CARTOON BY: AARON PAUL C. CARIL
EDITORIAL
When minors cross the line
The shooting at San Jose National High School in Tacloban forces us to look past the noise and confront a harder question: what do we do when a child commits serious harm? The Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act was never meant to excuse violence. It was meant to recognize something science has been telling us for years — that the adolescent brain is still under construction, especially the parts that govern judgment and impulse control (Steinberg, 2017). The law reflects that reality, even if public anger sometimes pushes us to forget it.
Under RA 9344, children fifteen and below are exempt from criminal liability, and those above fifteen but below eighteen are exempt unless they acted with discernment (Republic Act No. 9344, 2006). On paper, that sounds straightforward. In practice, it demands a level of assessment that many local governments simply aren’t equipped to do. Discernment isn’t guesswork; it requires trained evaluators, psychological tools, and a system that can distinguish immaturity from malice (Grisso, 2008). That’s the part we often skip in the rush to assign blame.
Parents and community members have every right to feel uneasy. They see the gaps up close — the understaffed guidance offices, the absence of mental-health support, the Bahay Pag-asa centers that exist in law but not always in reality. National monitoring shows that barely half of the mandated facilities are fully functional (Juvenile Justice and Welfare Council, 2022). When the support system is thin, the law can feel lopsided, even if its intent is sound. People aren’t reacting to the philosophy of juvenile justice; they’re reacting to the vacuum around it.
Law enforcement, for its part, is caught in the middle. Officers are expected to make quick decisions in situations that demand clinical precision. The law requires them to determine discernment, but the tools they need — forensic psychologists, standardized protocols, specialized training — are not always available outside major cities (RA 10630, 2013). It’s easy to criticize from a distance. It’s harder to acknowledge that the system asks them to perform a task the system itself has not fully prepared them for.
Child-rights advocates remind us that the JJWA works when the ecosystem around it works. Countries with strong school-based counseling, early-warning systems, and community-level interventions consistently see lower rates of youth violence (UNICEF, 2020). The Philippines has the framework, but not yet the infrastructure. The Tacloban incident is not proof that the law is broken. It is proof that the scaffolding around it remains unfinished.
So the real question is not whether the JJWA should stand. It’s whether we are finally willing to build the system the law envisioned: trained assessors, functional Bahay Pag-asa centers, mental-health support in schools, and a community network that catches problems before they escalate. When minors cross the line, the answer cannot be to abandon the principles of juvenile justice. The answer is to make those principles real — not just in statutes, but in the lives of the children and communities they were meant to protect.