour of children with high and complex needs, with an emphasis on rehabilitation, intensive community and secure care supports and compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Detention is only a last resort, for the shortest time possible.

As the Premier has observed, this is the approach that will actually work to bring down youth crime. Scotland has invested comprehensively in diversion, family support, mental health and drug and alcohol treatment, so serious offending is addressed as a symptom of unmet need and trauma, not an excuse to lock children away. Criminology evidence overwhelmingly tells us that pushing more 14- to 17-year-olds into the adult system increases reoffending, entrenches trauma and disproportionately harms Aboriginal children and children from marginalised communities. It does not make our community safer; it just hides kids in cells and calls that a solution. You cannot hold up Scotland as your inspiration while pushing children into adult courts and life sentences. You cannot import the violence reduction language while rejecting the core of the Scottish model, that children in trouble are still children and that detention must be truly a last resort for the shortest possible time in child-appropriate settings, never an adult prison. The action I seek is that the Premier scrap her plan to expose children to adult courts and life sentences and instead bring back to this Parliament a genuine Scottish-style whole-of-system reform package that treats children as children, tackling violence as it should through prevention, support and secure care.