More than 20 youth, legal, and support groups have sent Prime Minister Christopher Luxon a letter. Photo: RNZ / Rachel Helyer-Donaldson
Youth advocates are calling on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon to scrap a bill making military-style boot camps permanent and mandatory.
The Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Bill would introduce a Young Serious Offender declaration and the power to order a teenager to go to a boot camp.
More than 20 youth, legal, and support groups sent a letter to Luxon asking him to halt the bill before Christmas.
They argued this wasn't the solution to youth offending.
KickBack, founded by youth worker Aaron Hendry, led the call.
Hendry said the label "Young Serious Offender" was damaging, especially for kids who'd faced homelessness, poverty, abuse, and neglect.
Such labels, he believed, did more harm than good.
"These labels can be incredibly damaging to a young person's self-development and their growth. And if you're wanting young people to walk away from harmful behaviour in the community, you don't put labels on them that actually pull them backwards."
Hendry argued the bill's vision for military-style academies had shifted.
"The new law took away choice, support, and community. It isn't about helping kids, it was about punishing them."
He said fixing the root of the problem was crucial, and young people needed new boots that fit, not boot camps.
"There's a community of children who suffered some of the most extreme harm in our society and they aren't getting the support they require.
"The first thing we should have been doing was actually responding to those issues. We could have been working with our communities to ensure we did that early intervention well and ensured that those programs in our communities connected to young people when they started to make some mistakes in their lives."
The open letter said there was no evidence to back boot camps.
"Instead, the focus should have been on children having safe and loving communities, positive role models, and connection, and, when necessary, trauma-informed therapeutic support, in order to thrive," it read.
Hendry said introducing the bill before the pilot was completed was concerning.
"We believed this was a really shoddy and dangerous piece of legislation that opened the door for the risk of abuse and harm to occur. There was obviously a lot of attention and concern around this legislation that had been rushed through over the Christmas period.
The pilot involved 10 teens who spent three months in a youth facility followed by nine months in the community.
One of the participants died in a car crash in Tirau, while two others fled - one from the funeral of their deceased friend, and the other the day after.
Both were later found.
Last week, the government said it was considering extending the time some teenagers spent in boot camp residential facilities if it was likely they'd reoffend when sent back into the community.
Luxon said the legislation would allow for the boot camp residential facility to be used for between three and 12 months, but the government hadn't stated exactly how long it might be.
"We would have had the flexibility to extend the residential period if we had felt the individual wasn't ready to go back into the community, but we hadn't locked and loaded a discussion around that, though it gave us flexibility to have a longer residential component if we thought that was in the interests of the individual," Luxon said.
RNZ has contacted the prime minister's office for comment on the letter.
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