By Tim Stricklan, Hello Initiative Partnership Coordinator
In late 2023, Hello Initiative sat down with 18 young people with a diverse level of lived experience in Western Australia’s youth justice system (YJS). Among other things, we asked them about their experience going to court, navigating the YJS, how it felt to enter detention, and what they wished they had been told during their engagement with the YJS.
Young people said there is a cold, hostile, shameful, and impersonal feeling to youth justice processes, and that “no one’s listening”, hence the title of our report became, Nobody is Listening.
A system built for compliance, not for people
The young people we spoke to first encountered the justice system between the ages of five and 11, mostly through the experiences of a family member. By the time they were standing in a courtroom, most of them had been watching this system operate for years.
None of that familiarity had translated into understanding their rights, or feeling safe enough to exercise them. They described feeling like they had to agree with everything, not because they agreed, but because disagreeing felt dangerous. The system is not designed around helping the people inside it, it is designed around rewarding them for compliance.
The young people in this system disproportionately live with cognitive and behavioural disabilities, are or have been involved with child protection services, and face serious digital exclusion. WA’s YJS applies similar obligations to a 12-year-old in Kununurra as it does to a law-literate adult from Mount Lawley: regular reporting, court appearances with little notice, and compliance with complex order conditions.
Many of the questions these young people ask have clearly defined answers, and organisations exist to help them find those answers. The YJS has no clear or reliable procedures to point out the available services, leaving young people to navigate alone without a map. They frequently have no reliable phone, inconsistent internet access, and a dearth of trusted adults who understand how the system works. So they miss things. And when you miss things in a system built on compliance, the system treats that absence as wilful instead of as another symptom of the system failing them.
The voice deficit
Since 2019, Hello Initiative’s Mobile Support Project (MSP) has collected disused smartphones from the community, refurbished them, and placed them with children referred by frontline youth justice workers across WA. The program has supported over 870 young people. In 2024-25, 78 per cent of MSP participants completed their community order successfully (approximately a 14 per cent increase from the status quo, according to the DOJ Annual Report 24-25).
MSP costs a fraction of what detention costs – for every dollar invested, approximately $19 of costs are avoided. But the MSP was never just about compliance. It addresses the voice deficit. Giving a child a mobile device is one of the few moments the system extends something that resembles trust, respect, and responsibility.
These young people are not asking for the system to overlook their mistakes. They are asking to be treated as people who are capable of doing better, if given the chance.
The Nobody is Listening report identified several other ways to address the voice deficit: plain-language explanatory videos about court processes, a sensory support area at Perth Children’s Court for children who need it, and a community pantry expanding Hello Initiative’s Court Breakfast Project’s food relief. All three pilots are in different stages of development and are built directly from what young people asked for.
These are not radical reforms. They are the kind of practical changes that are only possible when someone stops and asks the right questions.
The role of the legal profession
Legal aid services were mentioned by young people, often in the same breath as long wait times and difficulty making contact. Lawyers who gave dedicated time were described as genuinely helpful. The problem is systemic scarcity and those who are available are stretched thin.
Beyond direct representation, Law Society members advise government, lead organisations, sit on boards, and set the tone for how legal processes are designed and communicated. That is a position of genuine influence over the conditions that Hello Initiative’s young people are navigating every day. Some practical expressions of that influence would be by donating disused company devices, funding the MSP or our other projects directly, or connecting us to decision-makers, all of which cost relatively little and have documented, measurable returns.
But the deeper ask is this: consider whether the systems you participate in are designed to be understood by the people subject to them. Ask whether the people making decisions about youth justice in WA have ever sat in a room and listened to a 14-year-old describe what it feels like to not know what is happening in their own court case. Advocate for the young people inside this system to be consulted, not just processed.
The young people we spoke to were articulate, thoughtful, and direct. They had clear ideas about what needed to change. They simply felt they hadn’t been heard. And if they feel like they haven’t been heard, they haven’t been. We know the system is difficult to navigate for adults, let alone for children.
Resources are stretched on all sides, but that is an argument to innovate within the YJS differently, not disengage. Hello Initiative is here for that conversation, and so are the young people who have been waiting to be part of it.
Hello Initiative’s Annual Report and the Nobody is Listening report are available at helloinitiative.org.au. We’d like to recognise the collaboration with Port School and Curtin University in the creation of the report. To get in touch about partnering with or supporting Hello Initiative, contact tim@helloinitiative.org.au.
