New South Wales has one of the lowest age barriers for locking up children in the world. All it does is shackle children into a vicious cycle of crime. Today, the industry is supporting a new campaign with Raise the Age NSW to raise awareness and, hopefully, Raise The Age.
Raising the age has received a lot of headlines lately because the Albanese Government and the opposition reckon 13 is too you to be on social media.
But in NSW, when you blow 10 candles on your birthday cake, you are old enough to go to a juvenile detention centre, and nobody talks about that, until now.
Raise the Age NSW – a coalition of more than 130 First Nations, legal, human rights and civil society organisations and community services, charities, peak bodies and unions – has launched a powerful campaign to raise awareness about one of the most disturbing laws that impacts minors.
The campaign has been created by Dentsu’s Tag, with media support by Carat and over 30 media organisations that have come together through Unltd.
“In New South Wales and across Australia, most people don’t know that the age of criminal responsibility is 10, and when they find out it concerns them. Most people want to know more about that,” Raise the Age NSW campaign manager Emily Mayo told B&T.
“In order to be able to raise the age, what we need to do is build public support for that, and the first step in doing that is helping people understand that the age is currently 10 and that that is too young.”
She added: “We want to open an honest conversation about the current state of play. The reason we want to do that is because, sadly, being tough on crime narratives have dictated the space around youth and their connection with the criminal justice system
“The reality is that tough on crime approaches do not work. So the evidence tells us that the younger a child is when they come in contact with the criminal justice system, the more likely it is that they will have ongoing contact with that system across their lifetimes.”
Think of the children
The creative was developed by Dentsu’s Tag. Caitlin Gregory-Layman, who oversees people and culture at Tag, said the agency felt personally moved by the campaign and had to act. The creative team took half a day to think about the brief before coming up with the birthday idea.
“It started very broad and then we narrowed down from there into this quite emotional and poignant. Look at what a 10th birthday is for a lot of children. Initially we want people to become aware this is an issue… many people just don’t know the age is 10. They don’t know that the UN is calling for it to be a minimum of 14, ”she said.
Hiranthi (Harry) Jayaweera, the Sydney MD of Carat, who has taken part in Unltd’s Adland Bail Out, was shocked by the law.
“The thought of someone who’s 10, and I have a nine year old, going through that had an impact on me. Just the psychological impact; it made me realise that things have to change.”
“It’s timely in a way. If you think children are too young at 13 to be on social media, then they’re definitely too young to be locked up.
“Hopefully it will resonate with people that we need to consider what we’re doing with our next generations.”
The creative was tested by Accenture Song’s Fiftyfive5. Estelle Gohli, who has run loads of tests about the impact of creative reckons the ad hits the right balance of emotion and hard hitting message.
“What we could see very clearly was that Tag has done a really beautiful job of creating the emotion that needed to be created,” she said.
“It has to be the exact right balance between upsetting me enough that I feel like I want to do something about it, and not upsetting me so much that I throw my hands up and feel like I can’t do anything.
“Putting this in front of a sample of people who were for raising the age, against raising the age and sitting on the fence, it was very clear that the emotional part of these ads was actually working pretty well with the cohorts that it needed to work with.”
Let’s tell hard stories
That is music to the ears for Jade Harley, the Unltd. director who has coordinated the industry to get behind the Raise the Age campaign.
She told B&T that the industry body reached out to charity partners, including Backtrack and others, on ways to make a difference.
“Youth incarceration came up across many of our partners as an issue that they were dealing with downstream that they were seeing caused significant harm to young people and communities. So we decided that as an industry, we’re uniquely positioned to look upstream and tackle some of those issues,” she said.
“This is an industry that is uniquely set up to tell those hard stories, to create new perspectives, to challenge the status quo.”
Dentsu’s response has been “phenomenal”, but so has the response from the industry.
More than $2.3 million worth of pro-bono media has been donated to the campaign by Alliance, ARN, ATN, Brandspace, Cartology, GumGum, JCDecaux, JOLT, Mamamia, Motio, NewsCorp, Nine Entertainment, Nova, OA Collective, Ogury, oOh!media, Paramount, QMS, SBS, SCA Radio, Seven, Snapchat, Teads, Tonic, Uber Ads, Val Morgan Group and Yahoo.
“Most people don’t know that 10 years old is the age for criminal responsibility and when they find out they think 10 is too young. On a human level, everyone can imagine themselves at 10 and what that feels like. Everybody has a 10 year old in their life, whether it’s a child or a relative or a friend’s child, and I just think on a human level, it’s just wrong,” Harley said.
It is wrong, and as an industry we have to change this and raise the age.
