Consultation on the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility

Yes. NSPCC Scotland strongly agree that the support needs and risks posed by children aged 8 – 11 should be met through extension to the National Child Protection Framework. Developing any separate framework would undermine the principle of responding to children with harmful behaviour with regards to their needs for care and protection. We support the expert panel’s recommendation that the National Child Protection Guidance be revisited to reflect good practice principles for working with children who have harmed others or pose a risk to others, building on the FRAME and the CARM guidance. We also suggest it would be helpful for the National Guidance to include a specific section on the context of children’s harmful behaviour, which summarises the best available evidence on the established links between early trauma and adverse childhood experiences and harmful behaviour, including information gathered for the current consultation.

We are also aware that specialist reparative services for children who have been significantly affected by traumatic events such as abuse, neglect and bereavement are pivotal to the current child protection system meeting the support needs, and risks posed by, children demonstrating harmful behaviour. The Review of Child Neglect in Scotland identified lack of resources for intervention with vulnerable families where children are at high risk as one of the main challenges facing child protection in Scotland. We believe that core funded services should exist in every local authority area to address the needs of children experiencing severe adverse experiences.

NSPCC consider it essential for any scoping study to make a clear distinction between the skills and training needed to ‘work therapeutically’ with children, for example in universal services such as education, and the skills and training needed for therapeutic work with children and families that aims to address the impact of trauma on children’s lives and behaviour. These are separate although related areas.
We are aware of specialist services at LA area, at NHS Board area and at national level in Scotland which contain extensive expertise in working with children who have experienced severe trauma and have extremely challenging behaviour. Services with this significant experience must be intimately involved in supporting skills development across wider services, particularly named persons in the education setting. Funding core services in all LA areas, not only to deliver specialist services to children and families but also to undertake consultancy, training and support for wider skills development, is a very helpful model.

Yes. The research conducted by SCRA to support the current consultation clearly demonstrated that children aged 8 - 11 years who are currently referred to the Children's reporter on offending grounds could equally be referred on a range of welfare grounds that currently exist.

NSPCC Scotland greatly welcomes the current consultation and strongly support the proposal to raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR). At eight, the current MACR seriously contradicts the burgeoning evidence base that has established beyond doubt the relationship between adverse childhood experiences and poor outcomes for children, including problematic behaviour.
The recent SCRA study conducted to inform the consultation established that the vast majority of 8-11 year-olds referred to the Children’s Reporter on offence grounds had significant welfare needs . The findings build on a substantial body of evidence across Scotland and the UK including (to name but a few): evidence from the Centre for Youth and Criminal Justice Studies confirming that the context of children’s serious offending behaviour is a background of trauma, bereavement and abuse; the NSPCC 2011 prevalence study (Child abuse and neglect in the UK today, Radford et al, 2011) which found that sexual abuse, physical violence and domestic abuse have strong independent effects in relation to young people’s ‘delinquent’ behaviour and most notably, the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transition and Crime with a top level finding that involvement in serious offending by young people is strongly linked to their experiences of multiple aspects of vulnerability and social adversity.
An understanding of the close link between what are now often referred to ‘adverse childhood experiences’ and outcomes for children underpinned Kilbrandon’s welfare approach towards children with ‘offending’ behaviour. Scottish policy has continued to evolve in a way that reflects and builds on this understanding. Getting it right for every child asks all practitioners coming into contact with children to consider their wider wellbeing, in the context of their whole lives, and respond early to adverse experiences in order to improve outcomes. NSPCC Scotland believe that raising the age of criminal responsibility in Scotland will help ‘square the circle’ of Scottish policy, as it relates to early and effective intervention with children and young people where there are wellbeing concerns, whilst upholding the UNCRC recommendations of 12 as the minimum age at which children can be held criminally responsible in the law.
We also believe that legal reform to raise the MACR in Scotland has a critical role to play in bringing about the wider cultural change necessary to embed the principle of getting it right for every child across the whole of society. Changing how we ‘see’ children as a society is a core part of the GIRFEC endeavour, in order that we share a collective understanding about the origins of children’s severely challenging behaviour, and respond to children and young people not as ‘trouble’ but as potentially ‘troubled’. Raising the age of criminal responsibility articulates the clear message that children’s harmful behaviour is rooted in early adversity and that it is neither appropriate nor desirable for the law to punish children for the trauma they have experienced.
Whilst we are supportive of the intention behind the current proposal to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 12, we would also enormously welcome a stated commitment to an on-going process of reform of the criminal justice response to children aged 12 and over. This is particularly important given recent evidence around the current experiences of older children, where alarming numbers of children over the age of 12 who are jointly reported to the Reporter – and presumably subject to the same range of adverse childhood experiences that younger children referred for ‘offending behaviour’ - are being prosecuted in adult courts . Given the stark findings from the Edinburgh Study of Youth Transition and Crime around the impact of early introduction to the criminal justice system and outcomes for young people, we would strongly support a clear commitment to an on-going process of reform.