BEFORE WE LOWER THE AGE, LET US RAISE THE VILLAGE

A Statement of PRESO Foundation on the Tacloban School Shooting, Juvenile Justice, and the Moral Work of Accountability

There are tragedies so painful that they tempt a nation to mistake anger for clarity. The Tacloban school shooting is one of them.

Children went to school and did not come home. Others came home wounded — some in body, many more in spirit. A school, which should have been a place of formation, became a place of fear. We mourn the children whose lives were taken. We mourn with their families, whose grief no statement can fully honor. We mourn with the injured, the traumatized, the teachers, classmates, responders, and the community now forced to ask: how could this have happened among children?

And yes, we are angry. We should be. But anger must not become policy. Grief must not become a shortcut to bad law. Vengeance must never be confused with justice.

In the aftermath of Tacloban, calls to lower the minimum age of criminal responsibility have again grown louder. This is understandable. When the harm is grave, people demand accountability. PRESO Foundation believes in accountability, too — real accountability, not symbolic outrage.

But accountability is not the same as revenge. Accountability is not simply finding a younger child to punish more harshly. Accountability is not pretending that a child who commits violence emerges from nowhere, untouched by family, school, peers, trauma, bullying, neglect, online spaces, firearms access, and institutional failure.

A child who kills must be stopped. A child who kills must answer. A child who kills must face consequences. But if our only answer is to lower the age, then we are not solving the problem. We are merely shrinking the person we are willing to punish.

Hindi hustisya ang paghahanap ng batang mapaparusahan kung hindi natin hahabulin ang sistemang nagpabaya.

The Juvenile Justice and Welfare Act has been unfairly reduced to a caricature, as if it allows children to harm others without consequence. That is not true. The law does not erase accountability. It provides a child-appropriate framework for accountability: intervention, diversion, rehabilitation, discernment-based proceedings, civil liability, and more intensive responses in serious cases. The question is not whether the law allows accountability. It does. The harder question is whether we have built the system that makes accountability real.

Tacloban does not reveal one failure. It reveals a chain of failures: protection failed the children who were killed; early detection failed if children had carried grievance, isolation, rage, or distress long before the violence; school safety failed if deadly weapons could enter a campus; firearms responsibility failed if children accessed guns adults should have secured; mental health support failed if children in crisis had nowhere effective to go; digital safeguarding failed if harmful online spaces helped normalize cruelty, spectacle, or revenge.

There was a failure of the family, the school, the community, the State — the village. And when the village fails, we cannot make the child carry the entire weight of the village’s failure. Dili pwede nga bata ray pas-anon sa sala sa tibuok komunidad.

This is not an excuse. This is responsibility in its fullest sense. A culture of revenge asks: How young can we punish? A culture of justice asks: Who was harmed? What must be repaired? What danger must be contained? Who enabled the harm? What systems failed? What must change so this does not happen again?

That is restorative justice. Not softness. Not permissiveness. Not sentimental mercy. Restorative justice begins with the truth that victims matter. Their grief matters. Their safety matters. Their healing matters. Their families must not be left alone after the cameras move on. But it also insists on another truth: when a child becomes capable of devastating violence, something has gone terribly wrong long before the first shot was fired.

So before Congress rushes to lower the age of criminal responsibility, PRESO Foundation calls for something more courageous: do not merely lower the age. Raise the village.

1. Account for the guns. Children did not manufacture those firearms. Children did not license them. Every firearm connected to this tragedy must be traced, and every adult with custody, control, authority, or responsibility over those weapons must be investigated. If a child gains access to a gun, that is not only a juvenile justice issue. That is an adult accountability issue.

2. Make school safety real, not ceremonial. Every school must have working emergency protocols, entry controls, crisis communication systems, and coordination with barangay, police, health, and social welfare responders. But safety cannot be reduced to gates and guards. A safe school is one where pain is noticed before it becomes violence.

3. Treat bullying as a national child protection emergency. Bullying never justifies killing. Nothing does. But bullying can isolate, humiliate, and wound children in ways adults often underestimate. When schools dismiss it as “biruan lang” or “normal lang ’yan,” they teach children that pain has no proper forum. And when pain has no proper forum, it may search for a terrible stage.

4. Bring mental health support from law to life. We cannot keep telling children to speak up when there is no one properly trained, available, and resourced to listen. The country must fund and hire guidance counselors, psychologists, school counselor associates, social workers, and child protection personnel with the same urgency with which it debates punishment.

5. Fix Bahay Pag-asa and the local intervention system. Juvenile justice is only as strong as its local implementation. Barangays, LGUs, social welfare offices, diversion programs, family interventions, victim support services, and Bahay Pag-asa facilities must actually work. No more invisible mandates. No more unfunded compassion.

6. Address digital harm without moral panic. If online platforms, gaming spaces, chat groups, or violent digital communities played any role, that must be investigated. But blaming one app or one game may be emotionally satisfying and still incomplete. Children are online. The State, schools, parents, churches, communities, and platforms must meet them there.

7. Center the victims in resources, not only in words. The families of the children killed and injured need trauma care, legal assistance, medical support, educational support, financial assistance, and long-term psychosocial services. Survivors need follow-through. Teachers and classmates need counseling. The community needs healing that is not rushed, politicized, or forgotten.

We have seen this mistake before. When fear rises, the country reaches for harsher penalties. We did it with the death penalty, believing severity alone would deter crime. But deterrence is not born merely from harshness. It depends far more on certainty, swiftness, fairness, prevention, and credible institutions.

A child in crisis does not pause to calculate statutory amendments. A bullied child does not read the Revised Penal Code before acting. A child with access to a gun is already standing at the edge of multiple adult failures.

PRESO Foundation rejects the false choice between compassion and accountability. We choose both. We reject impunity for children who commit grave harm. We reject vengeance disguised as reform. We reject the lazy comfort of blaming one law, one child, one app, one school, or one family, when the truth is more painful: it took many failures to produce this tragedy.

It takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to fail one. And we refuse to build a justice system on the smallest shoulders in the room.

Before we lower the age, let us raise the village.

#RaiseTheVillage #JusticeNotRevenge #RestorativeJusticeWithAccountability #ProtectChildrenProtectCommunities #PRESOFoundation