The National Child Commissioner says media coverage on youth crime is "creating more and more fear".
Appearing on ABC RN, Anne Hollonds, who will address the National Press Club on Wednesday, said when it came to the media she had observed "a lack of interest in the solutions to the problem".
"There's a lot of reporting of apparent youth crime...lots of headlines like 'teenage dirt bags' and 'kindergarten crims'," she said.
"We know crime sells… But there's not a lot of digging in and asking, 'well, why are these children offending, and what can we do to prevent that?'"...
She reiterated her comments from July that the media often recycled the same footage of any crime that had taken place to instil fear.
"The media, in just reporting it again and again, in showing all the footage that we get from CCTV and dashcam and body cam and iPhones now, that's kind of creating more and more fear – which really is just escalating the pressure on the politicians to be tough," she said.
The Commissioner's comments echo those of chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal legal Service, Nerita Waight, who told National Indigenous Times the police has used media in Victoria to spread fear about a youth crime crisis, which resulted in the state government backtracking on their decision to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14-years-of-age.
"If they're committed to making communities stronger and safer, scaring people is not the way to go," Ms Waight said at the time.
"It's all too regular to see stories in the media attributed to anonymous police sources, but you never hear of any police being disciplined for actions like that."
Commissioner Hollonds also used her appearance on Wednesday to note she hadn't seen any appetite from the federal government for a "national coordination" on how the wellbeing of children is looked after in the country.
It comes after Labor voted against Independent Senator Lidia Thorpe's ultimately successful motion in the senate to provide more quarterly reporting on all deaths, self-harm and miscarriages and stillbirths in custody.
"The idea that the states and territories could fix this on their own has been misguided, we need to work together on it," Commissioner Hollonds said.
In the wake of a 17-year-old dying in custody in August, it was revealed Commissioner Hollonds, along with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Katie Kiss and the Official Representative to the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, Dr Hannah McGlade, wrote to WA Premier Roger Cook urging him to reform the youth detention system only two days before the tragedy.
Weeks later, Commissioner Hollonds and Kiss, along with Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay, held meetings with WA Premier Roger Cook and with representatives of the Law Society of Western Australia to discuss the crisis in the state's youth justice system.
"I am hoping that we may have reached a tipping point," Commissioner Hollonds said on Wednesday, "whereby the horrendous failures in these systems that we've seen – such as the two tragic suicides of children in youth detention recently, within less than a year, and other horrific stories – I'm hoping that there is an appetite for thinking 'well, we need to take a different approach'."
"We need to pivot towards the solutions that will focus on addressing the underlying causes, because just locking up these children is not a winning strategy at all for anybody."
