Agree. Absurd idea. 

It is absurd to expect children under 14 to fully understand the severity and consequences of their actions.  Crimes committed under the age of 14 should be dealt with purely from a pyschological and educational corrective  rather than criminal perspective.   Certainly there should be no detention other than where there are extreme mental issues and in  very rare cases where it is necessary to protect the public.

As usual, guy loves criminals. Keep as is. 

12 in Scotland

13 in France

14 in Germany

15 in Norway

I was less than 10 when I watched the police investigating a burglary at my parents' place and fully understood that burglary was wrong and that if they found the people responsible they would likely go to prison.

Jamie Bulger's killers Guy?  Of course children under 14 understand right from wrong.

What Risky said. Rof's middle class liberals are pretty lenient on crime.

My 12 y/o certainly knows not to be a county lines runner.

Iirc from many (30!) years ago, it's only sub 10s that are exempt and 10-13 is the old doli incapax shyt.  The bolger killers were in the latter category iirc.

Typical Labour.

Soft on crime, soft on the causes of crime.

A Charter for drugs gangs to run wild with no risk.

Only a metro-bubble living lunatic would advocate this…

Why does it have to be so absolute.  You can deal with the 10 -14 year olds through sentencing guidelines and changes in dealing with the length of criminal records.

Citing Jamie Bulger’s killers - Jon Venables and Robert Thompson - as a basis for proof of concept of criminal responsibility in children is a very controversial choice. They were 10 when they abducted Bulger. The then Home Secretary Michael Howard was adamant that they should be tried and if convicted then they should ‘lock them up and throw away the key’. The case seemed to set a principle for evaluation of criminal responsibility in children and they were held fit to stand trial. A trial involving processes they are unlikely to have understood at all, which have since changed. 

 

I don't think there is an easy "at this age" answer.  I mean, being an acting like a total cv>t is a human instinct that may manifest at any time.  I don't think you can legislate for that and I do not think you can put an age on it.   Anyone who has spent time in a softplay area knows there are very young children who you would tag to be a future christie.  Never your own, obv.  

I don't think the  prison system helps but i do not have a suggestion.

I support this as would anyone else who’s actually met a child of 12’or 13

Rhialto19 May 26 19:17

Reply | Report

Why does it have to be so absolute.  You can deal with the 10 -14 year olds through sentencing guidelines and changes in dealing with the length of criminal records.

because it is a threshold test before prosecution. You don’t get to sentencing if you don’t get to prosecute because the law holds the person not to have been capable of a criminal act because they are too young to bear criminal responsibility and cannot therefore be subject to criminal trial. Sentencing is not a fix for reason 2 below. 

I have three points of view to raise here. 

1. Before prosecuting you, the law needs to determine if you are a person (age and capacity) who knew what they are doing is seriously wrong and to comprehend the implications and consequences, or that you are not - it is binary. As a first principle there must be a threshold or we prosecute babies etc. Parliament should reflect society’s appetite for where that line should be. 

2. However, you are advocating that the age of responsibility should be 10 for everyone with a policy to reflect degrees of responsibility according to age on a scale of, say, 10-14, or whatever you set it at. I can see your point but that is a greyscale that guarantees miscarriage of justice at the boundary age of 10 where there is a recognition that although the law says the 10 year old was of the age of criminal responsibility the facts say he really was a bit murky about it all (the 10 year old at trial didn’t really cope with six hours of cross examination) and though the jury have no reasonable doubt he intended to kill or injure the  the old man with the hand gun they do have doubt that he knew it was wrong because he spoke like he was playing a video game; so in your book sentencing would aid the issue and yet there is a mandatory life sentence so no scope for variation (save for tariff) for the offence in question.  For this reason the law needs to be clear on the age from which the grown up rules of our society apply to all persons in scope, with mental capacity clearly in play as always, on the facts at the time. 

3. I accept that a 10 year old is capable of horrendous acts. I have been involved in such cases. This is not the same thing as saying because a 10 year old is capable of the act he or she must know that the act was seriously wrong. In 1998 the concept of Doli Incapax was abolished (by the Blair government but following the revulsion at the facts of R v Thompson and Venables). Doli Incapax was a presumption that children aged 10 to 13 did not know the difference between right and wrong. It was not an absolute bar but a rebuttable presumption. This meant the prosecution had to prove the child knew their actions were seriously wrong. This was an entirely unnecessary and unsafe abolition. We now presume all 10 year olds know their acts to be seriously wrong.  Some will, some will clearly not. The appetite to raise the age is a response to the inappropriateness of this knee jerk legislation. Simple answer, reinstate Doli Incapax. Problem solved. 

Interesting mutters: it seems my criminal law teaching was defunct a year after I was taught it!  

The safeguards and processes that were necessary to implement in crown courts for the hearing of trials involving child defendants as a guardrail to support the abolition of Doli Incapax and meet the heavy criticism of the appallingly bad prosecution of Venables and Thompson have been cumbersome, expensive and difficult to manage. Not to mention the impossibility or tracking whether they aid the administration of justice for defendant and crown. 

I feel very upset still at what Venables and Thompson did to that poor child. Justice demanded a clear trial of the facts and when facts were proved, appropriate sentencing. However, I felt unsettled at the time by the mob demands for a show trial in a crown court on an adult basis.  I was partly comforted to know that the Crown had had to rebut the Doli Incapax presumption and prove criminal responsibility, so the indictment was appropriate even though they were very young. My disgust was that they applied a trial process that at least one if not both could not have really understood or coped with. The law of procedure changed for the good there but then the law of criminal responsibility was absolutely destroyed. We became a weaker society by trying to show strength. 

Wading in here on a pretty uninformed basis but moving to 14 as a standalone change would be an absolute disaster in terms of anti social behavior. The net result would, in the real world, be that the police (even more than they do now) would just say 'there is really not much at all we can do' in response to anti social and drug connected behavior from kids in that 11 to 13 range, some of whom are frankly fecking feral. 

If it were part of a broader overhaul of social services and child protection that offered alternative ways to deal with the kids and that behavior then that would be a different thing entirely but that would cost money and require proper grown up thinking from government, both of which are in extremely short supply in the UK. 

Bloody hell wango, that's some memory of criminal law.  I certainly didn't remember that. Although I was taught crim by a then twenty something Gráinne de Búrca and so was a little distracted.

Come now Buzz, I bet you can recall the name of the case which involved people nailing their scrota to the wall

That is most unfair Buzz! I was also distracted during criminal law but that's because I was being taught by a 50 something lunatic bloke who used to pick his nose through tutorials and drop the results down his grubby frayed shirt cuff and I was trying to not throw up! 

R v Brown (and other perverts)?

R v Wilson is the one that sticks in my mind. Who knew that marital bottom branding was a manly diversion. 

Fit tutors, that’s a short thread. 

Anyway, youth crime is treated absurdly overall by society. Parents are not made to be responsible but the nanny state appears hamstrung in its approach. Result - a gap that organised crime exploits or that just leaves mentally vulnerable people behind. 

But the real problem is that the only people in society afraid of a higher power are, well, you don’t like me saying it. 

"R v Wilson is the one that sticks in my mind. Who knew that marital bottom branding was a manly diversion. "

I seem to recall he used a butter knife.  see also Camplin and the chaptai pan.  Funny what stays with you.

Interesting to read Mutters’ posts above

I instinctively feel 12 is more appropriate than 10

10 has always felt very very young to me - I think the data from countries who have higher ages and who try to care for and rehabilitate younger children who do horrific things feels more fair and just societally. 10 year olds who kill don’t do so in a vacuum - they are usually deeply abused themselves (Bulger, Mary Bell etc) and therefore I favour a rehabilitation and care approach.  

I am quite sure that it is a mix of "TL:DNR", "there he goes again wanging on for an age - yawn" and "this is all very boring - kill everyone" sentiment, but I think this is the first time in decades where I have said something on this forum, on a point of legal process/history, and nobody's really taken issue with the point. A few "interestings", a nod or two along the "I did not know that" but absolutely no typical RoF unsubstantiated rejections and allegations of spazzenometry.  

RoF is changing.

For those interested in this area here is a good paper from someone at a university I did not know existed but it is well researched. 

The Abolition of Doli Incapax and the Alternatives to Raising the Age of Criminal Responsibility by Leanne Gibson :: SSRN 

we really need Bailey to read, consider and revert on this subject. 

Doli Incapax sounds like a Neil Gaiman character tbf

It is actually a very well written and researched article and clearly explains how we arrive at a point where Parliament is considering raising the age.  At the time of writing there was no appetite or capacity within Parliament to do so, but she was observing the dangers of abolishing Doli Incapax and the injustices that presented, but also identifying the criticisms of the Doli Incapax presumption and defence which were very aggressive (including by Lord Justice Laws, and the then Home Secretary Jack Straw), but by counterpoint the ECHR observation that this left E+W with the harshest regime in Europe.  She arrives at the need for a change in the age of presumed criminality.  It seems like the current Government has caught up with the unfinished business here. 

Yours, academically

Dr Mutters

Interesting article, thx.  Jack Straw was a penoir.

Indeed, thanks Mutts.  

(The uni was originally Newcastle Poly.)

it is indeed

RoF really has, really really, changed.

Straw was a very right wing left winger.  Penoir or not he implemented a heck of a lot of brutalist architecture in the Home Office space.  This was a time of ASBOs, TWOCers joyriding GTis and Bulger.  

Labour is economically left wing, traditionally as a working class party it has never been particularly socially liberal/left wing.  Its movement to the left on social issues in the last couple of decades in part explains the rise of Reform et al.

I sat between Jack Straw and Michael Howard at a dinner at Inner Temple an age ago.  Straw had a speech to make. I actually found him to be quite good company over the meal. We did not talk politics, but we did talk about things adjacent to politics - criminal justice, access to justice for the unrich and legal aid changes, the changes to the caution and inferences on no-comment interviews under the 1995 Act.  I found him to be quite human and accessible, unstuffy, bright but conscientious (i.e. not aloof bright - hard working). By contrast, Howard, who also spoke, was very sure he was the most interesting person there, did not engage in the issues under discussion, seemed to be more interested in punishment of wrongdoing (some sort of Torquemada complex) and really slippery on detail.  One of them was in possession of a comprehensive and detailed understanding of his subject matter and it wasn't Michael Howard.  Neither were folk I yearned to have dinner with again, mind.

Night of the long spoons.

Or something of the night of the long spoons.

Thanks for the article - have read half and will finish later

Reading her reasoning just also took my mind to how absolutely and utterly heartbreaking it is that children in so many countries are married off to grown men (recent Taliban news, many southern states of the USA, the fact that countries have had to even explicitly ban men marrying children arghhhh) but honestly I felt so disturbed last night just thinking about how a 9 year old could be married to a grown man)
What is this world ffs 

Yes, most disturbing. But there is a wider issue. While a 50 or 60 year old man remains attracted to the form of a teenage girl, and while the media continue to normalise this by portraying women in a form that blurs the line between adolescence and adulthood, and while men are not challenged for regarding this as some sort of zenith of female beauty, airbrushing out the realities of age, demanding all women are benchmarked by that caricature while refusing to acknowledge their own age, shape and order, we have a grandaddy of a problem. 

Mutters isn’t the problem here evolutionary as much as societal?  Men are just naturally attracted to females at peak child bearing age with the best chance of surviving childbirth and raising the children  which is obviously quite young 

Men used to beat each other with clubs, wear animal skins, sleep in caves and hunt for food with spears too, but we managed to move on. Well, some did. 

ummm what Guy? Where is that backed up by science? Men would be long dead in eras gone by in their 40s/50s and certainly not still procreating

There’s good research into why we and only a handful of species have a menopause as it was women’s wisdom and guidance needed to protect and secure the next generation whilst men died out younger

I don’t accept there is any evolutionary basis for male attraction to young females. It’s about power and domination. Why wouldn’t women want the youthful virile sperm of young teenager boys if it were evolutionary? Whereas umm we don’t - they don’t have to ban women marrying children anywhere because we don’t want to 

The evil peado overlords set the agenda in many facets of society including beauty standards as marketed. It’s deeply problematic and I think more women are starting to see through the veil and oppose the conditioning but it’s very nuanced and deeply engrained in us from as soon as we can watch and read as girls. Disturbing in the extreme

The resignation letters from 2 ministers recently highlighting the government’s absolute lack of action on VAWG are worth reading - we have the tools to tackle a lot of online issues and we don’t

I wonder why….

Guy you sound like the sort of person who tried to add P to LGBTQ because being a peado is apparently a legitimate sexual predilection 

ARGHHH

This honestly keeps me up at night - I am so so so disturbed by how many children are been deeply harmed as we speak 

And it’s also related to this topic above because the children who commit heinous “crimes” at age 10, 11 etc are usually themselves victims of horrific physical and sexual abuse. 

Years ago I read that at the same time as the Bulger case a scandi country I think had a similar tragedy and societally they saw it as their collective responsibility to rehabilitate and care for the child who had killed and harmed. I know it’s a difficult topic but I tend to that approach for anyone under 13 maybe 14 because it’s so unlikely a child would ever torture and kill without themselves having been tortured, raped, exposed to such harm and damaged. I don’t know enough about USA awful gun crime incidents to know how much that applies there but I think the high profile cases here have all had that background. 

So rather than age of criminal responsibility it’s also about societal responsibility to protect children 

WTF are you talking about Miss T?  It makes no sense on any level,  I am saying it is natural for men to find young women of child bearing age attractive because it obviously is.   Peadophilia is something completely different and an extremely harmful non evolutionary perversion.  

What society considers  "child" self evidently changes over time.   But given in our society it is generally 18 I believe this should be the age of consent unless both parties are under 18 in which case it should remain 16.  I am not in any way seeking to justify older men having sex with girls 18 or under.

I’m also very much in favour for specialist courts for criminal matters concerning children and sexual crimes

I don’t think the adversarial legal system is fit for purpose and was not designed for such crimes

The whole premise of a defence disproving the prosecutions case and trying to discredit victims and witnesses etc just doesn’t sit well with me

I know a number of special measures were introduced to try and manage that but I think an inquisitiorial approach is much more appropriate and takes the distasteful win/lose aspect away and rather serves justice but seeking to get to the truth 

Guy well is sounded like you were

And I still don’t accept it - if men are attracted to 16-18 year olds they need psychological help 

Mainstream porn needs to be banned. It is fuelling a lot of passive abuse and means many men don’t speak up or even turn their mind to these issues as they’re so riddled with shame that they get off to - and this is now the main hits on all mainstream porn sites - faux incest and “barely legal” content

W&G are harmed in the making of all pornography and if any men care about us then they need to clean up their own house first 

Ps. Many girls start menstruating at age 9+ so would be considered on that logic fertile 

I agree much of modern pron is highly problematic.