Australia: the country where children are too young for Instagram, but old enough for prison
By Charli Anderson
While there is no denying that kids should be protected from the potential harms of social media, the Albanese Government’s bold approach here contrasts starkly with its inaction on another key pillar of child safety - the age of criminal responsibility, writes Charli Anderson.
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Over the weekend, Prime Minister Albanese announced plans to enact further legislation to double maximum penalties for tech companies captured under the Social Media Minimum Age ban (SMMA) and strengthen the eSafety Commissioner’s information gathering powers. The announcement comes one week after the United Kingdom’s government outlined plans to introduce its own social media ban for under-16s, dubbed “Australia-Plus” for its similar, yet extended scope.
“Australia is leading the world in our efforts to keep kids and young people safe online”, Prime Minister Albanese said. “However, it is clear that eSafety needs more tools in their belt to take on these billion-dollar social media companies and hold them to account.”
While there is no denying that kids should be protected from the potential harms of social media, the Albanese Government’s bold approach here contrasts starkly with its inaction on another key pillar of child safety - the age of criminal responsibility.
In most jurisdictions in Australia (except for the ACT and Victoria), children as young as 10 years old can be arrested, prosecuted and sent to prison. This is one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility in the world.
When I was this age, I was only just learning how to navigate friendship conflicts in a classroom where we suddenly had crushes on each other. My times tables were occupying about 75% of my headspace, with the other 25% storing the dance that my friends and I had choreographed to Taio Cruz’s Dynamite to perform at school camp. When school camp finally arrived, I still remember eating an entire jar of raspberry drops with a couple of friends in the middle of the night, despite our teacher telling us that under no circumstances were we allowed to eat the lollies that we’d purchased to “gift to our parents” earlier that day. Looking back, the concept of telling a group of children not to eat the only jar of sugar in their dorm room strikes me as absurd. Now consider the concept of being arrested, tried and imprisoned at the same age.
Prison is no place for a child on the precipice of the Big, Scary, and Complicated emotional experience that is puberty. Heck - prison is no place for a teenager either. And yet right now, a child in year four in most parts of Australia is deemed old enough to be held criminally responsible for their actions. This is despite research consistently highlighting that prisons are unsafe for children.
In 2024, the Australian Medical Association (AMA) found that “incarceration harms children mentally and impairs their physical development”. Chair of the AMA Committee on Public Health, Dr Michael Bonning, told Channel 10 in the same year that there is “no credible evidence that locking children up at the age of 10 reduces crime in the long term”.
In January of this year, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) condemned Australia for our “inhumane” juvenile detention laws, urging the government to raise the age of criminal responsibility to at least 14. The review highlighted that these laws disproportionately impact First Nations children, with the AIHW finding that on an average night in the June quarter of 2025, 60% of young people between the ages of 10 and 17 in detention were First Nations. At the time, First Nations children of this age group accounted for only 6.6% of the general population.
Research consistently shows that Black children, Indigenous children and other children of colour are misperceived by adults as older and less innocent than their white peers, subjecting them to harsher penalties. In Australia, it has been recognised that the ongoing impact of colonisation harming First Nations Australians has also led to over-representation within the prison system. For years, it has been shown that raising the age of criminal responsibility leads to safer communities, better outcomes, and lower rates of recidivism (the tendency for a convicted criminal to reoffend).
One might think that public condemnation from the UNHRC in relation to a matter of significant concern around our capacity to protect children’s rights might spark a rapid response from the government that claims to “lead the world in our efforts to keep kids and young people safe online”.
Yet last week, the National Indigenous Times reported that “hundreds of pages of documents produced to the Senate” reveal talking points curated for the Attorney-General to “push back against calls to raise the criminal age of responsibility to align with international standards”. Legal advice provided to the federal government by the Justice and Equity Centre last year outlines that the federal government has the power to raise the age to meet international obligations.
The disproportionate incarceration of First Nations children makes clear that this is not just a policy contradiction. Instead, it reflects a rift in whose childhoods are seen as deserving of protection and whose are seen as deserving of punishment. As the world looks again to Australia in “leading the way” in protecting children online, it’s time to urge our government to step up and protect children offline, too. If social media is no place for a child, nor is prison.
About the author
Charli Anderson is the founder and producer of From the Diving Board, a podcast unpacking politics and pop culture through a critical feminist lens. Admitted as a lawyer, she has worked across the community legal sector, federal government and academia. Her professional and research experience has shaped a strong interest in preventing gender-based violence through cultural and systemic change. You can find more of her work on Instagram and YouTube.
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Thank you for pointing to the racially dehumanising undercurrent that runs under the Government’s position. With the muslim community we see double standards in how Muslim children are prosecuted and punished with terrorism laws (that don’t properly consider age or disability in sentencing) versus white non-muslim children who tend to be treated with more of a rehabilitation approach.
Yet we can’t get any disability advocacy ngo to speak about this.
Some children are treated not as human and so the consequences of treating them in inhumane and counterproductive ways does not matter.
Thank you for writing this. So well written and so important. I have also worked in the public space in health care and with children incarcerated and more awareness and conversations like this need to be had. Thank you again, for your writing and for your work 🫶🏻