Tough on Crime: Global Lessons for Youth Violence Crisis

In 1999, Lionel Tate (12 years old) brutally beat 6-year-old Tiffany Eunick to death in Florida, USA, claiming he was imitating pro-wrestling moves. But he was tried as an adult and became the youngest person in modern US history to be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Similarly, in 2023, Scarlet Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliff (both were 15 years old) carried out a planned and sadistic stabbing of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey in the UK. They were both tried as adults and sentenced to life imprisonment with minimum terms of 22 and 20 years, respectively. These cases represent how it should be when a violent crime occurs: criminals, regardless of age, must be punished. Even though both countries have juvenile centres, neither allowed any leniency to the criminals. It is indeed a lesson that when children commit heinous crimes, they must be transferred to adult court and receive adult sentences.
That is expected and normal, but sadly, that is not the case in Bangladesh. We have an extremely lenient law for youth, regardless of the crime. The primary legislation governing minors here is the Children Act 2013. Under that law, anyone under the age of 18 years is legally recognised as a child, and it explicitly prohibits sentencing a minor to death or life imprisonment. According to the law, rather than an adult prison, convicted or detained youth must be sent to separate, specialised correctional facilities for vocational training and counselling. Section 44 of the Children Act, 2013 also explicitly mandates that no child can be handcuffed.
Such lenient laws have become one of the primary reasons for the rise of violent juvenile gangs and crimes in Bangladesh. Day by day, the gravity of their offences is becoming more severe. They are no longer involved in petty crimes; rather, they are partaking in sophisticated criminal acts, like homicides, grievous assaults, extortions and drug dealing. Adult ringleaders are strategically recruiting minors into their operations, as our legal system is ill-equipped to penalise them. These youth have begun to think that they can get away with doing anything.
Our nation is not the only country experiencing such a dilemma. There have been multiple countries where juvenile crime increased, and it was handled adequately. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, youth violent crime rates increased a lot in the USA, causing panic among states. Many criminologists and academics warned about the situation if adequate steps were not taken. Thus, between 1992 and 1999, nearly every state in the USA passed legislation dismantling traditional juvenile protections to make it easier to try children in adult courts. Decades later, these laws still exist because it is important to be ‘tough on crime’. During the same time, both the UK and Singapore faced a sharp rise in juvenile delinquency. Manchester became the epicentre of the crisis, earning the grim moniker ‘Gunchester’ due to escalating turf wars, drug trafficking and firearm offences among the youth. The problem was catalysed by shocking events like the 1993 murder of a toddler by two 10-year-old boys. The government brought aggressive police crackdowns and abolished multiple juvenile laws. Similar to the US, they also became ‘tough on crime’. The new law made it easier to prosecute and convict young offenders in court. They also introduced civil orders to restrict the movements or associations of disruptive youths before they committed severe crimes. They mandated that every local council establish multi-agency Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) where police, social workers, probation officers, teachers and health professionals would work together.
On the other hand, during the first half of the 1990s, much like the current concerns in Bangladesh, Singaporean youth increasingly shifted from minor shoplifting to serious offences. To address this serious crisis, Singapore took a range of strategic and systematic measures. The government created a process known as the Family Conference, which brings everyone affected by the offence (parents, the youth [offender], police, social workers, school representatives, and the victim and their family) into a single room to collectively design a rehabilitation plan. Common outcomes of such conferences include a blend of direct restitution, apology rituals, community service and mandatory parenting workshops for both the youth and their parents.
To build a balanced and functional framework, Bangladesh’s government can cross-reference strategies deployed by the USA, UK and Singapore. The government must reform the lenient juvenile law and harden its policy on violent youth offenders. If a ‘child’ can commit adult crime, they must receive ‘adult punishment’. Policymakers need to incapacitate the youth offenders without adult inmate contamination by confining them in a separate wing of the prison and ensuring that they have zero access to street networks, complete loss of liberties, and that they follow rigid structural routines. Moreover, only punishing the youth offenders would not solve the issue; policymakers must also ruthlessly prosecute the adult handlers. If an adult uses a minor to commit a violent offence, the law must automatically double the sentencing.
The government can use the UK’s YOT approach to introduce a Community and Diversion Wing in the Bangladesh National Cadet Corps (BNCC). Under this wing, a few BNCC officers, along with social workers, local police, health professionals and educators, will work. Non-violent youth offenders could be sent to this wing for community service, which must be backed by absolute accountability, rigid behavioural boundaries and swift enforcement. As BNCC’s core motto is discipline, it will be the perfect place to put non-violent youth offenders.
The rising tide of youth violence in our country cannot be solved with soft compromises or lenient laws. Taming the epidemic demands evidence-based equilibrium and absolute toughness in crime. The historical lessons from the 1990s make it clear: our government must reform its policies to dismantle youth violence in Bangladesh. It is time our government replaced chaotic crackdowns with institutional discipline, ensuring that our laws are tough enough to protect citizens and punish offenders appropriately and yet smart enough for our future.
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The writer is an Editorial Assistant at Daily Sun