CRINmail 82
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Stop making children criminals: Separating ‘responsibility’ from ‘criminalisation’
Adult commitment to punitive systems runs deep. Less readily adhered to is States’ respect for children’s rights in the area of juvenile justice. This week, the World Congress on Juvenile Justice, which took place in Geneva, sought to address the pressing concerns regarding children’s rights in juvenile justice systems.
On Wednesday, CRIN organised a high-level panel discussion entitled “Stop making children criminals: the ‘minimum age’ debate - separating ‘responsibility’ from ‘criminalisation’”, which was chaired by CRIN director Veronica Yates. The panellists discussed a paper published by CRIN that aims to encourage a new debate on juvenile justice. Its premise: that the majority of justice systems in countries around the world focus on the punishment of children in conflict with the law, rather than their rehabilitation. This trend of criminalising children, CRIN argues, runs contrary to the Convention of the Rights of the Child, and States therefore need to design systems designed to keep children out of the criminal justice system altogether.
In this month’s Violence against Children CRINmail, we look at the issue in more detail.
A need for a new debate
In the words of panellist Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, former Independent Expert for the UN Secretary-General’s 2006 Study on Violence against Children: “Too often, juvenile justice systems are not providing justice at all; they are simply re-named penal systems, subjecting children to direct and indirect punitive violence that can do nothing to rehabilitate and reintegrate them.”
Ever younger children are being exposed to the criminal justice system, as States continue to lower the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR). States justify lowering the MACR often in response to rising crime rates - even though children tend to represent only a minority of offenders; to dissuade the use of children by adults to carry out offences; or to punish child offenders more harshly for serious offences. However, “maintaining primarily punitive, retributive systems for children in conflict with the law,” said panellist Peter Newell, Coordinator of the Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, “reflects [a] primitive emotion – fear and hatred of the next generation, holding them absurdly to blame for current ills.” These include violence in the home, poverty, and risky survival activities.
To allegedly combat this trend, policy statements and debates aim to raise the MACR by a year or two, or “reduce” sentences of detention. Yet this approach is steeped in compromise, as in failing to challenge both the criminalisation of children and the locking up of children as a form of punishment, supposed justice systems for children continue to be focused more on retribution than rehabilitation.
This situation continues despite evidence that shows how criminalising children causes persisting harm not only to the overall development of many children but also of human societies. Indeed, such a focus on punishment only encourages a spiral downwards by children into further offending and increasingly violent offending which often extends into adulthood.
Not only this, that States should individually define an age, within the Convention on the Rights of the Child’s definition of childhood, at which children can be criminalised is inevitably discriminatory. The majority have arbitrarily set the minimum age of criminal responsibility below the age of 18, despite this practice being in conflict with the requirement of the Convention that the child's best interests must be a primary consideration and the child's right to maximum possible development. The systematic imprisonment of child offenders also runs contrary to the principle of detention being a measure of last resort.
However, keeping under-18s out of the criminal justice system does not mean that young people who commit offences avoid ‘justice’ or that nothing is done about their offending. ‘Responsibility’ is not a negative concept, and it does not serve our purpose as advocates of children’s human rights to deny their immediate responsibility, to belittle their evolving capacities.
But to reverse the vicious cycle of offending, we need to separate ‘responsibility’ from ‘criminalisation,’ discard retribution altogether and focus exclusively on rehabilitation. This is key to ensuring rights-compliant justice systems that respond to offending by children.
Further Information:
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NEWS ROUND-UP ON JUVENILE JUSTICE
UPCOMING EVENTS
Justice Sector Reform: Training programme on applying human rights based approaches to justice sector reform
Organisation: International Human Rights Network
Application deadline: 28 February 2014
Event dates: 22-26 June 2015
Location: Maynooth, Ireland
Online safety: Protecting children on the internet
Organisation: Policy Knowledge
Date: 4 March 2014
Location: London, United Kingdom
Transnational child protection: Expert meeting on children on the move - children’s participation and discussion of the way forward
Organisation: Council of Baltic Sea States et al.
Date: 10-11 March 2015
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Child labour: Course on ‘Skills & livelihood for older out-of-school children in child labour or children at risk of child labour
Organisation: ILO International Training Centre
Dates: 16-20 March 2014
Location: Turin, Italy
Child abuse: 9th Latin American Regional Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect
Organisation: International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect
Dates: 26-29 April 2015
Location: Toluca, Mexico
Bodily integrity: 2015 Genital Autonomy conference
Organisation: Genital Autonomy
Dates: 8-9 May 2015
Location: Frankfurt, Germany
Street children: International Conference on the Legal Needs of Street Youth
Organisation: American Bar Association et al.
Date: 16-17 June 2015
Location: London, United Kingdom
Child labour: The Nairobi Global Conference on Child Labour
Organisation: African Network for the Prevention and Protection against Child Abuse and Neglect
Date: 23-25 August 2015
Location: Nairobi, Kenya
Child abuse: 14th ISPCAN European Regional Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect
Organisation: International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse & Neglect
Date: 27 September 2015
Location: Bucharest, Romania
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