By Kath Gannaway
ALMOST every week the Mail reports on “kids” who are causing grief one way or another in their communities across the Yarra Valley.
Grafitti, vandalism and worse.
Pick up any local paper as you travel around and it’s no different.
The recent incident in Wesburn where three teenage boys were injured when the stolen quad-bike they were riding crashed, was the worst-case scenario for them, for their families and for the community.
The Mail posed the question, could it have been avoided?
The real question is how can communities step up to the plate to address what is a much broader problem than three individuals.
Tony Aulich has been a police officer in the Upper Yarra for more than 30 years.
Rebecca Halit is the Manager Youth Education Training Programs with Upper Yarra Community House (UYCH).
They don’t have all the answers.
But they do have insights.
“You can’t judge anyone unless you know the full story and as to whether society is equipped to judge, I wouldn’t like to comment on that,” Sen Const Aulich said.
“You can try to envisage all situations that might come up, try to educate, instruct and try to put measures in place, but you can’t throw a safety net out that is going to cover all situations because, quite simply, every child is an individual and every combination of children is different.”
He makes the point that every child has a different story to tell.
“Some need more help than others, some need more time to learn and mature, some kids need more understanding than others.”
The UYCH Youth Programs have had 180 youth enrolments over the past two years.
The programs offer an alternative education stream for students who, for a variety of reasons function better outside the mainstream secondary school system.
Here too it’s easy to generalise or label.
Some of the students have behaviour issues. Others don’t.
Ms Halit has been running the program for six years. She is realistic about the behaviours of some of the kids she works with but has had enough contact with them and their families to see the bigger picture.
That’s one of the things she believes is missing when communities are confronted with what is neatly packaged as ‘anti-social behaviour’.
“Often these kids are not recognised for their particular talent but when you provide the right environment there is something almost brilliant, a character that stands out away from all the other things happening in their lives,” she says.
“When you get something that the kids enjoy and are focused on you tap into the real person, but when they are disengaging from school, or the community, or don’t feel like they belong, all the community sees is their defence mechanisms.”
Could the quad-bike crash have been avoided? The answer is, probably not.
“We all did ill-judged things when we were kids. Some of us got caught by things like accidents, some of us didn’t,” Ms Halit said.
Stop ‘kids’ causing grief
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