11yo ice addicts appearing in court but no special treatment programs available: Vic magistrate
A Victorian magistrate says ice addicts as young as 11 are appearing in the courts and she sometimes has no option but to put them into detention because there are no specialist treatment programs.
Shepparton Magistrate Stella Stuthridge has seen a "dramatic increase" in the incidence of people addicted to ice, or methamphetamine, over the past two years in the Mildura area and the Hume region, from Seymour to Wodonga.
In Shepparton, for example, there has been a 48 per cent increase in child protection cases and which often have ice addiction as the "driver" of the problem.
"Some of them are children of parents who have been ice-addicted, some of them are babies of ice-addicted mothers," she told 774 ABC Melbourne.
"Occasionally what we're starting to see is very young children - 11, 12, 13, 14 year olds, themselves addicted to ice and appearing in our courts."
Ms Stuthridge said children were only detained as a last resort.
The courts try to keep the children at home, or put them in foster care or treatment programs if they are available.
No specialist detox programs for teens
"There isn't an ability for me to access specialist residential detoxification facilities for 13, 15 year olds. It just doesn't exist," Ms Stuthridge said.
"We do experiment with secure welfare and then if nothing else works and there's been this spate of criminal offending then you put them in detention."
Ms Stuthridge said the problem was that people got addicted to ice very quickly and she compared it to the "wave of crack cocaine" that went through America in the 1990s.
She said the state needed a campaign aimed at building knowledge about how addictive ice was, but also starting to ask what we do to stop it.
"Whether you go to Horsham or Shepparton or Wodonga or Mildura or the Latrobe Valley you're finding the same problem across the state," she said.
The community in Mildura "realised very quickly" that young people were being "roped into ice addiction", she added.
"They responded very quickly with some very direct services," Ms Stuthridge said.
"I think it has been very difficult for people to understand not only that there's a dramatic increase in our work in this area but also the ages of the people are so young."
