Lost innocence
Children and teenagers are in the news these days, in the most startling ways. They get stoned out of their skulls on cheap solvent. They open the doors of taxis trapped in traffic, rob driver and occupants, and blithely scamper away with the loot. They maul a classmate and kill him by strangulation. They shoot a friend in the head and turn the gun on themselves.
But for the shooting tragedy that occurred in an SM mall on Tuesday, the result of which the unfortunate duo in their teens seem to have lost all chances of ever leading productive lives, it is children who are involved, 9-, 10- or 11-year-olds caught in circumstances truly inappropriate for their tender years. On a street island within sight of a police station on Edsa, for example, oblivious of who is looking or the steady whoosh of motor vehicles past the patch of green on which they sprawl, children who should otherwise be in school fry their brains breathing from little plastic bags dispensing lethal fumes.
How did the hope of the motherland come to this? the passing motorist, aghast, might ask. Who initiated them in the unspeakable pleasure, and where were (are) their parents?
And who taught the young thugs the grim skill of robbery on the run, and against whom law enforcers now warn?
But from reports, the minors who rob taxis are aware that even if they are caught by police, they will be remanded to the custody of social workers and eventually released. Thus are they gradually convinced of the rightness of doing wrong, because the law and the paucity of state resources dictate that they will soon be back in the streets to conduct the “livelihood” they have come to know and become skilled in.
Evidently, it’s time for an examination of the law that allows this malady to fester and to abet the corruption of the young. Six family court judges of Manila are correct to call for an amendment of the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 1996 to lower the age of responsibility for minors from 15 to nine; they are correct to acknowledge that the times have rendered the law impotent to address objective realities and needs. (The judges’ move was actually made in support of an earlier call of Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim, who pointed out that syndicates have been using children and teenagers in such crimes as drug trafficking and robbery, secure in the knowledge that even if caught in the act, minors are protected by the law.)
Objective realities also come to the fore in the case of the 10-year-old fifth-grader who was killed last week in what initially appeared to a teacher as mere horseplay. From reports in the trimedia, the 11-year-old attacker beat and kicked the younger child, and then, when he was down, choked him to death. The shocking act, the sheer violence of it, should be sufficient to sound the loudest alarm bells.
That killing in Baguio City calls to mind an equally chilling case in Britain—the February 1993 torture and murder of two-year-old James Bulger by 10-year-old boys. The older boys lured the child away from his mother in a shopping center, walked him for two miles to an area where they beat him with bricks and stones, and then laid his corpse on a railway track where a passing train cut it in half.
The boys were subsequently arrested, charged with murder and, at 11 years old, convicted—reportedly the youngest convicted murderers in Britain in almost 250 years. The judge said that while he would not comment on how Bulger’s murderers were raised by their parents, the act of “unparalleled evil and barbarity” could partly be explained by “exposure to violent video films.”
Last heard from in 2008, Jon Venables, who was released along with his cohort in 2001 after spending eight years in “secure children’s homes,” had been arrested and clapped in jail for downloading and distributing child porn. (Not much hope there for the idea of rehabilitation.)
It’s safe to say that similar exposure to acts of violence—perhaps even done on him at home—influenced the 11-year-old boy in Baguio to snuff out the life of his younger classmate. It’s unthinkable that the act came naturally to someone who would otherwise have behaved like the child that he was and engaged the other boy in roughhousing, or even fisticuffs.
It’s clear that the innocence presumed in children of his age had long deserted him, and that in seeking justice, it would be folly to treat him like a child.
