Don't baby the children
The Philippine House of Representatives has passed a bill seeking to lower the age of criminal liability for children to 12 from the present 15. A Senate version wants it a year higher at 13. A Social Weather Station survey says majority of Filipinos want to keep it at 15.
Meanwhile, human and children's rights advocates would rather not make children criminally liable at all. As for me, if I can have my way, I would bring the threshold to as low as possible, perhaps to as low as eight. And that is born of recollections I have of my own childhood, not of who I am now as an adult.
At eight, and as a child growing up in the 1960s, what was right and what was wrong was already pretty clear to me. And I am sure the same can be said of children my age. The consequences of not knowing the difference we consciously avoided. And any statistics from that long ago time will bear me out on this.
There was little or no crime committed by children in my time, despite the growing permissiveness descending on my generation. I know it is tempting to conclude that the relative quiet was due to the "backwardness" of the times as opposed to the runaway advances and modernity of the present when things can easily get blurred.
But those who subscribe to that view are forgetting one thing. It was in the 1960s when almost everything of the present took off. It was our generation that conquered space, remember? We were the ones who first put man on the moon. One of the most widely used terms of the present, WiFi, is a take-off of our HiFi, or High Fidelity, a great leap in sound reproduction.
No, it was not the times, backward or not, that was responsible for the dearth of juvenile crimes involving our generation when we were kids. It was our very early discernment of good as opposed to evil. And we can only thank our parents for bringing us up properly, and for disciplining us, including physically, when we erred.
I think it is actually insulting to children to say they are incapable of early discernment or of making simple and basic decisions involving right and wrong. I think those who insist on this so-called puerile infirmity are themselves being mentally and morally dishonest.
To say young children are incapable of discernment is to be ignorant or conveniently oblivious to the proven fact that children learn and get a good grasp of the world around them at a very young age. Indeed we have been taught that much of what we learn in life we learn while young. As old dogs, we not only can no longer be taught new tricks, we forget the old ones.
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