Faced with the alleged rise in insecurity in the Province of Buenos Aires, Governor Daniel Scioli stated in a press conference on November 5 that, in order to stop crime, the age for legal responsibility of minors should be lowered to 12.

This is a controversial topic that has brought social scientists into conflict for many years. Scioli warned about the fact that 400,000 minors who live in the province do not work or study. No wonder these kids constitute the privileged objects of punishment and social designation.
Some disreputable journalists build public opinion to raise general consent and repress children. Rossana Reguillo writes that the signs are disturbing. In everyday life, in the political and journalistic discourse, that authoritarian discourse becomes stronger, harder, acquires a social cleansing quality and threatens to increase the number of supporters, because it offers the comfortable certainty that the only possible salvation involves the extermination of all those elements which threaten and disturb the pretence of collective life; a pretence that is kept up with murmurs and faltering sighs in order not to wake the devil. But even though I do not think we are in hell, we are experiencing its preview.
Garcia Marquez once wondered whether the Earth was not the hell of other planets. Perhaps it is much less: a village with no memory, left… in the last suburb.
That is what the media is communicating, in block letters or an image in four inks. Word seeds fall on the earth of the condemned, and cover it with delirious vegetation.
Radio 10, through its mentor, “journalist” Daniel Hadad, stands out in the crusade against the “unfaithful” children by encouraging people to storm the streets contaminated with children juggling for coins, so that the “good pilgrims” can shed all that innocent grace on the “holy sepulcher” of supermarkets.
A crime reporter on TV spoke of thieves in “short trousers”, of the evil of these poor children, they who do not have a criminal code like yesterday’s thieves used to have, and he said it with a certain nostalgia. Carlos Ruckauf -- with his intact vocation of tough on crime measures -- told the Pagina/12 newspaper that “judges encourage murderers.”
The great mass media have been transformed into the headquarters of a temporary strategy of repression and denigration of poor people’s lives. We are consumers of the always “delightful” show of misery and tragedy, and the “touching” show of the efforts made by those who cause it and later eradicate it. And they cry out to heaven a heartrending plea: the age of legal responsibility has to be lowered by shooting at the victims.
It was here -- Camus used to say -- “where my generation learned that one can be right and defeated, that force can destroy the soul, and that, sometimes, courage is not rewarded.”
At what age should we charge minors? When they are fourteen years old? This is apparently not enough. When they are twelve, perhaps? Is there discernment at these ages? Can a child tell the difference between what is good and what is not? Between what is prohibited and what is permitted? Manuel Ossorio says that “those who behave without full discernment cannot realize the implications or the value of the consequences their actions have.” Discernment can be reduced for various reasons: mood, fear, and bewilderment. Has a child who endures hunger and abandonment, who has been abused, and who sleeps out in the open not been mutilated? Is a child who does not have the basic input of human upbringing: family, tenderness, shelter, and food, not affected?
And so, within the field of penal law, these children, influenced by the absence of the rights they were never granted, cannot clearly discern the criminal nature of their acts because they cannot tell good from evil.
The appeal for precocious discernment is a condition, but not a sufficient one. Therefore, the most harmful figures of penal obscurantism are invoked; we are reminded of the positivist conception of “natural criminals”, the irreparable genetics of our poor children.
In an essay on the death penalty by Albert Camus and Arthur Koestler, it was written that, in Great Britain, children under the age of seven were not liable for a capital punishment conviction. But, when they were between the ages of seven and fourteen, they could be hanged if there was “consistent evidence of perversity”. Perversity gave them “penal legal age”. That is why, in 1801, thirteen-year-old Andrew Brenning was publicly hanged for breaking into a house by forcing the entrance and then stealing a spoon. In 1833, a nine-year-old boy was sent to the gallows for having stolen, through a broken window, some pieces of colored chalk.
The media go against the family and blame it for engendering more children than poverty allows, for having transformed human upbringing into something frail when it is time to beat up their children, use them, turn them into human nightmares. And they are also against state schools for not having used their domination techniques to subjugate children. This is happening this year. But it is a story we have already been told by books or by our grandparents in their gatherings, that carnal memory which is transmitted through tenderness.
When immigrants were the victims of social contempt in Argentina at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the goal was, in fact, to eliminate the non-assimilable, the men and women who were fighting for their rights. Melendez, in the year 1900, found heredity to be one of the causes for crime among youths, mainly within the Italian and French communities. Luis Agote, a representative of the Conservative Party, said in the Argentine Congress on August 27, 1919: “I have, on my bench, several sentences in which judges have charged minors of 10, 11, and 12 years of age for being reoffenders. By studying these young criminals’ records, one finds out they are shoeshine boys, newspaper vendors, or messengers.”
Today, same as yesterday, the causes that produce the ill-treatment and abandonment are concealed, denied, blurred. It is as much an individual phenomenon as a social product, and humble families are attributed a responsibility that is collective. Most of the media do not shed a single word, a single image about the capitalism that avoids generating the “human condition”.
In the non-Euclidean space of the new millennium, an evil curve invincibly alters the course of all trajectories. It is the end of linearity, the end of progress. Within this perspective, the future does not exist anymore, as Jean Baudrillard observed.
Death has a particular look for all children. Exploited directly or indirectly by the system, they are -- today, same as yesterday -- the most eloquent expression of a continent of violence and the exploitation of human life. Hunger kills children every day, without that little bit of bread that was required, without the help of those who should have been singing for them.
The Spanish language original version of this article can be viewed at the web site www.pelotadetrapo.org.ar.