“Don’t Blame the Children, Mr. Senator”
It is 2025. The skyline of Metro Manila is taller now, but the ground beneath remains uneven. Children still sleep under footbridges. Students still share tattered books. The names in office may have changed, but the burdens of the poor have not.
And once again, the powerful are looking for easy answers to hard problems.
Senator Robin Padilla wants to lower the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 10 years old. His argument, delivered with the usual mix of fire and certainty, is that children involved in heinous crimes should face accountability — that age should not be a shield for cruelty.
But that’s not justice. That’s panic disguised as policy.
Representative Chel Diokno, who has long carried the torch of human rights and principled leadership like that of his father, stands opposed. And rightly so. “If we truly want to solve crime,” he says, “let’s fix our broken homes, broken schools, and a broken justice system.”
He isn’t wrong. A 10-year-old child in conflict with the law is not a symbol of moral decay — he is a reflection of societal failure. He is likely a victim of poverty, neglect, violence, or abuse. He may have never known protection, only survival.
The United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) has called the proposal what it is: an act of violence against children. That is no exaggeration. These children are often recruited by syndicates precisely because they are young and legally protected. But what do people do? They punish the children, not the syndicates. They jail the pawn, and let the king roam free.
Since when did incarceration become the answer to the cries of the hungry? Since when did a jail cell become a substitute for a classroom, a counselor, or a safe home?
The Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act was written not to excuse crime, but to recognize that children are not fully formed beings — they are shaped by circumstance. It was a law built on wisdom, on compassion, and on the idea that children can change. That they must be given the chance to.
The appeal to lower the age of criminal responsibility is not new — and every time it resurfaces, it reveals more about the state of leadership than the behavior of the youth. It reveals impatience, fear, and a refusal to do the real work: reforming our institutions, strengthening families, supporting communities.
To throw a child into a cell and call it justice is easy. To ask why that child ended up in crime — and then act on that answer — is hard.
Rights groups have warned repeatedly: punitive laws do not protect children — they destroy them. And once destroyed, what do we expect them to become?
The world is watching. International law is clear: rehabilitation, not retribution, must be the default for children in conflict with the law.
This is not a plea for softness. It is a call for courage — the courage to address root causes, not symptoms. The courage to defend the dignity of the child even when public anger calls for blood.
If to lower the age of criminal responsibility, this does not build a safer nation. We build a colder one — one where fear replaces understanding, and punishment replaces reform.
It is not the child who needs to grow up. It is our politics.