Lowering the age is not the answer

WE watched with horror last week what, thankfully, is a rarity in the Philippines: a deadly school shooting.

At 9 a.m. on Monday, June 22, two high school students, aged 14 and 15, slipped past weak school security at the San Jose National High School in Tacloban City, armed with a Glock 9mm pistol and a.38 revolver. They barged into two classrooms and fired about 40 shots. Panicked students hid under desks, screaming as three of their classmates were killed and 20 others were wounded.

When the smoke had cleared, police captured one shooter, while the other was arrested in a nearby house. They later revealed that the suspects had planned the attack for over a month due to alleged bullying. More disturbingly, text exchanges between the two minors showed they had researched juvenile justice law before they went on their rampage, believing that the law would spare them from criminal liability because of their age.

In a knee-jerk reaction, Sen. Robinhood Padilla called for amendments to Republic Act 9344, or the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 2006, to lower the minimum age of criminal responsibility (MACR) from 15 years old to 10. Subsequently, a Malacañang spokesman said the president was amenable to lowering the MACR and would review whatever amendments Congress would send his way for signing into law. Lowering the minimum age to 12, she added, “was reasonable.”

This is a mistake.

In 2026, the United Nations-recommended MACR is at least 14 years old, though it strongly encourages nations to aim even higher, such as 15 or 16. This standard remains anchored by General Comment No. 24, issued by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

The UN’s position breaks down into three clear directives for member-states:

The absolute floor is 14. The UN urges all countries to raise their MACR to at least 14. Any age below 14 is considered developmentally inappropriate for the formal criminal justice system.

15 or older is better. The UN explicitly commends countries that have chosen 15 or 16 as their baseline, pointing to overwhelming neuroscientific evidence that adolescents still lack full cognitive maturity, impulse control and long-term risk assessment at younger ages.

There should be no backsliding. The UN strictly dictates that if a country already has an MACR higher than 14 (like the Philippines, which is currently at 15), it must not lower it. Doing so is viewed as a direct step backward in protecting children’s rights and a violation of international progress standards.

Clearly, amending our law to lower the MACR would be a step backward.

As a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, if the Philippines lowers the MACR, we would be violating the international legal principle of nonregression, which states that a country cannot scale back human-rights protections once they have been granted. Lowering the age from 15 to 12 or 10 would invite international condemnation and flag the country as one that doesn’t comply with global child protection treaties.

Proponents of lowering the minimum age to 10 or even 12 argue that children are different nowadays due to social media and technology, making them mature faster.

Child psychologists, however, point out that access to information does not bring about emotional maturing. Knowing how to use a smartphone or being exposed to adult concepts does not speed up the brain’s development. The prefrontal cortex, which governs impulse control, risk calculation and resistance to peer pressure, is completely unequipped at age 12, let alone 10, to handle adult-level consequences.

Another common argument for lowering the age is that criminal syndicates exploit the law by using minors as drug mules or lookouts.

But lowering the MACR will not stop these syndicates and merely push them to recruit even younger accomplices. Instead of lowering the MACR, authorities ought to be cracking down on syndicates that recruit and coerce children into committing crimes.

One final consideration that proponents of lowering the minimum age should consider is that doing so would breed more criminals.

Criminological, sociological and psychological studies over several decades consistently show that early entry into the formal justice system is one of the strongest predictors of adult criminality.

In fact, jailing minors — whether in juvenile detention or adult prisons — is widely considered by criminologists, psychologists and human rights experts to be one of the most counterproductive responses to youth crime.

When you group young, impressionable and high-risk individuals together in a confined space, they don’t learn how to reform; they learn how to become better criminals.

If the goal of jail is to deter future crime, study after study shows that it fails spectacularly with minors.