Children in the dark

Charitable fairness insists we hear the two big arguments congressional proponents used in the barbaric bill criminalizing nine-year-olds which, as of Wednesday, was upped by Congress to 12-year-olds.

The two arguments, in bare-bone terms, are that it is a measure meant to protect children and that nine-year-old children are of age to know what is right and wrong.

A measure protecting children is laudable enough; who doesn’t want to protect children? But what proponents used in justifying the statement of high moral principle is off-kilter, absurd and idiotic.

Protecting children in the yet unnamed bill means once children aged nine-years-old and above are penalized as criminals, drug syndicates thereafter will not use children in the illegal drugs business.

Whoa! Take a deep, long breath here. Where that lackadaisical logic comes from is breathtaking! I am helplessly clueless about its origin and the closest I got to this odd logic is the old joke about a congressman, on finding out he couldn’t do anything about poverty, solemnly declared poverty a crime and poor people criminals.

Babbling stupidities, by common experience, is excusable, particularly if the one speaking is dead-drunk. But these are august congressmen speaking here, not dead drunks and presumably, some sort of legislative wisdom speaks through them. Have they spoken wisdom? I have large doubts.

Nonetheless, granting there is a problem of criminal gangs using children, is making nine-year-old children criminally liable a sane and practical solution?

Immediately, it is not as sound as these children are more likely victims than willing, conscious criminals, intimidated by criminal gangs to do their bidding under the threat of violence.

But let’s assume making children criminally liable is a workable solution and there is now a law mandating nine-year-olds, apprehended as drug couriers, can be legally penalized and detained. What will prevent drug syndicates then from using eight-year-olds and even younger children in place of the nine-year-olds?

Faced with this stark fact, will the criminal age limit again be lowered? In fact, Mr. Duterte, who is as excited as Congress at lowering the criminal age, is saying drug syndicates are now using six-year-olds!

Fixating on an age number, therefore, is a slippery logical slope. And before we know it, age won’t really matter, whether it is nine, 12 or 15. As there is no guarantee this will not happen, the thought that this government might as well declare all children at birth as potential criminals is as valid a proposition as any other alarming propositions our present era has coughed up.

Barbaric lunacy again? Maybe not so. English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes long ago categorically believed that the universal and inevitable initial condition, meaning at birth, of humankind is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” In short, criminal.

Anyway, the other argument about whether nine-year-olds have capacities to “discern” right from wrong is important in resolving the settling or abolishing criminal age limits involving children.

Not so important in the meaningful appreciation of the issue is the police saying they have recorded some 1,500 cases involving young children. The number is logically insignificant as it is too small, lost in the millions of children out there.

Anecdotal evidences, too, of being victims by children in conflict with the law are similarly useless, as anecdotal evidences are clearly meant to stir emotional reactions rather than sober reflections of the issues at hand.

Suggestions also about a host of minor practical issues once a law is passed are similarly unimportant now. Among these practical issues are niceties like if there are enough “Bahay Pag-asa” facilities, a fancy name for what is still a jail or the planned agricultural farms where children proven guilty of running afoul with the law are sent for rehabilitation is any different from the Iwahig penal colony for adults. This in turn opens government to charges of exploiting minors as forced labor or if there are enough competent juvenile courts equipped to handle cases involving minors.

So, how crucial is the debate over whether nine-year-olds have criminal capacities or not? Well, once many are thoroughly convinced that nine-year-olds, and even 12-year-olds, do not have capacities to tell right from wrong it is only then where we can arrive at getting the correct age when someone should be held criminally liable.

Of course, there are complex moral, scientific, social and political questions surrounding the issue of criminal age limits. Addressing these questions properly, however, will take more space than this column allows.

Nonetheless, let me air a cautionary note. Any sincere position taken on the issue about criminalizing children will always reveal one’s underlying assumptions about class privileges and political positions.

An example of this is in the approving of criminalizing children, which more often than not targets poor children struggling to survive the darkness of poverty, reveals one’s true sensibilities about the poor. Sensibilities which by turn reveals whether one is complicit or not in state brutality against poor children who never had opportunities in the first place as those arguing from the perspective of the middle or rich classes.

In short, we must check our social and political biases. For God’s sakes, defenseless children are involved here! Doing less is more than enough to throw this barbaric bill criminalizing young children back to the one place where it should have been in the first place, the garbage dump.