Increasing youth violence
According to the latest crime statistics from the Federal Ministry of the Interior for 2022, the number of suspected children under the age of 14 increased by 33.5 percent compared to the previous year. The German police union has also repeatedly called for the criminal responsibility to be reduced to 12 years.
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According to the latest crime statistics from the Federal Ministry of the Interior for 2022, the number of suspected children under the age of 14 increased by 33.5 percent compared to the previous year. The German police union has also repeatedly called for the criminal responsibility to be reduced to 12 years. On Thursday, the AfD parliamentary group for the first time introduced the “draft law to better combat serious child crime” (Drs. 20/6194) in the parliamentary deliberations. The legal policy spokesman for the AfD parliamentary group, Thomas Seitz, explains:
»The planned and arranged murder of a friend in Freudenberg by a twelve and a thirteen-year-old represents a turning point and must lead to a rethinking of the assessment of criminal offenses by children. It is just not enough to look after such perpetrators psychotherapeutically. Even preventive programs in schools do not help here. Child crime is not an isolated case. Sanctioning criminal acts as early as possible is also in the well-understood interest of the child perpetrators themselves, since very few criminal careers begin directly with rape or a homicide.
Reducing the age of criminal responsibility to 12 years is therefore urgently required. In many other countries, children under the age of fourteen are held criminally responsible. In Switzerland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland, children are criminally responsible from the age of 10. In Scotland, Hungary, Canada and the Netherlands, criminal responsibility begins at the age of 12 and in Greece and Scotland at the age of 8.«
