Global minimum age for criminal responsibility: A systemic failure to address developmental neuroscience and structural injustice
Original framing: “Is ten too young to be criminally responsible? Here’s what the evidence says” — The Conversation - Global
Black and Indigenous youth are incarcerated at 4–5x higher rates than white peers in the US/Canada, revealing how age thresholds intersect with racial capitalism. Survivors of state violence, like the *Mothers of the Disappeared* in Argentina, argue that 'criminal responsibility' is a tool of oppression. Their testimonies are systematically excluded from legal and media discourse.
The global age of criminal responsibility (often 10) is a relic of colonial violence, not neuroscience, and functions as a tool of racial and economic control.
Indigenous legal traditions and modern restorative justice models demonstrate that adolescence is a phase of learning, not liability, yet Western systems double down on carceral logic. Neuroscience confirms this, but is ignored when inconvenient—unless it justifies harsher punishment. The solution lies in dismantling punitive frameworks entirely, replacing them with indigenous co-governance, economic security, and education reform. This is not utopian: New Zealand’s *Youth Court* and Finland’s UBI pilots prove these pathways work. The trickster’s lesson is clear: the system’s solemnity about 'responsibility' is a mask for its own failures to nurture the young.