JJWC: Law reforms must focus on prevention, not lowering criminal liability

The Juvenile Justice and Welfare Council (JJWC) said that discourse regarding legislative reforms to decrease violence among youth should look past lowering criminal liability and instead focus on analyzing the various factors that lead to children committing unlawful acts.

Atty. Clare Oco, executive director of the JJWC, explained during a radio interview that prevention was better than implementing stricter punishment, noting that there were some cases where children ended their lives even before being held accountable.

“I think what’s more relevant to look at particularly in the executive side is prevention,” Oco said. “One of the emerging concerns is nihilistic violence extremism where children are encouraged, young people in general are encouraged to conduct senseless violence.”

Discussions surrounding criminal liability and other measures to address juvenile offenders were re-opened after two separate incidents of gun violence within schools were reported in less than a month.

The suspects in the tragic incidents were minors who carried firearms that were supposedly obtained through their relatives.

The violent encounters led to multiple deaths and injuries of students.

Amid the development, Oco said that the government needed to implement provisions of the Juvenile Justice Welfare Act that mandated the conduct of programs that assisted children that were at risk of coming into conflict with the law.

The lawyer further stated that the initiatives were important, particularly in the growing digital space, which has been attributed to encouraging violence among children.

“Even if we do lower the criminal liability the problem will not be resolved if we do not look at a majority of factors that push them to commit violence,” she said.

Blaming parents is ‘punitive’

One of the supposed factors that the public have pointed out as the primary influence of violence was the neglect of parents in taking care of their children.

For Oco, however, she said that such a perspective was “punitive,” given that children were often influenced by a “confluence” of factors that they encounter in their day-to-day lives.

“Parents can not always be blamed because they don’t always push the child, it’s a confluence of many events, not just one factor, but it is a factor,” she said.

“What we should do is to capacitate parents on how they can properly raise their children,” she added.

As for parents who do push their children to commit violence, Oco did note that there were laws in place to ensure that they would also be held liable.