Life Without Barriers submission: Review of the age of criminal responsibility
Life Without Barrier’s submission to the Council of Attorneys-General Age of Criminal Responsibility Working Group review, dated February 2020.
In this submission, Life Without Barriers advocates for lifting of the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility (MACR) to 14 years; the presumption of doli incapax be applied to young people aged 14 and 15 years who are charged with criminal offences; and therapeutic responses be more widely available to young people exhibiting behaviour considered to be antisocial in nature, irrespective of whether these young people are aged below a revised MACR, or above it.
Life Without Barriers urges a reduction in the use of responses that have been proven to either entrench offending or achieve no reduction in the rate or severity of future offending.
