The grounds for reconsidering the current position are indeed compelling.The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has indicated that 12 years should be the ‘absolute minimum’ age at which children become liable to criminal proceedings. Lecturer in Psychosocial Analysis of Offending Behaviour, Edge Hill University On February 12, 1993, two-year-old James Bulger was abducted and murdered by 10-year-olds Jon Venables and Robert Thompson.

Experts working in youth services and the justice system have called for the age of criminal responsibility to be raised in England and Wales. In important respects children's decision-making, and the cognitive functioning that underpins it, is different from that of adults.The capacity for abstract reasoning matures throughout adolescence and is significantly underdeveloped in children aged 11–13 by comparison with 14–15 year-olds, who are, in turn, outperformed by older teenagers. A recent survey of 90 countries found that the most common age (adopted by around a quarter of the sample) was 14 years.The government's obdurate refusal to countenance any change is thus at odds with youth justice practice elsewhere. Outside of the youth justice system, the legislative framework provides for a range of safeguards predicated on rather different assumptions about the age at which children are able to make informed choices and can be considered fully responsible for their actions.In law, young people are not, for instance, considered sufficiently mature to make decisions in relation to the purchase of alcohol and tobacco, apply for a credit card, or get married without parental permission, until eighteen years of age. Other jurisdictions within the UK have been less resistant to change: in Scotland, the age at which children can be prosecuted was raised from eight to 12 years in 2010; in Northern Ireland, which currently shares a minimum age of criminal responsibility with England and Wales, Justice Minister, David Ford, recently confirmed that he is committed to pressing for an increase.In this context the National Association of Youth Justice has explained the government's rigidity as ‘an ideological commitment to appear tough on youth crime rather than a dispassionate review of the evidence’ (Bateman, 2012). When countries outside of Europe are considered, England and Wales remains an outlier.  In Scotland a Bill has been raised to increase the age from 8 to 12, but there is resistance to change elsewhere in the UK. Such considerations raise doubts as to: the appropriateness of attributing criminal intent at such an early age; the competence of those currently subject to youth justice proceedings to participate in them effectively; and the legitimacy of subjecting younger adolescents to any form of criminal sanction.The government contends that such sanctions are required if children are to be held accountable for their wrongdoings and future offending is to be averted. The age of criminal responsibility (ACR) in the UK is a devolved matter.

The minimum age of criminal responsibility, currently 8 in Scotland and 10 in England; The number of children in custody remains high, with disproportionate representation of ethnic minority children , children in care, and children with psycho-social disabilities, and detention is not always applied as a measure of last resort; Move unanimously backed but some want it raised further to 14 in line with UN’s stanceMinisters are under pressure to raise the age of criminal responsibility in England and The Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has urged reform across the UK after the UN’s committee on the rights of the child (UNCRC) decided the global minimum at which a child can be prosecuted should be 14.The minimum age a child can be prosecuted for a crime in England and Wales is 10, and the EHRC told a David Isaac, the commission’s chairman, said: “Increasing the age of criminal responsibility is crucial to stop very young children being exposed to the harmful effects of detention and to protect their future.”Its intervention came as the Scottish parliament, which oversees Scotland’s separate legal system, voted unanimously on Tuesday to raise the minimum age to 12, ending long-standing laws that set the age of criminal responsibility at eight.Under those long-standing rules, children aged between eight and 12 in Scotland could be referred to a special system known as children’s hearings, separate from the adult court system, but whose rulings could still be used to give the child a criminal record.The Holyrood reform was criticised as not going far enough by the Liberal Democrat MSP Alex Cole-Hamilton, who has championed raising Scotland’s age of responsibility to at least 14 in line with the UNCRC recommendations.An EHRC spokeswoman welcomed the debate in Scotland on the issue but said the commission supported raising it significantly higher across the UK in line with expert opinion and global norms.

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