The government’s ‘war on kids’ won’t stop the youth crime problem in Queensland, experts say

“If I had just one person that loved or cared about me … I think that would have reduced a lot of the crime.”

Those are the blunt words of Georgia*, a young, well-spoken woman who was just 12 years old when she first landed in youth detention on car-stealing charges.

“Kids don’t just wake up one day and decide they’re going to go out and do crime and steal cars … that comes from extensive trauma history,” she said.

She was just a toddler when she was taken off her drug-addicted,…