13-Year-Old Australian Boy Allegedly Planned School Shooting: Federal Police

A 13-year-old Australian boy allegedly kept a notebook containing plans for a school shooting, federal police have revealed.

Australian Federal Police (AFP) Acting Deputy Commissioner Sandra Booth told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security that the boy allegedly possessed violent extremist material, and had been using the chat platform Discord.

“During a warrant executed at his home, we allegedly found a notebook that contained plans for a school shooting,” she said. “This was not in the U.S. This was in Australia.”

The boy is before the courts, charged with making a document likely to help terrorist acts.

Booth said AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett had asked her to stress that Australia is “at the crossroads of a tsunami of youth crime,” with young and vulnerable people being radicalised and manipulated “at rapid speed.”

“It used to take months or years to radicalise or manipulate individuals, but now, in some cases, it is happening within days,” she said, pointing to artificial intelligence, what she called a “growing grievance generation,” and young people searching for purpose and belonging.

Children Charged

The AFP’s written submission (pdf) says it has investigated 65 people aged 17 and under since 2020, and 35 of them have been charged. Assistant Commissioner Peter Crozier told the committee the youngest was 12.

Since January 2024, 23 of the 47 people the AFP has charged with violent extremist material offences have been under 18.

But the yearly count of young people in counter-terrorism investigations peaked at 22 in 2024, fell to 17 in 2025, and stands at 10 so far this year.

The submission also describes an earlier case in which a teenager posted on Snapchat that he planned a shooting at his high school and had access to firearms and explosives. Police seized a tactical vest and a ballistic helmet. He was sentenced to a two-year good behaviour bond and 12 months’ probation.

The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) says the median age at which minors first come under its investigation is now 15, and about 85 percent are male (pdf).

ASIO Deputy Director-General Claire McGuinness said 20 years ago the agency’s caseload was mostly people in their early 20s, but it now included children in their early teens, who were at a stage of life where they were more open to influence.

No Link to Video Games—ASIO

While many of the minors ASIO has investigated played violent video games, the agency said it had found no direct link between video games and radicalisation, which it noted was consistent with many earlier studies.

Instead, ASIO’s submission points to platforms where young people talk to each other, such as Discord, Telegram, Instagram, Roblox and TikTok, as easy places for extremists to make a first approach to minors.

Booth also described loose online networks such as The Com and 764, whose members are driven by nihilism, gore, sexual extortion and violence.

“Often, they turn desperate victims into perpetrators,” she said. Young people are blackmailed into recording or livestreaming the crushing of animals, or physically or sexually assaulting their siblings, believing they will be left alone if they comply.

In one case, she said, a young Australian teenager was charged with child abuse material offences after allegedly asking one of these networks to have his online name written across an infant’s face, and forcing the infant to vape.

Speaking of victims found through social media and games, many of them young girls, she said, “They are made to feel like they have made a friend, but realistically, they are being groomed and then trapped in a cycle of hurting themselves.”

The AFP’s submission says every young offender in its current counter-terrorism caseload is a boy, while most victims of the nihilistic networks are girls, describing a pattern in which “manipulated boys hurt others while manipulated girls hurt themselves.”

In 2024, the Five Eyes security and police agencies, including ASIO and the AFP, jointly warned that youth involvement in terrorism was trending upwards, and urged parents to understand what their children were doing online.