Maw lives with his mum and eight siblings in the western suburbs of Melbourne. He says that growing up he always loved basketball because it gave him a sense of peace.
“It took my mind off a lot of things,” says Maw. “The things I was going through at home, the things I was going through at school.
“I just wanted to play. But not everything could be paid for.”
When Maw was 14 his family had to move house, and the family couldn’t find a school in their new area that would accept his enrolment. So, he stopped going.
“As a young person, when you don’t have school or anything to do during the week - you start doing different things to kill time and make money,” he says.
“I was young, I couldn’t work. I started hanging out with the wrong crowd. Started stealing from shops, then it went to stealing cars.”
Eventually, Maw spent just over two years in youth detention.
Anoushka Jeronimus from community legal centre WEstjustice says stories like Maw’s are not uncommon.
"Crime prevention is not just the job of criminal justice system and not just the job of the young person and their family," she says.
"It requires the whole of the community. TARGET ZER0 provides us with the opportunity to do just that: bring the whole of the community together in Melton, Brimbank and Wyndham."
In 2022, WEstjustice was awarded $500,000 seed funding from PRF to establish TARGET ZER0, together with Centre for Multicultural Youth. TARGET ZER0 is a ten-year justice reinvestment plan working towards ending both the overrepresentation and criminalisation of young people in the western suburbs of Melbourne. The initiative takes a collective impact approach, bringing together a coalition of stakeholders to address the common overlapping systemic and structural factors that can cause young people to have contact with the justice system, such as access to education, health services, employment, and housing.
"TARGET ZER0 is not only bringing together the whole community around its twin goals but critically, enabling a shared focus on their root causes across multiple systems to help young people like Maw and his family thrive in our community."
In 2024 PRF provided an additional $7.45 million to scale TARGET ZER0, and PRF Head of Community Wellbeing & Justice Dominique Bigras says the investment in this targeted approach will help divert young people from the justice system.
“When young people don’t have access to what they need to thrive, their risk of contact with the justice system increases,” she says. “TARGET ZER0 will help better coordinate and target services so young people don’t fall through the gaps.”
Maw says by having the right support he’s been able to develop a routine, begin working towards something, and has become a totally different man.
“When you get out of detention, especially for a young person, if they have no one around to support them, they're just going to go back to the same stuff,” says Maw.
“I was able to get that support from a lot of people. And that really helped me turn my life around.”
No items found.
