Lowering the age of criminal responsibility

A different view on the eternal dilemma

Abstract

The journal Crimen 3/2023 published an article entitled "Lowering the age limit of criminal responsibility: an eternal dilemma?" in which the author presents arguments against this solution. The aim of this analysis is to provide the opposite arguments, in favor of lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility, so that the reader can make his judgment based on the pro and contra argumentation. Opponents of lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) mostly refer to the argument of "accepted international standards" as well as to the humane, altruistic statement that children perpetrators of criminal offenses are most often victims of poor socio-economic conditions that "force them into crime", so that they should not be punished, but that they should be helped. In the first part of the paper are analysed international standards and MACR in European and non-European countries. We are proving that international standards regarding MACR does not exists, but MACR is different in different countries. The structure of juvenile crime in Serbia is analysed in the second part. Statistical data show that juvenile crime in recent years is increasingly violent and brutal, what confirm the thesis that MACR should be lowered. The third part of the paper deals with juveniles sanctions. They are relatively mild and do not differ much from the measures of social protection, except that they are not imposed by social services but by judicial authorities, whose authority can only act encouragingly and frighteningly on the child to stop with criminal behaviour. In this sense, we do not see that lowering the MACR would drastically "deteriorate" the position of children, except that perhaps the fear of "criminal responsibility" would deter them from committing criminal offenses. In the end, we deal with the psycho-physical (in)maturity of children starting from the premise that we should not only observe the protection and interests of the child perpetrator, but also the protection and interests of the child victims and victims in general, who feel powerless in a system in which they cannot achieve material or moral satisfaction. Statistics show that the most common victims of juvenile crime are other children, and protection of the childperpetrator in such cases means neglection of the child-victim. The law cannot and should not be only "particularly human", neither for the sake of abstract "humanity" turn an eye to concrete crimes. The issue of lowering the age of criminal responsibility below 14 should be considered because this limit was set at another time and for minors who had a completely different lifestyle and who committed mostly property crimes. Having in mind all that, we advocate that MACR should be reduced to 12 years for all or alternatively only for violent crimes, and in terms of "criminally irresponsible" children, some form of parental criminal responsibility should be introduced. Because the child, by birth itself becomes a legal subject, and the consequences of his actions or the pain inflicted on the victim cannot be attributed to "force majeure", but exclusively to their guilt or the guilt of their parents.