My Lords,
“No child should suffer such appalling abuse, especially from those who should love and care for them most.”
Who said that? It is not a Christmas quiz. It was the Minister repeating a sentence what feels like a long time ago, but it was earlier this evening in proceedings on this Bill in your Lordships’ House. What if the same child victim of cruelty or neglect survives and grows to act out as a damaged little person as a result of that neglect or abuse?
I am very disappointed to hear about my own party’s position on the age of criminal responsibility, not least because I was reading David Lammy’s comments in the Guardian just a couple of years ago in relation to concern that our age of criminal responsibility, at 10, is too young. I think that we as a society are failing some of our most vulnerable children, including victims of neglect and abuse, and we should not be criminalising them. Given what we know about child development, 10 is way too young. It makes us as a jurisdiction an outlier in the civilised world and that is not something to be proud of.
Perhaps understandably, much of the debate in Committee focused on some of the most notorious cases, including that of Thompson and Venables, but such horrific and notorious cases are few and far between. More often, we are talking about offences such as criminal damage, and it is often looked-after children who are criminalised for offences of that nature. They have already been let down in their lives by their natural parents and/or their adopted parents and are looked after by the state. They then get involved in something that is treated as criminal damage in a care environment and for which neither noble Lords’ children and grandchildren nor mine would ever be criminalised.