The House of Representatives is a veritable chamber of regressive legislation after it reduced the minimum age of criminal age of responsibility from the present 15 to 12-year old children even as it previously restored the death penalty.

These two regressive measures are included in the priority legislative agenda of President Rodrigo Duterte, which he announced at the start of his incumbency.

Speaker Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo admitted that she was pushing for the enactment of the bill even in its original version of nine years threshold because it is the priority of President Duterte.

Even at the reduced age of 12 as the threshold, House Bill No. 8858, as amended, remains to be anti-child because:

1. Neuroscientific research documents that the brains of children do not fully develop until their early 20s. Consequently, children between the ages of 12 to 15 do not have complete faculties for discernment to make them criminally culpable.

   If children in this age bracket cannot vote, run for Sangguniang Kabataan positions, get married or secure a driver’s license, then why expose them to be confined, detained, jailed and charged with a crime?

2. Lowering the minimum age of criminal responsibility will not result in lower crime rates. Data show that children commit only 1.72% of reported crimes and most of them are poverty-induced crimes like theft. Poverty is the problem which must be addressed and solved.

3. Lowering the age of criminal responsibility will just encourage criminal syndicates to use even younger children. What should be done is not to sanction children but to have a more intensified campaign against criminal syndicates exploiting children and treble the penalty imposable on them.

4. The present Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 2006 must be fully implemented with the assurance of adequate funding for non-penal institutions and programs for children in conflict with the law.

   We must not expose children to the adversities of prosecutory and judicial processes just because government has failed to implement the juvenile justice law.

5. Due to lack of funding for the creation and operation nationwide of the “Bahay Pag-asa”, children in conflict with the law are bound to be confined in jail-like facilities, and no prison is fit for a child.

Only five “Bahay Pag-asa” units are accredited by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) and the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Council (JJWC) for being compliant with prescribed standards.

There is no new appropriation for the creation and maintenance of “Bahay Pag-asa” in the proposed 2019 national budget.

EDCEL C. LAGMAN