Columns

Should parents be held responsible for the criminal behaviour of their children?

Harry Misslbrook argues that they should; Anicia disagrees.

Harry:
I’m going to convince you that parents should be made legally responsible for their children’s criminal behaviour. I understand this is a rather massive call, so I’m going to narrow down exactly when parents should be held responsible, and why this should be the case. Firstly, punishing a parent for their child’s actions would only occur for repeat offences by the child, and after it had been determined (via social work consultations) that the parent is not providing adequately for the child in terms of basic needs and /or a lack of behavioural boundaries. Obviously you don’t want to punish good parents whose child does something illegal one time, nor do you want to punish parents where the child has legitimate behavioural issues despite the parents doing everything they can to help the child with these issues. 
With regard to punishing parents, this would either be done via monetary punishment, ordering of counselling, or, in extreme cases, imprisonment. This sort of system is already in place in many US states and some European countries, to very good effect. The best examples of these system working is seen with truancy issues and minor criminal acts such as shoplifting and tagging. These parents provide little or no guidance to the child’s development of an understanding of right and wrong or legal and illegal, and usually don’t care what their child gets up to. Results have seen that punishing the parents is not only a way of providing some sort of punishment where the child is not legally able to be charged, but also provides a large incentive for the parents to actually start parenting and providing some discipline and guidance in the child’s life to give them an understanding of acceptable and unacceptable conduct.
If you can’t punish the child or the parent for a child’s criminal act, then what? The child continues to grow up with a lack of guidance, discipline, and awareness of their own actions, and can easily go on to commit much larger crimes in the future. Punishing the parents provides a way to improve overall parenting quality in poor parents, and leads to a better society in the long term.
 
Anicia:
Good parenting teaches a child what is regarded as right and wrong, how to become a self-responsible individual that acts according to their conscience. If parents fail in that, they might seriously screw up their kid. Therefore, one might argue that it is perfectly reasonable that parents should be held responsible for the criminal behaviour of their children. 
The crux is: while we know in theory what good parenting is, there is no instruction manual that guarantees 100 percent success. One may raise a child with the best intentions and follow the latest parenting trend and little Tomo could still end up stealing his friend’s iPod, selling drugs, or raping a classmate. The fact is, parents do not have 100 percent control over their kids. The reason for this is that a child is as much an autonomous being as any other human, with unique ideas, decisions, and actions. And the older Tomo gets, the more his parents lose their influence. Peer groups, teachers, celebrities – all are important in shaping Tomo’s personality. This is how our society is set up. 
One may argue that parents would care more if they were faced with a punishment for their failure, and that good parenting can prevent negative social influences. But would Tomo’s parents actually care more, or simply fear punishment? What base for parenting would that provide? And how far do we want to go? Search Tomo’s friends for drugs? Home-school him and declare the playground a hazard zone? What about those parents who are willing to sacrifice everything for their children but simply do not have the means – the single dad who cannot afford a babysitter and lives right next to the cocaine dealer?
Before we offload the responsibility on the parents alone, we should turn an eye on the structures of our society. Instead of wasting money on building a new administration for ‘parent punishment’, why not put the money in the improvement of already existing institutions like the CYF? 
 
Debatable is a column written by the Otago University Debating Society. They meet every Tuesday at 7pm in Commerce 2.20.