A TEN-YEAR-OLD walks into a heinous-crime docket, and Congress calls it justice.
That is the practical effect of Senate Bill 372, filed by Sen. Robin Padilla, which would strip children as young as 10 of the exemption from criminal liability they currently hold under the Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act of 2006 (Republic Act 9344) whenever they are accused of a heinous crime. The bill has been pending in the Senate since last year, but the Tacloban school shooting in June pushed it back into urgent debate, with Padilla publicly pressing his colleagues to stop what he calls political maneuvering and act. Senators remain divided. Sen. Francis Pangilinan argues that 10 is too young and that the real failure lies in implementation, not the age threshold. Sen. Raffy Tulfo counters that families of victims deserve a justice system with teeth.
Both positions, however, are arguing about the wrong variable.
Hungry Workhorse was privileged to take part in a different but related exercise: the Council for the Welfare of Children’s (CWC) consultations for its Legislative Agenda for Children for the 20th Congress and, earlier, work adjacent to the National Council for Children’s Television’s (NCCT) child-protection classification standards. Neither project concerned juvenile justice directly, but both surfaced a pattern that the current debate over SB 372 overlooks: the Philippines does not have a coherent, unified theory of how the state treats a child at risk, whether that child is a viewer, bystander, or an offender. What exists instead is a patchwork of laws, agencies and now bills, each reacting to whichever crisis is loudest that month.
The CWC consultations were candid about this. Stakeholders across sectors returned repeatedly to the same complaint: child protection law in the country is fragmented, inconsistently enforced and built for problems as they existed decades ago. That is precisely why the Magna Carta for Children was raised as a serious proposal in those sessions, alongside a stronger, better-resourced Philippine Commission on Children to give the state’s child-related mandates real coordination and authority. The logic was not to “ban more things” or “punish more harshly.” It was to build one framework that actually holds together.
The NCCT’s own philosophy, developed under the Children’s Television Act of 1997, offers a useful contrast to how SB 372 is framed. When the council determined how to handle violent content on television, it did not simply prohibit it. It built a graduated system: age-appropriate classification, viewer advisories, restricted hours and accountability for broadcasters. The premise was that children exist on a developmental continuum and that the state’s role is to calibrate protection to that continuum rather than draw a single hard line and declare everything on one side “safe” and the other “criminal.”
SB 372 takes the opposite approach. It reduces a single number from 15 to 10 and treats a wide and clinically complex category, “acted with discernment,” as though it functioned like a light switch. A child a day past their tenth birthday who commits a listed offense would suddenly become eligible for the adult framework of criminal liability, however diminished. Nothing about a child’s neurological or psychological development changes that abruptly at age 10. What the bill effectively proposes is not a more accurate discernment standard, but a lower institutional tolerance for waiting.
That impulse is not without cause. Public patience wears thin after footage of a child committing serious violence circulates. But policy built around the worst available case tends to fail the median case badly and the median case, according to the government’s own 2016 National Baseline Study on Violence Against Children, is a child who has already experienced violence long before committing any. Three out of five children in that study reported physical violence, mostly at home. A justice system that meets such a child with prosecution rather than intervention does not close a loophole; it completes a cycle.
This is where the CWC and NCCT work converges with the SB 372 debate in a way that has gone largely unremarked. Both processes treated the child less as an isolated moral agent and more as a product of an environment, whether that environment is a household normalizing violence, a media landscape saturating them in it, or a community failing to intervene early. The corrective proposed in each case was structural: better classification and monitoring for media and a unified rights framework with a stronger coordinating body for policy generally. Nowhere in that body of work did the recommended answer amount to lowering the age at which the state stops trying to help and starts trying to punish.
None of this suggests that RA 9344 is beyond reproach. Pangilinan is correct that implementation, particularly the state of Bahay Pag-asa facilities and the intervention programs the law promises, has been chronically underfunded and unevenly delivered. Addressing a law that functions poorly by lowering the age of exposure to a punitive system, rather than repairing the system itself, mistakes a maintenance failure for a design failure.
If legislators are genuinely seeking a “timely solution,” as several have described SB 372, the CWC’s own agenda already points toward one that does not require dismantling the child-rights architecture the Philippines has spent nearly two decades building. Strengthening the commission tasked with coordinating child welfare policy would prevent juvenile justice, digital protection and welfare interventions from being negotiated as separate, competing bills. Funding the rehabilitation infrastructure RA 9344 already promised would address implementation gaps directly. Treating a child’s exposure to violence, at home, online, or on the street, as the variable worth intervening on early would prevent that exposure from resurfacing later as an offense.
The Senate does not lack urgency at present. Where the opportunity lies is in having a shared framework for where that urgency should be directed. That lesson emerged clearly from the work of drafting one legislative agenda for children. It is worth revisiting before this Congress finishes writing another law about them.
Kay Calpo Lugtu is the chief operating officer of Hungry Workhorse, a digital and culture transformation firm.
