“Young people today are unbearable, without moderation... Our world is reaching a critical stage. Children no longer listen to their parents. More and more children are committing crimes and if urgent steps are not taken the end of the world as we know it is fast approaching.”

Don’t think this is a quote out of some recent newspaper report. These words were written in the eighth century BC by Greek poet Hesiod.

I came across this text while reading on the issue of the age of criminal responsibility. Jorge Cardona, a member of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, used the excerpt in his address to the Human Rights Council last year.

In his paper, Cardona refutes what he calls the “myth” that every generation believes that the young ones are lost, that child and teen delinquency is on the rise and that penalties for this age cohort should be strengthened. We have to bear in mind that the notions of childhood and adolescence are modern.

In previous centuries, children were viewed as miniature adults. Children were made to work for long hours, just like grown-ups. Deviant behaviour by children was treated just like that by adults and the punishment was no different.

Today, we regard the development of the child as a gradual, physical and mental process. We look at childhood and adolescence as a crucial period in an individual’s life.

In fact, adolescence was only viewed as a particular stage of development in the 19th century. It was at that time that adolescents were considered to be in need of guidance and some control.

Law is tied to the kind of society we live in. The way we deal with delinquent children and adolescents reflects the way childhood and adolescence are socially constructed.

Internationally, it is, by and large, acknowledged that there should be a separate criminal justice system for juveniles, which takes into account their immaturity and inexperience.

The United Nations’ Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice stress that “efforts shall be made to establish, in each national jurisdiction, a set of laws, rules and provisions specifically applicable to juvenile offenders and institutions and bodies entrusted with the functions of the administration of juvenile justice…”

Undoubtedly, there are people reading this piece who are saying that there have been very serious crimes committed by children. The James Bulger case immediately comes to mind, the toddler who was killed brutally by two 10-year-olds in the UK.

In England, the age of criminal responsibility is one of the lowest in Europe. It was reduced from age 14 to 10 in 1998 when the presumption that children under 14 did not know the difference between right and wrong was removed. But as Britain’s Children’s Commissioner, Maggie Atkinson, points out “The statistics show that we are in danger of criminalising too many children and young people by locking them up for committing far less serious crimes”.

Law is tied tothe kind of society we live in

Three years ago, a call was made for the age of criminal responsibility to be raised from 10 to 12 in England. The justice minister replied that children over the age of 10 “knew the difference between bad behaviour and serious wrongdoing” and rejected the plea.

UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay insists that, in the case of child offenders, under international law, imprisonment should only be a last resort. “In every case where a child is deprived of his or her liberty, we must ask ourselves what we hope to achieve in doing so – whether it is to punish, to rehabilitate or to simply remove difficult children from sight.”

The age when a child can be held criminally responsible in Malta is nine years. Of course, the argument that civilised society should recognise that children who commit offences need to be treated differently from adult criminals applies to us too.

As in other areas, the development and implementation of policies and practices are subject to both internal and external pressures. Among the latter, one finds a number of UN agreements, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that the best interests of the child must always be the primary consideration and that custody should only be used as a last resort.

Helena Dalli is Minister for Social Dialogue, Consumer Affairs and Civil Liberties.

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