Page 2478 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 31 July 2019
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been taken by an affected family member. Fathers have had to ring the police to report the behaviour of their own children. One set of parents told me through tears that they were informed that their 13-year-old daughter was obtaining drugs by exchanging sex with adult men.
In some extreme cases, concern for the safety of other children in the home has led parents to contact the territory’s care and protection system to ask that a child with a substance use disorder be removed from the home. Imagine that: being so afraid of what your daughter or son has become capable of doing that you would need to request government assistance and intervention to remove that child from your own home.
In response to such difficult and heartbreaking circumstances, these families have tried everything they could to halt this spiral of self-destruction in the lives of their children. They have sought out and contacted services both in Canberra and also interstate. They have saved and paid for private counselling and treatment. We should all be grateful for the availability of such services but in some cases children refuse to engage with them or they start and then stop when the allure of addiction or the pull of peers becomes too great.
In our current system, drug and alcohol treatment programs for youth rely on the young person voluntarily participating, and the one message I have heard again and again from families with lived experience is that sometimes this is asking too much, regardless of how good the services are. These mothers and fathers are crying out for another option, including mandatory drug rehabilitation for these youths, to help save their children before it is too late.
Desperate Canberra families are not wrong to raise these issues. The impacts of addiction on a young person and that person’s family can indeed be devastating. This government’s own ACT drug strategy action plan 2018-2021 acknowledges:
Illicit drug use … has a particularly adverse impact on young people.
The ACT Human Rights Commission’s recently released review of allegations at Bimberi Youth Justice Centre includes the estimate that “up to 90 per cent of young people at Bimberi have had involvement with drugs in the community”. There are real concerns, too, that currently available services may be inadequate. The same Human Rights Commission report noted:
There are gaps in rehabilitation and other drug and alcohol services for young people in the community.
Likewise, experts acknowledge that, for some young people, drugs, alcohol and/or mental health issues adversely impact on their ability to make rational choices and decisions to voluntarily engage in treatment.
In light of these facts, the request of these parents that there be an option for compulsory therapeutic drug treatment for young people with complex substance use disorders, often accompanied by severe mental health disorders, appears to make
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