Police officers interrogate a 17-yearold offender on July 12, 2012. He had stabbed a classmate with a knife over a quarrel arising from playing online games together

The brutality committed by a 10-year-old girl in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality that was captured on a surveillance camera shocked the country late last year.

On the afternoon of November 25, 2013, the girl entered an elevator and unexpectedly picked up a one-and-half-year-old boy when he went following his grandmother and was left. The video footage from inside the elevator showed the girl hurling the toddler to the ground before beating and kicking him violently.

When the elevator door opened on the 25th floor, the girl tossed him out of the elevator doors. When the worried grandmother took the elevator to the 25th floor, she came across the girl coming back out of her home, but when she asked if the girl had seen the child, the girl said that he had been taken away by a stranger.

A community guard found the boy only minutes later, on the ground and covered in blood. The girl later told the police that she continued to beat up the boy in her home’s living room before taking him to the balcony, where the boy accidentally fell through the railings to the ground.

It took the boy a week to wake up from a coma, although he ultimately survived after undergoing major brain surgeries.

After netizens called for harsh punishment for the girl, she moved to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region with her mother. Local police said that there would not be a criminal investigation against the girl, as she had not reached the age of criminal responsibility, which is 14 in China.

In China, children under 14 are deemed incapable of bearing criminal responsibility, while those aged between 14 and 16 are criminally responsible for only eight severe offenses: intentional homicide, intentional attacks resulting in serious injury or death, rape, robbery, drug trafficking, arson, causing explosions and poisoning.

China’s juvenile population has exceeded 300 million, roughly equivalent to the total population of the United States. Results from various studies show that the number of extreme cases of youth crime is on the rise.

There have been a troubling number of examples in recent years. On October 24, 2012, a 12-year-old boy from Mile County, Yunnan Province, strangled an 8-yearold schoolmate on his way back from school to seek revenge over an argument.

On April 15, 2012, a 12-year-old girl from Hechi City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, invited her classmate over to play, then stabbed her to death with a knife. The reason she cited was that she was jealous of the classmate’s good looks.

Ineffective rehabilitation

Statistics released by the China Juvenile Delinquency Prevention Research Society last November revealed that the average age that juveniles start acting out is 12.2 years old in China.

According to a survey conducted by the Harbin Mother and Child Hospital on 900 children aged between two and five, around 20.8 percent of them showed aggressive behavior.

“Behind every problematic child is a poor education at home,” said Zhang Shuqin, deputy headmaster of a primary school in Linyi City, Shandong Province. She said it is a pity that adults in China don’t have access to parenthood training.

According to China’s Criminal Law, if a person is not given criminal punishment because he or she has not reached 16, his or her parents or guardians are to be ordered to discipline them; when necessary, juvenile offenders may be taken in by government-run corrective facilities. Hong Daode, Professor of the Beijing-based China University of Political Science and Law, told local newspaper, Beijing Times, that such stipulations need to be amended, as parents or guardians may not be capable or qualified to correct their children. He suggested that relevant government departments or certified organizations conduct overall appraisals of these guardians before giving their children back to them.

Hong said that the government didn’t have the financial resources to run such programs in the past and this situation should be changed as the country has become richer.

Meanwhile, the efficacy of government-run corrective facilities for teenagers has been questioned.

Wu Bin from Beijing’s Chaoyang District People’s Procuratorate conducted a follow-up survey on juvenile delinquency cases handled by his organization during 2003 and 2004 and found that 47.5 percent of juveniles sent to corrective facilities committed crimes a second time during probation.

In his report, Wu noted that cross-impact of criminal inclinations is common in juvenile corrective facilities, which can exert profound negative influence on those sent there for impulsive offenses and increase their risk of becoming chronic, long-term offenders.

Immature justice system

Legal experts also complain that China operates one of the least mature juvenile justice systems among the world’s major economies. China’s first juvenile court was only established in Shanghai in 1984. The first juvenile court in the United States had already been established in Illinois in 1899, nearly 100 years prior.

According to the Supreme People’s Court, China’s highest judicial body, the country had more than 2,300 juvenile courts by July 2011, which employed around 7,400 judges.

Led by the courts, the various criminal justice organs have been gradually developing specialized departments to handle juvenile cases, with personnel who are trained to work with juveniles and are aware of their special vulnerabilities and legal rights. China’s amended Criminal Procedure Law, which was adopted by the top legislature in March 2012, introduces a number of positive measures, including the creation of a new chapter on procedures for juvenile crime cases.

Special concessions are included for when a juvenile suspect or defendant has not appointed someone to carry out their defense in court, he or she is entitled to an attorney assigned by a legal aid organization. Investigators should generally allow an offender’s parents or guardians to be present at interrogations and prosecutors may grant conditional non-prosecution to juveniles who have committed minor crimes. Also, where an offender is under the age of 18 at the time of a crime and is sentenced to imprisonment of less than five years, relevant records of the crime are to be sealed.

However, scholars studying juvenile justice are not satisfied with the situation in China. At a seminar on the relationship between preventing juvenile crimes and the amendment of the Criminal Procedure Law in April 2012, Professor Yao Jianlong at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law said that the chapter on procedures for juvenile crime cases in the law “failed to adopt the core values of modern juvenile justice system and continued a penalty centric view.”

“The focus of the modern juvenile justice system is to rehabilitate juveniles, rather than to imprison and punish them,” Yao told Southern Weekly. He added that law enforcement organs under China’s current justice system have only two choices when it comes to delinquent juveniles: punishing them or letting them go.

“We are creating hardened criminals that we will have to deal with again in the future,” Yao said.