Our children are being criminalised, according to a new report urging the Government to raise the age of criminal responsibility from ten to 14. Helen Gabriel reports on the controversial debate about juvenile crime.

AT THE age of nine, your child could be smashing windows and kicking down fences. By 17, they could have graduated to burning cars or turning to violence.

But a new report for the Centre For Crime And Justice Studies claims too many children are prosecuted and criminalised.

It calls for greater emphasis on educational, social and mental health needs and suggests care proceedings should be used for younger offenders.

Earlier this year, The Press revealed the shocking extent of juvenile crime in the city, with kids as young as nine caught breaking the law. Children committed more than 2,000 crimes in York in just one year - more than a quarter of all crime detected by police and the offences got more serious as they got older.

Children aged 14 and under were responsible for 680 crimes that police knew of.

The new report, From Punishment To Problem Solving: A New Approach To Children In Trouble, highlights the fact that children are criminalised in England and Wales at a much younger age than in many other countries - in France it is 13, in Japan it is 14 and in Italy it is 15.

It claims the age of criminal responsibility should be raised from ten to 14, with child care proceedings used for children below that age who commit serious offences.

But Norman Brennan, director of the Victims Of Crime Trust and a serving police officer, said crimes that 30 years ago were being committed by those in their late teens were now being carried out by children years younger.

"Youngsters as young as 12 or 14 are carrying firearms and knives. Some of them even know their lawyer by their first name."

However, the report's author, Rob Allen, says the youth justice system should move away from "cops, courts and corrections".

He suggests reforms, such as a residential training order of up to two years - or five years in the case of grave crimes - and calls for the phasing-out of prison custody for 15 and 16-year-olds and new facilities for 17-year-olds.

He also believes there must be greater investment in services to support troubled or at-risk children with educational and mental health problems.

Mr Allen, who has advised the Government on youth justice, said: "We have seen an increasing preoccupation with protecting the public from young people and a growing intolerance of teenage misbehaviour of all kinds.

"A genuine shift from punishment to problem-solving as the guiding principle for tackling youth crime would help to produce a society that is both safer and fairer." He said many of the young offenders he dealt with came from disturbed backgrounds and had often not been to school.

"I don't think they have reached the point of development that you could safely say they do know right from wrong," he said.

"They may not be able to know about the consequences of what they do."

One of Labour's first measures after coming to office in 1997 was to lower the age when children were presumed to know the difference between right and wrong from 14 to ten. Since then the number of children prosecuted has risen from 79,092 to 96,188.

A Home Office spokesman said there were no current plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales.


Dealing with children who take life

THE issue of dealing with child criminals has frequently come under public scrutiny, and there have been a number of high-profile cases where serious crimes were committed by under-15s.

Jon Venables and Robert Thomson were only ten years old when they abducted and murdered two-year-old Jamie Bulger in 1993.

Both boys were released on parole after eight years.

Mary Bell was 11 when she was found guilty in 1968 of the manslaughter of two small boys in Newcastle.

More recently brothers Danny, 12, and Rickie Preddie, 13, were convicted of manslaughter for killing Damilola Taylor in 2000.