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- [00:00]
A
Recently we put out the call to you, our listeners, seeking conversations around youth crime. Today's guest answered that call. She's the foster mother of a young woman who's been both offender and victim. We won't be naming our guest or her daughter for various legal and personal reasons. This is Australian True crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung, People of the Kulin Nation and a warning. This episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence. You became a foster mother when you're. We're gonna refer to her as your daughter, but we don't wanna name her. So Your daughter was 5 years old, is that what you said when she came to you?
- [00:47]
B
She was five years old. She's now 20, so 15 years. And the day that two pieces of paper were presented to me with her information on them, I took a big deep breath and I said, so you're asking me to promise to love this child for the rest of my life? And they said, yep. And I took a big deep breath and I said, okay, I'm in.
- [01:09]
A
You contacted us because we put a call out saying, look, that we really wanted to continue the conversation around youth crime, youth offending. And we said, you know, if you've got any involvement in this, if you were a perpetrator, offender or whatever, please contact us. You did contact us because you're daughter has become involved in some pretty serious offending. When did that start? Tell us about that period of time.
- [01:37]
B
So we were going down the path of adoption by the time she was 14. The foster agency finally decided that I was worthy of adopting her. So we started going down that path. As part of that, they wanted her to have contact with her birth father who she hadn't seen for 10 years. They had a lovely first visit and then he canceled the next four visits. And so she decided that if I'm not even worthy to be loved by my father, I mustn't be worthy to be loved by anybody. And she started playing up. So year nine, she was suspended from school for they call it ditching. I called it jigging. I think my parents called it wagging, whatever that is. And then she was, at the end of the year, she got a longer suspension for stealing some money out of a kid's school bag and for having vapes and empty cruiser bottles in her locker. And then didn't want to go back. So I enrolled her in distance education for year 10 because just getting her to school was going to Be a challenge. And then. And then she was bashed by her best friend. She organized to meet her at the local Westfield, and then they, her and her friends said, come over, we're going to do something at this park. So she went to the park with them and they bashed her for an hour because apparently she'd flirted with some girl's boyfriend. They videoed it. They made her kiss their shoes, which is apparently a thing. They stole her AirPods and her phone and her skateboard and sent her home humiliated. And so again, her best friend did this. So her father's just disappointed that her best friend bashed her. But because these kids were underage, all two of them were 18, so the rest just all got caught because they were all on CCTV and everything. So it was all caught on camera. They all got a slap on the wrist, sent home, except for two who were over 18. And so they were charged with robbery and company and the rest of these kids were just told, don't do that again. And so then she started running away from home a lot and just, you know, give me a kiss goodbye. Say, bye, Mum, Love you, be back soon, or back in an hour or whatever. And then I wouldn't see her for a couple of weeks or days or weeks.
- [04:17]
A
Oh, my God. Where are you thinking she is? And are you calling the police and saying she's a missing person? Like what?
- [04:22]
B
So part of the process as a foster carer, if. If you don't know where they are, you are obliged to. You have to ring the police. I couldn't tell you how many times I reported her missing in that sort of. Towards the end of year nine, and she started going missing Easter of year nine, so I would be reporting it to police. I became very well known in the police department. When she'd come home, I'd either have to take to the police station to have her sighted so they could see that she was unharmed and everything else. I got a phone call from the police one day saying that she'd been arrested at this guy's house nearer to the city and could I go to the police station, because she'd been charged with 16 charges of credit card fraud. So they'd. The boys that were in this little group had gone out and broken into cars or done whatever, stolen credit cards. Then they'd all got dressed up like they were in Ocean's Eleven or something and walked into Westfield and went tap, tap, tapping with other people's credit cards. So I went to the police station and sat there while they processed everybody. Her friends, the one who had bashed her a year before. She was with her again. And this girl's doing handstands in the cell while they're waiting to get processed. And they got a slap on the wrist because they were 15 years old. So, again, absolutely zero consequences. So I brought her home. She got changed, had a shower. I went again, and then I didn't see her again until August. So that was May. So she was gone till August. My God. And during this time, the foster agency said to me, you're no longer her carer because we're not paying you the foster care allowance. And so you're now nothing to her. And I said, well, I'm not nothing. I'm the only stability she's known for nine years. They wouldn't let me know where she was. They wouldn't. I asked. I said to them, when you see her, can you please let me know if she's alive and she's okay? And they said, if she agrees to that, yes, we will.
- [06:40]
A
So she's still engaging with them on some level?
- [06:43]
B
Yeah, because they'd meet her and. And buy her groceries once a week. Yep. Okay. Right. So. And they were meeting her wherever she was living during that time. They were living with. I think there was a whole lot of kids that were couch surfing who were living with this couple somewhere. And she was kind of running these kids to do break and enters and bottle runs and vape crons and things like that. According to what my daughter's told me, they've never been caught or charged with any of these things. But this woman would then pay them with a roof over their head, drugs, whatever drugs they wanted. And so then one day, my daughter rang me and said, something bad's going down this weekend. Can I come home? And I said, yep, of course. Where are you? I'll come get you. That was when the COVID lockdowns were on. And I. You weren't allowed to leave your lga. And I didn't care. I drove to the other side of the city, picked her up and brought her home. And, you know, she was exhausted. She stunk. She was filthy. So she just kind of ate and slept and washed and stuff like that. And then I. The detective who'd been involved in their case, when she was bashed, she'd kept in contact with me during the court case with these other two older girls. I rang her and I said, my daughter's home. Um, just thought you'd like to know that she's finally back. And she said, oh, great, can we come out to see her? And I said, yeah, sure. So they came out and just did a welfare check and said, are you okay? Have you been in any trouble? Do you need us for anything? And then that was all good. Anyway, they rang me the next day and said, has your daughter looked at her mobile phone? I said, no, she hasn't. They said, something is bad's gone down last night and the people that she was with have been involved in the bashing death of a young man.
- [08:59]
A
So you know for sure she wasn't involved, because she was. It was a very rare night that she was actually home.
- [09:04]
B
Yes. And the police, the detectives had sighted her.
- [09:07]
A
Yeah.
- [09:07]
B
She 100% wasn't involved. She said to me, because this woman couldn't control her, she thought she might have been the one getting bashed. So she came home. So she either would have been implicated in the bashing or as doing the bashing or being bashed. So she was 100% not involved because she was in her bed in our home. And. But her friends, who had previously been slapped on the wrist for bashing my daughter, had now bashed a boy to the point where he died. My God. And. And because he's dead, it's all gone to court and everything else like that. So finally, they have had some repercussions. But slaps on the wrist don't work.
- [09:56]
A
Well, it's interesting because you're really on the fence here, aren't you? Because you. On one hand, a lot of us are saying, oh, they need a good kick up the bum, like in the old days when the coppers would give them a kick up the ass and that'd be that. And rah, rah, rah. Right. But you are the very, very loving mum of an offender whose offending so far has been, I'm gonna say, low level. Although I'm sure the people who own the credit cards wouldn't say it was low level. But no violent offending so far that we know of. But her, she's with a cohort who are violent offenders. What do you think would have worked on her? Do you think community service would have worked on her? Would she have shown up to it?
- [10:34]
B
I don't know. I don't know. But what is happening? What. What's going on isn't working. And the reason that I wrote into you guys is because so many people were saying the parents should pay.
- [10:45]
A
Yep.
- [10:46]
B
Now, I already wasn't sleeping. I could barely work, I could barely function at all because I was so Worried about, you know, I don't call her my foster child. I call her my child. Yeah. So if I then had to turn around and pay this person who she'd stolen the credit card from for the money or, you know, repaid the bank or whatever, for me, that's just punishing.
- [11:11]
A
Me more and not punishing her at all.
- [11:14]
B
Not punishing her at all?
- [11:16]
A
No. A lot of kids and her, I think, would, would still see that as no repercussions for them.
- [11:21]
B
No repercussions, but. But massive repercussions for me. And also, you know, I'm not a, a deadbeat parent and I'm not teaching her, you know, she's not third generation criminal or anything like that. My family's. We're good citizens and we do the right thing and we don't commit crime. So it's nothing that. And I, I had no control over her. I'd had no control over whether she slept in her own bed or someone else's bed that night or didn't sleep at all. So I don't agree. If the parents aren't implicit in whatever the crime is that's happening, I don't agree that the parents should be held liable. I think if the parents aren't supportive, maybe that could be a different story. So again, it's maybe not a one, one case fits all, but something more needs to happen. I tried to get her into like a boot camp program that was run by traumatized returned soldiers. But the foster agency forbid that because it didn't say that whatever was going to happen was trauma informed on the website. I was desperate. I would have done anything. I was, you know, I was wishing that we could just go off and move to an island for three years until she got through these awful, this awful age. But that obviously wouldn't have worked.
- [12:47]
A
So how did this crime affect her? The crime that she was not present for, but her cohort, who incidentally had bashed her earlier, they went on to bash a boy to death. How did that affect her in the short and the long term? Was that enough to.
- [13:03]
B
Oh no. Cause she went again. So the police, the detectives came back and just made sure she was okay. And then a couple of days later, she went again. I don't know where she went this time. The foster agency kind of put her up in a bit of a halfway house. But again, she could come and go as she pleased. Anyway, she came and she went and she came and went and came and went quite a few more times. Finally she rang me up one night she was really sick. She was in a police station because she didn't know where else to go and could I go and pick her up as she had Covid and she was as sick as a dog and I think that was when the police were coming to check that you were actually in the house. And so even though she wasn't locked in her bedroom or locked in the house or anything, she was in bed, asleep and being fed for two weeks during that quarantine period and wait while she was sick. And I think it reminded her body what it was like to rest rather than live in fight or flight. So that was the October that she was in year 10. So that had gone on for a year by then. And that's when she finally came home and settled. And, you know, there's been a couple of little incidences again since then. It's been a long road and, you know, my job as a mum is to raise a child who's a good citizen or a person who's a good citizen, who has as many good relationships as they possibly can and who will do some form of good in the world. I don't want her to be a doctor or a pilot or anything else. I just want her to be a good person, just be happy, just contributing in some worthwhile way to the community she's living in. And I still want to have that relationship with her because, you know, she is my daughter, regardless of what a piece of paper says.
- [15:16]
A
Thank you to our guest today. If you have a story you think we'd be interested in, please email us or DM us on Facebook or Instagram. There are links in the show notes.
- [15:25]
B
To help you do that.
- [15:27]
A
If you need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 131114 or contact 1-800-Respect on 1-800-737-732 or 1-800-Respect. Org AU Indigenous Australians can contact 13 YARN on 139276 or 13 yarn.orgau.
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B
The producers of this podcast recognise the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded. They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.