The Curfew Effect: What Happens When We Tell Teenagers ‘No’

In an age where limits are seen as oppression and discipline mistaken for trauma, the very idea of telling teenagers “no” has been all but criminalised. Curfews, once a staple of communal safety and parental responsibility, are now treated like relics from an authoritarian past. But on the ground, in the streets, malls, bus stations, and food courts, the consequences of that permissiveness are visible, measurable, and dangerous.

When society stopped telling teenagers “no,” it didn’t free them. It exposed them, to bad decisions, to worse influences, and to environments where impulsivity meets opportunity. The data is clear, they proved it in Alice Springs, when teens roam unsupervised in the late hours, rates of vandalism, assaults, theft, gang recruitment, drug use, and sexual violence rise sharply. Not over decades. Over weekends.

And yet, when curfews are proposed or enforced, a predictable chorus of critics emerges. They speak of systemic inequities, criminalisation of youth, the need for compassion. But compassion, in the absence of boundaries, is not virtue, it’s negligence.

I get it, I found the idea of curfews personally egregious, I remembered officers stopping me when I was on my late-night jogs, training for the big game, or riding home from work. It pissed me off. They saw me night after night and stopped me and asked the same stupid questions, again and again. But, I watched as some modern officers drove straight past a group of kids on their bikes, they looked, out of place, so I pulled up and asked if “everything ok?” and found they were lost, I drove at about 5km an hour letting them follow me through the streets to the main road and then checked that they knew where to go from here. “Thank Sir” I heard.

See, I get it, my experience was crap, and repetitive, but if I needed help, it was there. The main kid told me he tried to flag down the cops and they just drove straight past them. I was in the right place, at the right time, year of security training and profiling let me know something was amiss, and I dealt with it.  I asked why they were out so late, two of the kids said “no ones home”. It was 10 o’clock at night and they had no one at home, so they went out, and they were vulnerable. Its not about my lived experience, its about the greater good.

The reality is that security professionals and law enforcement officers do not theorise about curfews. They observe the patterns. They know what time the local centre becomes hostile. They know what faces show up every night when the adult foot traffic thins and the guardians retreat. They know that youth loitering in high-risk areas at 11 p.m. aren’t meditating on civic engagement. They’re bored, emboldened, and looking for a spark.

And when something burns, it's never the bureaucrat’s house.

The curfew works not because it eliminates all crime, but because it restores a barrier, temporal, social, and legal, between order and chaos. It tells young people, clearly, this place is no longer yours at this hour. That clarity, far from punitive, is protective. It offers young minds a line not to cross. And for many, that line is the only thing keeping them from a criminal record, or worse, a coroner’s report.

The teenage brain, as psychologists remind us, is a cocktail of impulse, emotion, and underdeveloped foresight. Add peer pressure and remove boundaries, and you get precisely what we've seen, flash mobs, swarm thefts, antisocial intimidation, and “youth disturbances” that too often end in ambulance calls. A few years older and we see men cut down by knives whilst just trying to make a living.

None of this is new. What is new is the refusal to do anything about it. Curfews are resisted not because they don’t work, but because they work too well, they draw a moral line, and moral lines make modern policymakers uncomfortable.

But morality aside, curfews shift incentives. They reduce risk exposure. They give police and private security legal grounds to intervene early, before the bottle is thrown or the punch is landed. They allow communities to regain their night-time spaces, parks, bus stations, retail centres, not as contested zones, but as safe spaces in the old-fashioned, literal sense of the word.

This isn’t about criminalising kids. It’s about interrupting pathways to criminality. It's about recognising that just because something is common doesn’t make it acceptable. Teen loitering at midnight isn’t a rite of passage, it’s a failure of adult leadership.

Enforcing curfews doesn’t require brutality. It requires clarity, consistency, and consequence. A warning first. A firm removal next. And for the recidivists, escalation, not to crush them, but to correct them. Because the real cruelty is allowing a 15-year-old to destroy his future unchecked, unchallenged, and unaided. I’m not even stating it’s the only solution, maybe it should only be used during school holidays? Or enacted after an obvious rise in juvenile anti-social behaviour?

Society either enforces standards, or it inherits the consequences of not doing so. Curfews are not authoritarian. They are a modest assertion that someone still cares enough to say “enough”.

Because if we won’t tell our kids “no,” the prison system eventually will, and it never says it gently. From the author.

The opinions and statements are those of Sam Wilks and do not necessarily represent whom Sam Consults or contracts to. Sam Wilks is a skilled and experienced Security and Risk Consultant with 3 decades of expertise in the fields of Real estate, Security, and the hospitality/gaming industry. Sam has trained over 1,000 entry level security personnel, taught defensive tactics, weapons training and handcuffs to policing personnel and the public. His knowledge and practical experience have made him a valuable asset to many organisations looking to enhance their security measures and provide a safe and secure environment for their clients and staff.