Why punish children for the crime of adults?

Is it not the fault of adults that children, at their young and tender age, would become a menace to society?

A child may be capable of committing criminal acts, but that doesn’t make him/her a criminal if and when he/she commits one, much unlike a grown-up, mature person. Why chastise kids as though they are hooligans like Nardong Putik and Asiong Salonga?

Until a child is a child, he/she must be treated as such, with tenderness and understanding. Children today can’t even defend themselves in public hearings to protest the current move in Congress to debase them.

I cry child abuse.

Has the government turned paranoid because of the drug problem?  And how come well-connected “bona-fide” hoodlums, patron sharks and high-profile crooks have been dealt with just kid gloves?

How come favored convicted politicians go to hospitals and not jails, and after the “pardon,” they’re back in power and their lavish lives, partying to no end?

Such insanity!

RENI M. VALENZUELA [email protected]