By Nestor Ravilas

I don’t really get it, and it is giving me pain trying to comprehend what the hell their rationale for lowering the age of criminal liability to age 9. A person cannot marry in the Philippines under the age of 18, and still in need of parental consent when she is 18. She might insists having a full weight of her decision and well prepared to face the travails of marriage, but the state intervenes and assumes to itself the decision to bar her to consummate her wish. The moral argument is that children lack the necessary degree of maturity and sense of responsibility needed on such huge decision, thus depriving them of that freedom to marry before reaching 21, the age that frees them from parental consent. Then why all of a sudden this government is hell-bent to lower criminal liability to age 9? You cannot marry until the age 21, but a 9-year-old child can already be held criminally liable? Or they will amend later the family code and allow a child of 9 years of age to marry to do away with the contradiction?

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