Victoria’s first taskforce on young Indigenous people in the criminal justice system has begun, with the commissioner for Aboriginal children touring the state to investigate community-based solutions that work at keeping young Aboriginal people out of contact with police and the criminal justice system.

The Aboriginal youth justice taskforce, announced in 2018 by the premier, Daniel Andrews, will examine the cases of about 250 Aboriginal young people in the youth justice system.

Sixteen per cent of children in the youth justice system are Indigenous, even though they make up only 0.7% of the state’s population, and 1.6% of 10 to 19-year-olds.

A 2017 Victorian government review found that over-representation is caused by intergenerational trauma, broken connection to country and community, over-policing, not enough focus on diversion and exclusion from mainstream culture.

Parallel to the taskforce, the commissioner for Aboriginal children and young people, Justin Mohamed, is conducting the “Our youth, our way” inquiry.

“It’s broader than justice,” Mohamed, a Gooreng Gooreng man originally from Bundaberg in Queensland, said. “We are looking at the things that make our young people resilient.”

Mohamed will have four months to hold 13 regional forums in Victoria, “pulling together local service providers, police, courts, Aboriginal organisations … We’ll present a picture of what that region looks like, in terms of the cycle of offending, and we’ll start building a plan for that region, to have a focus on Aboriginal young people.

“Our team will [look at] the two bookends of this: how do we reduce young people coming into contact with the youth justice in the first place, and how do we stop the reoffending numbers?”

Around 65% of young people with a youth justice order are reoffenders, Mohamed said.

“The idea is to get to the communities, because we know the answers lie within community and we want those communities to be heard,” he said. “And we need to hear the voices of those young people.”

The first hearings were held in Warrnambool and Framlingham last week.

“Warrnambool has one of lowest rates of young Aboriginal people offending,” Mohamed said, citing cultural engagement of children from an early age as a protective factor against offending. “Cultural engagement is the stabiliser within a lot of the programs being run. It’s the reason why the region’s [offending] numbers are so low.

The commissioner will travel to Ballarat next, with other regions to follow.

“We’ll be hearing from young people what they think is working, about a lot of services that are supposed to be there to protect our young people,” Mohamed said. “How are young people valued and supported, what are the social norms of those communities, how is racism working? It may not just because young people in that region want to do bad things.

“We want to create a safe space for them to have their views, and not something that makes their lives more difficult. Like most things around youth engagement, having young people as part of the planning process hasn’t always been done in the best way.”

The report will be tabled in March 2020.