NEW ZEALAND - School absenteeism in Auckland horrifies police

According to an article by Sam Boyer entitled “School absenteeism in Auckland horrifies police” published on 25th September 2014 the police in New Zealand visited three different schools; the Manurewa high school, the James Cook High School and the Alfriston College. During their expedition they made a shocking discovery: Of the 4586 students that should have attended schools, 321 were absent! This corresponds to about seven percent of all students.

This generation of students doesn’t seem to fully understand the importance of education for their personal development and professional careers. They don’t take school seriously as they used to. The percentage of teenagers playing truant increases from year to year. In “The New Zealand Herald” it is written that only one year ago the percentage of the high school students who didn’t attend school regularly were just 3.9 per cent. Now there are nearly twice as much. The police and the teachers are asking themselves why such a high number of teenagers aren’t quite interested in attending school anymore and what they’re actually doing during their absence. In the article it says that some people suppose that the high school students are probably involved in youth crime like burglaries, shop-lifting, vehicle crime and so on. In this neighbourhood students take part in criminal activities even at primary and intermediate level. Of course it isn`t clear whether or not the presumption are true. However it is possible since the number of youth crime is rising. Nowadays even children of the age between 12 and 15 are committing criminal offences. It’s clear that action has to be taken which means that for example punitive measures will be taken if parents aren’t able to control their children and if they fail to teach them certain manners. Teachers hope that these operations will reduce the amount of the truant children.


What we have to say abou this:
 
We assume that the population’s opinion about youth crime in New Zealand isn’t any different from ours in Basel. It’s seen as something bad that we should try to reduce as much as possible. As we’ve seen in the article youth crime also leads to truancy and since education is essential for young people, New Zealand has taken certain measures. These include a Youth Crime Action Plan (YCAP) that is the same all over New Zealand. This is a plan to reduce youth crime and help those who offend to turn their lives around. Government agencies work together more closely with schools, parents etc. to stop problems before they become an issue. It also aims at helping the people behind the statistics because they don`t offend without reason. There are often personal problems behind their actions and in order to prevent them from reoffending the government takes care of their issues. If an offender is caught, the police either just warns him or he gets a youth justice coordinator who stands in for his interests during the family group conference where it is decided what’s going to happen with the offender next. If they can’t agree on a fair punishment a punitive measure will be defined by the youth court. This method is used for every crime except murder. The success rate of the YCAP is 90 per cent.

In Basel there isn’t such a complex system. A few years ago, youth crime wasn`t even recognized as a serious problem that needs to be solved. Now there are seven youth workers called “Jugendsachbearbeiter” that take care of these cases. They are spread over three different police stations in Basel-Land and their job is to deter crime by correctly informing students about offenses and to identify young criminals in cooperation with the youth advocacy as well as the police. Meanwhile they have a special daily journal in which they collect all probable youth crimes so they’re able to conduct investigations very rapidly in case of increasing crimes in a certain area. They also need many connections to people that work closely with children and teenagers because they seek contact with persons directly involved. Adolescents who commit a crime in Basel are then sent to the youth court and if necessary to a psychologist.

Now we’re going to look at the results of these two methods. In New Zealand, youth crime has decreased by about 34 percent over the last twenty years. The ministry of justice announced that only a fifth of all the offenders appeared a  youth court. That’s because the police is looking for alternative methods to punish young people since they think it’s too harsh to immediately handing them over to the criminal justice system. One of these alternatives is for example the YCAP that we`ve talked about about. This decline of teenagers appearing at the youth court is shown in the following statistics that we’ve found in another article. In 1997/98 there were about 900 adolescents taken to a youth court while in 2011/12 that number had decreased to 189. By contrast we see a slight increase of youth crime during the past ten years in Switzerland. But since 2011 this value has decreased again. So this means that even if youth crime is still a problem it’s apparently in decline in Switzerland and New Zealand thanks to the success of the actions taken.