France is stricter than the UN: it sets the age of criminal responsibility at 13. This threshold is in line with the world average, but is below the minimum of 14 years recommended by the Convention on the Rights of the Child since 2019. The Committee on the Rights of the Child had relied on new scientific research to support its suggestion to raise this threshold from 12 to 14 years.
But with his notion of “decivilization”Prime Minister Gabriel Attal seemed to be going in the opposite direction as child violence returned to the public debate. For its part, science would rather point towards an age of 15, according to two Australian experts who detail, chez The Conversationwhat’s going on in a teenager’s brain.
The concept of criminal responsibility is based on a person’s ability to perceive whether or not their action is wrong. However, in adolescents, the brain needs to provide more effort than adults to process so-called “social” emotions such as guilt. Moral judgments suffer from the same problemwhich is normal, because these skills are still under development throughout adolescence.
Between the ages of 10 and 14, a young adolescent does indeed have the cognitive means to recognize his misdeeds, but it is more mentally demanding, affirm Susan M. Sawyer and Nandi Vijayakumar. It should be added that his brain is fighting other battles: social rewards, emotions and the attraction to new experiences also greatly influence the decisions he can make, even more than the morality of an action.
This decision-making relies on basic cognitive functions, such as the brain’s flexibility and memory, as well as the ability to control impulses. These functions know their greater growth between 10 and 14 years old. It is only at the age of 15 that a minor’s decision-making reaches adult maturity. But even after this level, he remains largely subject to his emotions when he considers the consequences of his actions. A teenager is thus more distracted and struggles more to get rid of social pressurewhich makes him take more risks.
Adolescence lasts longer than you think
The emotional impact of puberty on decision-making should not be overlooked. The hormones of puberty, namely estrogen in girls and testosterone in boys, whose effects on the body and reproductive organs are well known, also play a role in the brain. They modify the structures that manage emotions, including the amygdala (for fear and stress) and the striatum (for reward and motivation).
Therefore, the brain’s sensitivity to emotions grows up in early adolescence and peaks around the age of 14. These changes linked to puberty push minors to seek more sensations and disrupt their impulsivity.
Moreover, adolescence lasts longer than we think. The first major brain developments related to the period appear at the age of 8 or 9. Then more intense changes occur at the beginning of adolescence, that is to say between the ages of 10 and 14. But they continue, more modestly, until the twenties. Complete cognitive and emotional maturity is not reached until the age of 24! However, the brain develops at different speeds, depending on the teenager. There is therefore no precise age from which a human can be declared an adult.
So much data to take into account when discussing the criminal responsibility of a minor aged 14 or under. And that’s without mentioning adolescents affected by neuronal development disorders, who naturally face more difficulties. However, they are disproportionately imprisoned across the world.
Source: www.slate.fr
