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The government will lower the age of criminal responsibility to 13 from the current 14 in a bid to prevent rising juvenile crime, the Ministry of Education said Thursday. Those aged 14 and younger cannot be held criminally responsible under current laws.
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| The Ministry of Education announced a set of measures to prevent juvenile violence, including the revised bill of lowering the age of criminal responsibility from the current 14 to 13. /Gettyimagesbank |
"The education ministry will sternly deal with bullying in classrooms to protect each student from such serious school violence," Education Minister Yoo Eun-hae said in a statement.
The ministry said even if the student is a first offender, it will ask for a police investigation if the crime is serious. It will also utilize the juvenile detention system so that police superintendents can directly refer cases to the competent court.
The move comes amid growing calls for tougher punishment for young offenders in recent years, after middle school girls in Busan were accused of savagely beating up a peer in 2017. They avoided imprisonment based on the Juvenile Law, with the court ordering "protection measures" for them.
Currently, under the Juvenile Law those aged 10 to 13 are not held accountable for violations of the Criminal Law, and they are only subjected to protection measures such as community service or serving time in juvenile protection facilities. Under the law covering juveniles, perpetrators under 14 cannot be sent to prison and those under 19 are exempt from the death penalty or imprisonment for longer than 20 years.
However, critics say the mere strengthening of punishment for juveniles will not be an ultimate solution in preventing school violence.
"The education ministry should reconsider what is the right direction from the educational perspective when it comes to dealing with juvenile crime, instead of blindly accepting public outrage," said Jeong Kyung-won, a director of the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union Research Institute.
A bill to lower the minimum age of criminal liability has been pending at the National Assembly for some time.
