‘England and Wales are outliers in bringing the criminal justice system to bear on young children who cause harm.’ Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘England and Wales are outliers in bringing the criminal justice system to bear on young children who cause harm.’ Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images Opinion Children Jailing children does not make us safer – we need to get rid of this Dickensian delusion Kirsty Brimelow We have a Victorian attitude to child offenders. It is harmful to them – and, when they reoffend, damaging to everyone
Kirsty Brimelow KC is chair of the Bar Council of England and Wales
I t is said that there can be no truer revelation of a society’s soul than the way it treats its children. The Bar Council of England and Wales has just concluded an expert review of the minimum age of criminal responsibility. At 10, it is the lowest in Europe. We recommend that it is raised to 14 .
Society should have moved on since the 1800s, when Charles Dickens railed against the storm cloud of unfairness that gathered over children. However, Dickens’s anger at the law and society, and the harsh treatment of children, remains familiar today. England and Wales are outliers in bringing the criminal justice system to bear on young children who cause harm.
Under the criminal law, a child aged 10 can be detained by the police following arrest, and they will experience the same process and environment as an adult suspect. Children are subjected to the same initial police detention periods as adults. In the year to March 2024, 45% of children arrested were detained overnight , and research shows that on average they are detained for about 11 and a half hours.
Moreover, children find it difficult to engage with the significant cognitive demands of the criminal justice system and this is linked to increased suggestibility, acquiescence and compliance in interviews. Whatever adjustments are made to criminal procedures, children routinely struggle to participate and this challenges the fairness of their convictions.
Take Dylan (not his real name), a man now in his 30s, as he made a bid for his liberty earlier this year. This was after his sixth recall to prison for breach of licence conditions for a sentence he received when he was just 13. Dylan was 12 when he ran away from a children’s home and, along with his brother, approached a woman and asked her for a cigarette. When she refused, they grabbed at her handbag, causing her to fall, and they ran off. The prosecution and convictions that followed resulted in a period of detention for Dylan, together with a sentence of detention for public protection (DPP). This is the child equivalent of the deeply flawed imprisonment for public protection (IPP) sentences. Little did Dylan know then that he would spend most of the next two decades under the shadow of the sentence.
Dylan completed his GCSEs in detention, and was released before he turned 18. At times, he succeeded in living in the community. But when things went wrong in his personal life, his early traumatic experiences and difficulties in securing appropriate accommodation were compounded by the relentless grip of the criminal justice process.
Because of the DPP, Dylan could easily be recalled to prison, even without committing a new offence, including for not living in an approved hostel. Finally, earlier this year, the Parole Board recognised that the indeterminate sentence itself had become in…