Sydney: Shouting “shame,” protesters on Monday held demonstrations across Australia to express their anger over what they said was a lenient sentence in the death of a 14-year-old aboriginal boy.

Outside the Supreme Court of New South Wales in Sydney, many protesters wore black, yellow and red — the colours of the aboriginal flag — and Black Lives Matter shirts. They said the sentence was yet another injustice against the indigenous community.

“Aboriginal blood has been spilt, and it continues to be spilt,” Lynda-June Coe, a representative of Fighting in Solidarity Towards Treaties, an advocacy group for Australia’s First Nations people, told the crowd. “The primary target of this undeclared war is our children.”

“When does this insanity stop?” she added.

The teenager, Elijah Doughty, was killed in August 2016 in Kalgoorlie, a city in Western Australia, when a man, whose identity has not been released, ran him over in a truck. The man said that Elijah was riding a motorcycle that had been stolen from his house. The man said that he had been catching up to the motorcycle when it veered unexpectedly in front of his truck, leading to a collision.

On Friday, the Supreme Court of Western Australia acquitted the man of manslaughter but convicted him on the charge of dangerous driving occasioning death, to which he pleaded guilty. That charge has a maximum sentence of 10 years, but he was given three years, with the eligibility for parole.

When the news of the verdict reached Coe on Friday, her first emotion was anger, she said. She issued a national call to action on social media and through a network of advocacy organisations. They began organising protests across Australia’s capital cities. Demonstrations in Melbourne and Brisbane are scheduled for later this week.

At the protest on Monday, many said they saw the sentence as another slight in a long history of institutionalised racism against aboriginal people since Australia’s colonisation in 1788.

Speakers threw red ochre, a traditional aboriginal paint that they said represented spilt blood, at the glass walls of the Supreme Court and wrote Elijah’s name on the glass as police officers watched.

A report last year found that indigenous Australian men had the highest rates of suicide in the world. According to the 2016 census, suicide was the leading cause of death for aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders ages 15 to 34 from 2011 to 2015. Those statistics reflected the underlying sense, protesters said, that aboriginal-Australian lives were disposable.

There is a culture in Australia that views “aboriginal people as animals and our lives aren’t worth it,” said Meyne Wyatt, an actor who grew up in Kalgoorlie and said he was a distant relative of Elijah’s. “We’re worth it.”

Non-aboriginal Australians at the protest said they did not want to stay silent anymore.

“It’s been 230 years of systemic decimation of culture, systemic decimation of a race of people who have done absolutely nothing but be here,” said Jess Loudon, who is white and grew up in the Northern Territory.

“He knew he could get away with it and that’s why he did it,” Loudon added, referring to the man who killed Elijah. “And why did he know he could get away with it? Because that child was aboriginal.”

In the aftermath of Elijah’s death last year, anger erupted into violence in Kalgoorlie. Riot police officers were brought in, and dozens of people were arrested.

That tension emerged again Monday when an aboriginal man with a white braid began shouting at police officers.

“You’re terrorists, look at you,” he said, using expletives. “Go back to your own country.”