LOCK UP OUR BOY
Parents’ plea to keep son alive as angry community wrestles with spiralling youth crime crisis
A GOLD Coast couple say they pleaded with authorities to lock up their 13-year-old boy as a last resort to keep him alive.
The educated parents have watched their oldest child slip from being a loving, caring boy to a life of stealing luxury cars as part of an infamous juvenile street gang. The couple have tried psychologists, counselling, family trips away, punishment and consequences. Nothing has worked. “I’m terrified every time I hear the phone ring … I’m convinced it’s going to be the police telling me he’s dead or killed someone,” the boy’s mother says. “He’s in cars being driven by 12 and 13year-olds at 260km/h.”
Their chilling warning is it could happen to any family and, sadly, there is little help.
He’s a beloved 13-year-old boy from a good family now stealing cars and property with a juvenile gang. His parents have tried everything in their power to stop it, even pleading for him to be locked up to break the cycle. They say every child is at risk but, sadly, no one can help
EIGHT weeks ago, Rachel* and David* lost their son. While 13-year-old Matthew* is still alive and, sometimes, home … he’s also gone.
Matthew has joined the Southside Gang, a loose collection of Gold Coast children who steal cars, rob houses, use drugs and post it all on social media. Simply search the term on Instagram and it’s all there for the public – and police – to see. But Rachel and David are still struggling to understand how their own sweet son, who loves the beach and sports, has fallen into this crowd.
And make no mistake, these are not the parents you expect to have a child in a gang. Both are educated professionals who live in a lovely home in a coastal suburb, they are engaged members of their community and loving parents to two younger children.
This was never meant to be their story.
But that’s precisely their warning: don’t think it can’t happen to you.
The couple have tried everything to turn their son around psychologists, counselling, family trips away, punishment, consequences. Nothing has worked.
And now the justice system has failed them too.
Despite standing before a magistrate in the Southport Court just last week, pleading for their child to be taken to juvenile detention in the hopes it would “snap him out of it”, they were told that was an impossibility. The magistrate said her hands were tied, Matthew walked out of court that day and, just hours later, out of their home.
And for seven days they didn’t see him. Even now, they fear he’ll soon be gone again … back with the crew on the streets, sleeping on couches in homes where parents don’t care, stealing cars and risking his life.
“We don’t know what to do. We can’t eat, we can’t sleep, we can’t work,” says Rachel.
“I’m terrified every time I hear the phone ring … I’m convinced it’s going to be the police telling me he’s dead or killed someone. He’s in cars
being driven by 12 and 13-yearolds at 260km/h. It’s terrifying. “The whole family has been traumatised, our younger son is seeing a psychologist because he’s just devastated at what has happened to his idol – his big brother.
“We’ve both been given Valium but we’re too scared to take it. That’s how far removed this all is from our family culture. This is a horrible nightmare, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
Rachel and David still don’t know exactly how Matthew got mixed up with the Southside Gang – but they know two critical factors were bullying and social media.
David says their son started being harassed after entering high school last year.
However, he says Matthew did not tell his parents the full extent of what was happening in the schoolyard.
“We didn’t know how bad it was, he wouldn’t tell us anything and anytime we questioned if he was OK, he would assure us he was fine,” David says.
“But it turns out he wasn’t, a group of kids two grades above were beating him. Looking back on it now, we think that he started following these gang kids on Instagram as a way of sourcing his own protection.
“That’s certainly how it started … not that we knew any of it. Somehow he got sucked into that life, and we lost our little boy.”
Rachel says she will never forget the moment their lives changed.
She was folding laundry one Monday afternoon when a knock came on her door. It was the police.
“We have never had the police visit ever, so I was freaked out thinking someone had died. Then they said: ‘Where’s Matthew?’
“I said he was at school, but I was also thinking how do you know my son’s name? I nearly died, my heart was racing, I had to sit down.
“Then they showed me footage from the previous Monday. It showed a little associate of his, who was also a really good kid from a good family who got mixed up on this. He had picked Matthew up in a stolen car from school.
“The footage showed Matthew wearing his school uniform - we thought he was at school that day - and they had gone to another child’s house and were using Matthew as a decoy to try to steal their car.
“The police explained they’re not allowed to arrest juveniles and I was like, ‘what do you mean? Arrest him!’
“But they said if I brought him to the station that afternoon they would pretend to arrest him to give him a scare. They said for good kids from good families, that’s usually all it takes.
“The interview went on for hours but at the end of it, I think Matthew just thought ‘oh well, I’m in too deep now, may as well keep going’.
“Ever since then he’s just been on a bender, we’ve had one incident after another and it just won’t stop. We don’t know how to stop it.”
Listening to Rachel and David’s story, it’s clear they did all they could as soon as they could. From that first incident, anytime Matthew disappeared they would report him to the police as a missing person so that if he was found on the streets he would be returned home.
“The police used to roll their eyes, but I said he’s a 13year-old boy, and only just 13. If he’s gone for two hours and I don’t know where he is, then he’s missing. This is a child, for God’s sake,” says Rachel.
“So they would find him, bring him home and he’d head right back out the door. He stopped talking to us. We were the targets, it was all our fault but we don’t know what we ever did. A friend of mine said maybe he blames us for the bullying, that we didn’t stop it. But we didn’t know what was happening. I just wish we could go back in time.”
David says almost as awful as not knowing when his son will ever return, is the fact that no one can or will help.
He says while the police have been fantastic, they admit their hands are tied. And while there is much that social media companies like Instagram could do, they instead do nothing.
Rachel says she reports
I’m terrified every time I hear the phone ring … I’m convinced it’s going to be the police telling me he’s dead or killed someone. He’s in cars being driven by 12 and 13-year-olds at 260km/h
Mother of youth gang member
every single photo or video she sees on social media of these kids driving stolen cars, doing drugs or carrying knives – but every single response comes back as “this does not contravene our community guidelines”.
Rachel says she feels like Instagram is gaslighting the entire community.
“It’s insane. I once posted a photo of myself breastfeeding – and you literally could not see anything – and that was removed for contravening community guidelines on Instagram. Yet this is footage of actual crimes being committed by children and that’s OK?
“Where is the responsibility? The fact is these kids are doing all these crimes for the glory on social media.
“The worse of an offender that they are, the more followers they get.
“There’s a whole Southside Gang vs Northside Gang rivalry between the Gold Coast and Logan/South Brisbane with a list of luxury cars they’re trying to steal – and it’s all being allowed to happen online.
“Search those terms, or the 42 or 41 numbers they use to represent their ‘Southside’ postcodes, it’s all over Instagram – and nobody does anything. It could be so simple – use those hashtags and you’re banned. That would literally solve the problem.”
David says while the new youth justice laws introduced by the state government recently have helped in some respects, the justice system was still a toothless tiger.
He says police are proactively working alongside youth justice and have ramped up their co-responding, but there is little they can actually do.
“When Matthew was last in court, just over a week ago, the judge gave him 24-hour-a-day curfew and said if he walks out our front door, they will have the police arrest him and put him in detention.
“But we got home, he went upstairs and got on his computer – we thought to watch Netflix because he doesn’t have a phone anymore, but he must have got on Instagram – and three hours later he was gone. He was gone for more than a week before the police found him and brought him home.
“Those kids knew what we didn’t: that the judge’s words meant nothing.
“We called the police straight away when Matthew disappeared and told them what the judge said and they just laughed. They said they have no power to do that, that curfews and bail conditions mean nothing. And the kids know that, so they don’t care.
“There’s one child who has dozens of charges - right now Matthew doesn’t even have one - and their mother had to stand up and beg the magistrate to give detention … and still all they got was 10 days.
“So every day he’s gone we get up and we do a breach of bail report and the police issue another missing person report and that is literally all we can do. We sit, we wait, we worry and we pray.”
David says studying youth crime statistics shows that children are gaming the system.
He says the rate of crime is highest among 13 and 14-yearolds, dropping dramatically as they near 18.
“They know that anything they do before the age of 18 doesn’t go on their permanent record.
“They may do stupid things but they aren’t dumb.
“They’re not afraid of consequences because they think nothing can really touch them.
“Some of them have got beaten up by adults but they don’t care, they just brag about it.
“Maybe it’s time that when a juvenile has repeat offences, it stays on their permanent record. There has to be some form of consequences because what we’re doing is just not working. And they know it.
“Matthew still has plans to go to university and get a job – he thinks all of this is just ‘fun’ and that it can’t touch him.”
David says it’s also time to rethink the juvenile detention system, which is expensive to the taxpayer, overcrowded and ineffective.
He says rehabilitation camps in which the kids are forced to work hard and be responsible would be cheaper and more effective.
““Military boot camps can be effective but they’re incredibly expensive and don’t run very often,” said David.
“If we could use them as a source of rehabilitation and they ran year-round it would probably bring the cost down and regardless it’s got to be cheaper than juvenile detention.
Even more important than punishment, however, is prevention.
And Rachel and David have some ideas regarding that as well.
Rachel says while most schools teach about the dangers of social media, their focus is on the wrong area.
“Everyone talks about paedophiles grooming your kids – and yes, that’s terrifying. But the real danger is peer pressure – from body image issues to glorifying crime.
“Social media can be a fantastic tool or a horrific weapon, we can’t just hand our kids a phone and expect them to figure it out.
“I can guarantee that my other children will not be getting phones.
“You always worry about your kids hanging out with the wrong crowd at school, but now they’ve got the wrong crowd hanging out in their bedroom and in their pocket. It’s all on the phone.
“I’d like to see the state government treat these youth gangs like outlaw motorcycle clubs, preventing them from hanging out together would be a huge start.”
While Rachel and David continue this half-life in parental purgatory, they continue trying to plot a way out.
Rachel says at one stage the pair had packed up the house, ready to move away for six months, when Matthew busted their plan and they had to cancel for fear of his retaliation.
But David says, in retrospect, running away was never going to be the best solution.
“If we left the Gold Coast, where all of our family and friends are, where our jobs are, where our support is, we’d be running away from the only help we’re getting.
“And for all we know, the problems would just follow us to a new town.
“We have to fix what’s caused this. We’re just praying we find that answer.”
Heartbreakingly, Rachel says she has been scrolling through her phone and picking out photos to use at her son’s funeral.
She says she’s trying to acclimatise her mind to the fact that she may lose Matthew forever.
“I do believe in my heart that he will turn it around.
“He was a good boy with a good family and we will never stop loving him, but what if he dies before he can change?
“This is a nightmare, but that would be my worst nightmare.
“I just keep thinking that every day he is alive is another day he can change.
“We just want our little boy back.”
All names have been changed to protect identity