The Sentencing Academy has published a new report, authored by Professor Kathryn Hollingsworth, Dr Jonathan Bild and Professor Gavin Dingwall, that explores what children above the above of criminal responsibility know and think about sentencing. The report is based on the findings of a survey of 1,038 children living in England and Wales aged between 10-17 years.
Read the report here: Children’s Knowledge and Opinion of Sentencing
Key findings:
› Most children reported having spoken to someone about what happens in a criminal court. The most common answer (57%) was that they had spoken to ‘my family’, with 39% of respondents having spoken to ‘my teacher at school’. However, very few respondents (2%) reported having been to a criminal court.
› Respondents reported having seen what happens in a criminal court from a variety of sources, with the two most common responses being ‘on a TV programme’ and ‘in a film’.
› Despite all participants in the survey having reached the minimum age of criminal responsibility, respondents generally over-estimated the age at which children become criminally responsible: 61% of those who provided an answer to the question of at what age does a child become criminally responsible (i.e. excluding those who answered ‘don’t know’) thought it was over the correct age of 10-years-old.
› The children in this survey were much less likely than adult respondents to think that the sentencing of adults is too lenient: 27% of respondents thought that sentencing was too lenient but a greater proportion – 34% – thought it was ‘about right’. Only 16% of respondents thought that the sentencing of children was too lenient.
› Whilst the vast majority (81%) of respondents correctly identified that a judge ‘would’ sentence a 25-year-old more severely than a 15-year-old for an identical offence, only 50% of respondents thought that they ‘should’ do so; 38% thought that both offenders should receive the same punishment.
› Respondents generally under-estimated the severity of sentencing for children convicted of a repeat knife offence. In a scenario crafted to engage a mandatory custodial sentence as the most likely outcome, 57% of respondents thought that the offending would most likely be met with a non-custodial sentence. This included a majority of 16- and 17-year-old respondents to whom the mandatory sentencing provisions apply.
