No 10- or 11-year-olds have been imprisoned in England and Wales since 2010, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has said, as the criminal justice system becomes ever more reluctant to criminalise primary-school-age children.
There has been a huge drop in the number of very young children cautioned or convicted in England and Wales in recent years.
In 2010, 781 youth cautions or sentences were given to 10-year-old children, according to information released by the Youth Justice Board (YJB) under the Freedom of Information (FoI) Act.
In the year ending March 2022, the most recent figures available, just 16 10-year-olds and 80 11-year-olds were convicted or cautioned, mostly for offences involving violence or arson.
None were sent to custody, which for children under 14 is in one of eight secure children’s homes in England and Wales. Instead, the children received cautions, fines or community sentences.
The last time a 10-year-old child was given a “detention and training order”, sentencing them to between four and 24 months in custody, was in 2016, YJB figures show.
But the government has repeatedly refused to increase the age of criminal responsibility from 10, one of the youngest in the world, since the 10-year-olds Robert Thompson and Jon Venables were found guilty of murdering the Liverpool toddler James Bulger in 1993.
Increasingly, charges against 10-year-olds are dropped once they reach court. In October at Leeds youth court, the Crown Prosecution Service discontinued a case involving a 10-year-old boy accused of damaging a flatscreen TV belonging to a Halifax-based children’s home and of using “threatening, abusive, insulting words or behaviour to cause harassment, alarm or distress”.
Children in care are disproportionately likely to end up in court. A large study in September found that children who have lived in care are eight times more likely to have received a youth justice caution or conviction than those who have not.
Magistrates or youth court judges prefer now to impose punishments that will not last too long on a child’s record.
In August, a boy convicted of damaging £895-worth of clothing from New Look when he was 10 was given an absolute discharge. This sentence appears on a child’s criminal record for a year, but, after that, no employer or other member of the public will know that they were charged for a crime.
In November, an 11-year-old girl appeared in court in Kent charged with a string of shoplifting offences committed when she was 10, including stealing £152.85-worth of cosmetics from the Deal branch of Superdrug. Her case was adjourned to the new year in the hope it could be resolved out of court.
Twelve of the 10-year-old children convicted or cautioned in 2021-2022 were convicted for violence against the person offences. The other four were prosecuted for arson, robbery, criminal damage and public order.
Sixty of the 11-year-olds were convicted for violence against the person. One was found guilty of joyriding and another for unspecified “motoring offences”. Another was convicted of fraud, one of robbery, three of arson, three for public order, two for domestic burglaries, two for criminal damage, two for theft and handling stolen goods, one for an unspecified racially aggravated crime and three for unspecified charges.
Responding to the figures, Rob Preece, the communications manager at the Howard League for Penal Reform, said: “The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales should be raised.
“If a young child is in trouble or behaving in a concerning way, the priority should be to consider their welfare and understand the reasons why this is happening. It is better to do this outside the criminal justice system, so that the child can be given the support they need without being held back in life by a criminal record.”
An MoJ spokesperson said: “The number of children receiving cautions or convictions has fallen by 79% in the last decade thanks, in part, to early support that prevents children committing crimes in the first place.
“We see this as a sign the youth justice system is working and have no plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility as it enables the very early intervention that is most effective.”
Chief constable Catherine Roper, the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for children and young people, said it was important that young people were not criminalised for behaviour that could be dealt with “more appropriately by other means”.
“It is encouraging that the number of children who are arrested continues to decline, whilst alternate measures to deal with offending behaviour, such as out of court disposals, has increased,” she said.
