Shunning responsibility

Children seemed to gain a victory last week with a Cebu City ordinance forbidding their parents or guardians from inflicting damaging punishment on them.

While the controversy raged, kids’ rights were attacked anew with the promotion of a plan to change the law to lower the age when they may be held criminally liable from 15 to 12.

The lower age of criminal liability for kids is a feature of the new Criminal Code of the Philippines that was first presented in Cebu last Friday, July 6.

The date is incidentally the memorial day of Saint Maria Goretti, an 11-year-old Italian who was stabbed to death by a minor named Alessandro Serenelli after she refused to grant him sexual favors.

On her deathbed, Goretti forgave Serenelli, an act that Assunta Carlini echoed when Serenelli, having served 30 years in jail, approached her and begged for forgiveness.

Goretti in her last moments still saw more than a mere sexual offender in Serenelli whom an Italian court found acted with discernment.

Her foresight proved brilliant years later when Serenelli turned a new leaf and became a Franciscan brother.

Goretti’s uncommonly compassionate judgment of character ought to speak to Philippine authorities as they mull over changing the minimum age of criminal liability.

Being responsible for our children extends to giving them a chance to reform even when they break the law.

We need to have fresh eyes to see that there is always in children a potential for goodness that needs to be rescued and this rescue becomes hard to execute when we rank our kids with criminals.

It is easier to dump these little offenders in jail than implement complex and painstaking intervention programs for them, easier to skip distinguishing between the stone-hearted criminals and the urchins whom they use as tools.

But at this point we need to ask ourselves again if our conscience can soothe us when we choose the quick over the noble path.

Are we so desperate in our fight against criminals that we would rather vent the full force of the law on these little ones who never had the opportunity to develop the gift of discernment?

Social scientists have observed that we live in a time when the young are taking longer than those who have gone before them to mature. Surely, this reality should urge us to deal a far less than draconian hand on misguided tender lives.

Let us not reject our responsibility to train our children to be good men and women. Consigning them behind bars when they break the law at a young age is a callous way for us to escape the hard labor reforming them entails.