Lower criminal responsibility age won't fix rise in child offenders, says chief prosecutor

Lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 12 years will not solve the problem of juvenile delinquency and the solution is to change the environment of the children, Prosecutor General (PG) Hussain Shameem said on Thursday.

The government announced in April that it would reduce the age of criminal responsibility to 12 years. PG Shameem wrote an article regarding this on his own blog.

In the article published by Shameem 'Children who commit crimes - the solution is not to lower the age, but to change their environment', he criticised the government's decision. Shameem believes that the whole problem cannot be solved by punishing children who commit crimes, but by guiding them and providing them with other opportunities.

"The issue of juvenile delinquency is an unresolved issue in the criminal justice system of Maldives. The law is there. Law enforcement has not yet even come close to success with it," he wrote.

According to Shameem, the reasons why adults commit crimes are different from those of children. Children do not commit crimes, he says, to commit the crime itself.

"I don't think anyone who lives with children or knows how they think would believe that a 9-year-old child would wake up in the morning and think that he would commit a crime today," Shameem wrote.

Noting that there are many children in Maldives who are close to committing crimes and criminal environments, Shameem said that if this problem is not solved, it will become a national problem.

Expressing dissatisfaction with the government's decision, Shameem added:

Shameem said people are imprisoned to be treated in jail and brought back to integrate into society as good people. However, he noted that such a full service is not yet provided in the prisons of the country and instead the prisons are providing training to commit more crimes. He also expressed his opposition to solving the problem by imprisoning children.

"Given what a new juvenile is expected to learn from prison when he is jailed, I don't think it's a safe method to prevent children from committing crime. It's like taking children to a forge in order to protect them from fire,” he said.

Shameem also agrees that the existing law needs to be amended. These include making programs mandatory for parents and clarifying the role of agencies and expanding their involvement in rehabilitation, he said. However, he said he does not believe that anything lacks under the current law.

Shameem said children in Maldives commit crimes because their environment encourages them to do so. He said no child living in an environment that does not encourage crime has come to the attention of any institution.

“Therefore, one of the things that should be done to prevent children from committing crimes is to change the environment in which children are exposed to crime,” he said.

By changing the environment, children's behaviour does not change like "pressing a switch," Shameem added.

"You will see results in time. It takes patience and determination. We have to spend state resources to change the child and the environment around him," Shameem said.

In addition, Shameem noted:

"Through all of this effort even if we recovered and saved only one child and his family, it will be worth the cost. I find that the investment in changing the environment is less costly than the ongoing cost of incarcerating a child, that too with far better results," he wrote.

Home Minister Ali Ihsan said at a press conference last May that the age of responsibility for crimes will be reduced to 12 years, but not to put them in jail. Instead, the government's intention is to take the children to a specific island and run them through specialised rehabilitation programs, he said.