Criminal age of responsibility

[Shoxfordian]

What age do you think the criminal age of responsibility should be? In Scotland there's a campaign to make the age 12, and the UN opinion is that it should be 14. In portugal, it's 16.

I think it should possibly be 12 or 13 but also there should be some discretion based on the specific child's level of understanding.

Sorry not an aibu just an opinion question

Try telling James Bulger's parents 10 is too young for criminal responsibility

Don't be ridiculous. Setting the age higher doesn't mean patting very young murderers on the head, telling them they've done a very naughty thing and then letting them go.

They were too young to be tried as adults.

This will have the lawyers clapping their hands and counting their bank balance, yet another get-out-of-jail -free card.

^^
You have experience of how criminal lawyers are usually paid do you? Bearing in mind kids rarely pay privately. Very badly is how.

Hard cases make bad law

I think it should be relatively high, 16 at the youngest. Brains are not fully developed until 25. A teenager's brain does not have the full capacity to think through the consequences of their actions and understand the exact effects they will have. They lack the ability to empathise with many situations. They also lack impulse control.

Saying "they know what they are doing" is a gross oversimplification. They may understand some of what they did but they do not have an adults understanding. Treating them as though they do is wrong.

That doesn't mean people under 16 don't get punished for crimes. It just means their age will be taken into account and punishments can focus more on rehabilitation and stopping future offending.

I agree 10 is ridiculously young. I think it should be 16 but I’d settle for something like 14, as the UN suggests. They must have some idea what they are talking about!

I can never get it into my head that it’s younger than the age when a child can give consent to sex (13 - it’s always rape if the child is younger) and much younger than the age at which it’s legal to engage in sexual activity with a young person (16).

There might be room for a completely separate system of legal “punishments” for young people similar to what they would get now - various rehabilitative orders and unpaid work in the community - but without it being classed as criminal or recorded as such. So that possibly only in extreme circumstances does it affect their future prospects.

An individual child's (and adult's) ability to understand and control actions is always taken into account.
I don't think you can talk about a 10 year olds having criminal responsibility in the same way you can an adult. I think they have to be treated completely separately so in that sense there cannot be criminal responsibility until a person is an adult. Which isn't to say there can't be punishment.

aLilNonnyMouse
I wonder if you would have posted this if a child had been abducted and raped by a 15 year old?
I'm not sure that the focus of this crime should be on rehabilitation. I personally think it should be primarily punishment.
I have known, looked after and worked with many under 16 year olds. Many have great empathy and understanding. Almost all were aware of what was right and wrong but the age of 10

I don't believe in punishment for punishments sake. Take a young offender and lock him up without ever teaching him why what he did was wrong, and you just create an angry resentful person who will likely go on to offend again.

Rehabilitation should be the primary function of a working justice system.

Easy to say aLil when it's not your child who has been raped or murdered. There is a pace for punishment, it's not a very trendy or woke word but it exists for a reason. I can assure you that offenders under the age of 16 are mostly already very aware what they did was wrong. They're usually extremely pissed off to have been caught

10 is OK I think, with a provision that if they weren’t capable on an individual basis of forming the mens rea to commit the crime then they wouldn’t be convicted. 12 is too old given that it’s irrebuttable. Plenty of 12 year olds are more than capable of knowing what they’re doing and that it’s wrong

I've been raped myself, I've had close family members murdered. I still hold these opinions.

Both are horrific things but we should follow what evidence shows us works, not respond based off emotions. Rehabilitation leads to better outcome with regards to reoffending. Young people are still learning and they can only learn from examples given to them. Young people in bed situations often know nothing better and should be given the chance to learn from their mistakes - no matter how horrific. You can't just write a child off as evil.

It’s not an either or in relation to incarceration though. I personally feel that imprisonment should fulfil the multiple functions of retribution, deterrence and rehabilitation

There's way more to it than 'knowing right from wrong'. A 4yo knows it's wrong to kill someone, but that doesn't mean they have an adult's understanding. Young adolescents don't have the same concept of permanence, they don't have anything like an adult's impulse control. They're still concrete thinkers at that age.

I don't think anyone's arguing that young people who commit violent crimes shouldn't be managed by the justice system, but there has to be a difference in how we treat a 30yo and how we treat a 12yo who have carried out the same offence.

I don't think anyone's arguing that young people who commit violent crimes shouldn't be managed by the justice system, but there has to be a difference in how we treat a 30yo and how we treat a 12yo who have carried out the same offence

There is. Do you think a fully grown adult man who killed James Bulger in the way Thompson and Venables did would have been released after 8 years?

Likewise Aaron Campbell who was 16 when he murdered and raped Alesha MacPhail received a shorter punishment part to his sentence than he would if he’d been over 18

I think youngsters absolutely should be charged as adults for very serious crimes, like murder and rape.

I think youngsters absolutely should be charged as adults for very serious crimes, like murder and rape.
I don't, at least not before the age of around 15.

There is a vast difference between a child of 10 or even 13, and a child of 16/17. The two can't really be classed the same.

murder is still murder, regardless if a killer was 14 or 34.

I'm not so sure about ages really - 16 seems high, 10 seems low, but then if a 10 yr old does something truly awful society needs a mechanism to address that.

For me it's about the punishment fitting the crime - none of this "being tried as an adult" and then shoving a 15 yr old in jail for the entire rest of their life nonsense that seems to happen in certain countries, and a young person's detention/sentence should not be punishment led and should only focus on setting them on the right path and reintegrating them into society. Identifying them should be strictly disallowed too - this makes a huge difference to their future prospects.

Easy to say aLil when it's not your child who has been raped or murdered. Yes it is. And that's one reason we have a criminal justice system rather than allowing the injured parties to exact their own retribution.

We had a sneak thief enter our house. The police knew who it was likely to be, but hadn't enough evidence. I was delighted when I later heard that a caretaker had thrown him over a wall. Now I just feel sad that he should have wrecked his life chances at such an early age.

How can we say 13 is too young to understand consent, to decide whether to smoke or drink alcohol, to sign any sort of contract, as their brain and understanding isn't fully developed enough to fully comprehend all the consequences. But then if they get into a fight in the heat of the moment, that they fully understand the long term consequences that their split second decisions will have.

Also '10 is old enough to understand right from wrong'...is it? If all the adults in your life consistently model 'wrong' behaviour? If this causes them to fall in with gangs who also model this behaviour? How and where are hey supposed to gain this understanding?

I think 10-12 is right imo. Obviously more lenient sentences are needed for kids who are groomed into criminal behaviour eg by County Lines.

10’s fine.. there’s a gang of 12-14 year olds local to me destroying the town at night.. posting it on snapchat and bragging about £1000’s of damage. Bragging that the police can’t catch them, can’t touch them or it’s assault..

The name of fuck do they not know they’re doing wrong. They threw a large wooden plank with nails (part of a planter they’d destroyed n chucked at moving cars) at a mother with a pram! They are feral rodents of teens that mummy and daddy are protecting (literally the dad of the one who’s snapchat was used said it wasn’t him doing the damage cause he was filmin)

Yet the police know it’s a ohh don’t do that situation so they blast the sirens on the way round and they run off to the next place.

Maybe a sliding scale of how responsible they are.

@Lunafortheloveogod This is probably why the police do SFA - www.theguardian.com/society/2019/nov/03/youth-court-system-in-chaos-says-childrens-commissioner

My nearly 10 year old understands right from wrong. But she doesn't have the life experience to anticipate or understand fully the consequences of her actions. That's an important distinction.