Blame is cheap

It happens every time. A tragedy strikes, and the adults in the room immediately look for a shortcut.

After the June 22 school shooting in Tacloban left three kids dead, the national reflex was painfully predictable. Lawmakers are back on their soapboxes, pushing to lower the minimum age of criminal responsibility to 12 — or even 10. They blame violent video games like Gorebox. They blame the unchecked toxicity of smartphones.

Here in Iloilo, Gov. Arthur Defensor Jr. had a more grounded reaction. He asked parents if they were actually prepared for the baggage a cellphone brings, while announcing the expansion of the PRIME mental health program into public schools. He’s looking at local numbers — roughly 70 suicides a year, with 40 percent of them teenagers. That is a real, measurable emergency. Putting psychologists and trained counselors in schools is a concrete, necessary step.

We need to stop kidding ourselves about this national debate. The rush to blame screens and amend laws is nothing but a budget-friendly way to avoid taking the blame.

Yes, cyberbullying is a vicious catalyst. But a smartphone didn’t kill those students at San Jose National High School. Two teenagers did, and they used a 9mm pistol and a .38 caliber revolver. They didn’t download those guns from an app. They got them from adults — one from a police officer relative, the other from a security employee. We have an undeniable failure of adult responsibility, school security, and basic firearm control. Yet, the political solution is somehow to throw pre-teens into the penal system.

Before anyone votes to amend the Juvenile Justice Law, they need to visit a Bahay Pag-asa.

The law already has a mechanism for children over 12 who commit serious crimes. They are supposed to be placed in intensive intervention centers. The reality? These facilities are mostly underfunded, understaffed, or completely missing. The DSWD recently had to flag PHP 275,000,000 just to pilot five regional centers because the 118 supposedly operational ones nationwide are struggling. Local governments simply do not prioritize the budget for social workers, diversion programs, or psychologists over highly visible infrastructure projects.

It is much easier to pass a harsh new law than to fund the one we already have.

Lowering the criminal age doesn’t deter crime. It just criminalizes trauma. Children in conflict with the law are almost always victims first — of poverty, severe neglect, domestic abuse, or exploitation by adults. If we lower the age, we are not protecting the public. We are just building a more efficient pipeline for broken kids to become hardened criminals.

We are caught in a massive contradiction. We debate whether a parent spanking a child crosses the line into abuse, while simultaneously arguing that the state should lock up a 10-year-old.

The move to push PRIME into schools works because it addresses the root rot instead of waiting to punish the symptoms. If we actually want to stop the next school shooting, we have to stop pretending this is just a youth behavior problem. It’s an adult failure. We leave the guns out, we ignore the bullying, and we refuse to fund the rehab centers. Blaming the kids is just an excuse.