How do children end up in conflict in the law and what can be done to alleviate their plight? This report, published by Save the Children as a contribution to the UN Study on Violence Against Children, looks at children in conflict with the law in the broader context of their lives. It contains detailed case studies of community-based responses from around the world. Care and protection systems must be improved, and children’s coping strategies should not be criminalised.
Over 90% of all children in conflict with the law are petty offenders, mostly committing minor offenses against property. Out of these children, four of out five will only commit once offence during their lifetime. This statistic holds in developing nations, industrialised societies and even communities with high levels of violence. The myths circulating about child offenders miss the fact that most criminalised children are simply trying to survive.
The report’s recommendations cover prevention, decriminalisation, diversion, the justice system, and reintegration and rehabilitation. Its findings bring together current literature as well as case studies from a variety of contexts:
- Most children handled by the criminal justice system come from particularly marginalised communities and families, and often from persecuted minorities.
- Children’s first contacts with the law are often strongly negative, involving police or local security officers who use unlicensed brutality.
- The period of a child’s arrest and interrogation is often the most dangerous, but detention also poses significant problems. Overcrowded and inhumane conditions often have a traumatising effect.
- Criminal justice systems inadequately serve children in developed countries like the US and the UK, as well as in developing nations. Rates of incarceration for children, and the routine use of detention before trial, even for petty offenders, are on the increase in developed countries.
- Alternatives to criminalisation and detention for child offenders are rare. They tend to be isolated good practices and under-resourced, even when they have shown a demonstrable impact on the lives of children and on their offending.
From a wide range of both general and specific recommendations, the following are both representative and geared towards numerous constituencies:
- Care and protection systems should be strengthened to prevent children from coming into contact with the law at all.
- It is vital that governments should decriminalise status offences and basic survival behaviour, as well as being a victim of sexual abuse and anti-social behaviour.
- Governments should prioritise diversion options as a first response to children coming into contact with the law. The formal justice apparatus should be called on for violent offences only.
- Comprehensive, restorative juvenile justice systems, centred on children, should take international standards seriously and improve upon the option of detention. Those who are violent with children need to be monitored closely and brought to justice.
- Reintegration and rehabilitation in the community and in society must be upheld as the twin goals of all work that concerns children in conflict with the law.
