"What are my fellow alumni saying, and why are they wrong?"
"What are my fellow alumni saying, and why are they wrong?"
Over the weekend I stumbled onto an online statement of opposition to various House and Senate bills that propose to lower the minimum age of “criminal responsibility” (more softly described in the bills as “children in conflict with the law”) from 15 to 12 years old.
The statement came from some of my fellow alumni of the U.P. School of Economics. It is heartening to note just how far the products of this school have come down from their ivory tower since my years there in the seventies. But it also sobering to discover that even such illustrious folks can fall prey, no less than anybody else, to fallacies of illogic and unexamined ideology.
A disclaimer at the outset: I haven’t read any of these pending bills on lowering the minimum age of criminal liability. I can think of few things less boring than poring through legislation. If readers can summon up actual language from the bills to rebut me, I’ll be more than happy to stand corrected.
So: what are my fellow alumni saying, and why are they wrong?
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“Discernment” is not clearly defined when the House bill subjects the child who “acts with discernment” to “intervention and diversion proceedings.”
The UP alumni point to various local studies that connect the “age of discernment” to—variously—fifteen, eighteen, even twenty-five years old. This wide range of ages is no less vague than the House bill. And surely no one will argue that the minimum age of criminal liability could be set as high as 18, let alone 25 years old.
What the House bill does say is for the authorities to rely on “the discernment assessment tools developed by the DSWD.” That’s a practical answer to a question which academics aren’t helpful on. If you have a problem with the concept, take it up with the DSWD and the tools they’re using.
The U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child does consider the minimum age of criminal responsibility BELOW the age of 12 years as “internationally acceptable.” But elsewhere in that document, the U.N. also “urges State parties not to lower their minimum age…to the age of 12.”
This is the kind of “Yes, but…” answer we can expect from the diplomats and bureaucrats who inhabit the United Nations. These guys by their nature and profession want to have their cake and eat it too. So when they answer like this, do we focus on the “Yes” or on the “but…”? It’s a poor way to form public policy—and luckily for us, as Duterte keeps reminding us, we don’t have to listen to the U.N. to do what we think is best for us.
Other Philippine laws establish 18 years as the “age of majority”—to vote, to indulge in tobacco and alcohol, to get married.
True, but we also have the current law (which the UP alumni support) setting the minimum age of criminal liability at 15 years. So right now, even now, the law already makes a distinction between the age of majority and the age of criminal liability. Whatever the former is, has nothing to do with where the latter should be.
Criminals will adapt to the change in law. Syndicate heads can simply deploy children younger than 12 to carry out crimes.
The adaptability of criminals—shared with other humans—is not an argument for doing nothing, but in fact an argument for persevering and adapting as well against them. If syndicate heads end up recruiting younger and younger, and so long as we follow them down, at some point it will just be too much trouble for them to change the diapers of their felonious accomplices.
PNP studies show that only two percent of crimes are committed by children.
This outlier argument is especially specious. In the PNP’s index list of major crimes, it’s quite unlikely that any one of those crimes—whether murder, rape, or whatever—is committed by more than 200,000 people in a given year. So should we now decriminalize their behavior because they’re fewer than two percent of the population?
There are not enough “Bahay Pagasa” centers for children, and some of them have “subhuman conditions” and are “worse than prisons.”
Exactly the same problems of overpopulation and poor conditions—and on an even wider scale—afflict the country’s jails. But nobody’s calling for the wholesale release of inmates, or the police slowing down their arrest rates, for that reason. If the problem is infrastructure, then the right answer is to build or improve more of it.
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Much of the rest of the U.P. alumni statement focuses on two propositions that are arguable at best:
Poverty in our country is the main cause of criminality.
Even if this were true, it does not excuse or even mitigate an individual’s responsibility for his own criminal behavior. And it is such notions of responsibility that ought to be driving our policies about punishing—or, in the case of juveniles, forcibly rehabilitating—criminals.
Moreover, there are many more poor people who still live within the law. They ought to be offended by this kind of patronizing generalization that being poor somehow predisposes you to a weaker moral or civic conscience.
Ours is a culture that highly values its children.
This one is true—and it’s precisely why we ought to be acting as soon as possible to correct and redirect our children whenever they start going bad. The U.P. alumni insult the rest of us by implying that we will treat our child offenders no better than the adult ones. We are not Neanderthals, we know what “age-appropriate” means when we consider how best to reform our young.
The position paper closes with a quote from the late Senator Jose Diokno, that we want to have “a nation for our children.” On that point I think we can all, of course, agree.
Readers can write me at [email protected].