We’ve Got Your Boy: Episode 3, Doli Capax (Capable of ‘Evil’)
The murder of James Bulger in 1993 by two 10-year-old boys was an horrific act of violence that essentially led to a huge change in the country’s youth justice system: the abolition of the legal term doli incapax (meaning incapable of evil).
It meant that children as young as 10 were now deemed capable of committing crime – before then it was 14. Since this shift, England and Wales to this day has one of the lowest ages of criminal responsibility in the world.
In this episode we challenge the thinking that some children are simply ‘just evil’, and that horrific acts of violence aren’t the symptom of a wide and complex web of social problems that underpin them.
What does it mean in practice to put prevention before punishment?
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