Tougher penalties have never been proven to keep young people from committing violent acts, the head of the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Council (JJWC) said, pushing back against renewed calls to drop the age at which children can be held criminally liable.
Executive Director Tricia Clare Oco pointed to the United States, where some states impose stricter penalties yet continue to record frequent school shootings. “If we look at the drivers of violence, lowering the age does not automatically mean children will stop committing these acts,” she said in a Thursday interview on state-run PTV.
The JJWC, tasked with carrying out the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act, argues that the conditions surrounding a child matter more than the severity of the law. Oco listed household circumstances, neighborhood influences, bullying, peer pressure, and repeated exposure to violence as the forces that more reliably steer minors toward crime.
She placed particular weight on what children absorb online, where violent material can come across as ordinary. “Even adults can be misled by social media. Children are even more vulnerable because their minds are still developing,” Oco said. Families and communities, she added, remain the first line of defense: “Guidance from families and communities remains critical in preventing violent behavior among young people.”
The records the council keeps complicate the case for a harder line. Children in conflict with the law are most often booked for theft, physical injuries, and drug-related offenses — what Oco called “crimes of survival.” Their numbers have also been falling: from 24,683 cases in 2016, the count dropped 77 percent to 5,698 in 2025.
Oco wants the response spread across multiple agencies rather than loaded onto any single one. She credited the Department of Social Welfare and Development for programs such as Parent Effectiveness Seminars and economic aid for struggling households, noting that poverty itself can push children into trouble. For schools, she called on the Department of Education to toughen anti-bullying efforts, train teachers to spot students at risk of harming others, and hire more guidance counselors so problems surface early.
“We need to study the causes of why young people are being pushed to commit these kinds of crimes,” she said. “After identifying those causes, we should develop policies, mechanisms, and measures that can prevent or stop children from engaging in violent behavior.”
The debate has reached Malacañang. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. remains receptive to amending Republic Act No. 9344 to lower the threshold, the Palace said Thursday, though his stance would hinge on whichever version of the bill clears Congress and lands on his desk. Marcos has not committed to a specific figure, but the Philippine National Police proposal to bring the age down from 15 to 12 has struck him as reasonable.
The current floor of 15 has stood since the law took effect in 2006 and survived untouched when RA 10630 revised the statute in October 2013 — a sharp departure from the Spanish-era Revised Penal Code, which had set the line at 9.
