The Research On The Reduction Of The Minimum Age Of Criminal Responsibility Of China

The emergence and development of system of Age of criminal responsibility is inseparable with the continuous improvement of society, economy, politics and culture, and the development of physical and mental of human beings. this process is accompanied by a criminal charges of the principles of development and improvement. This process is accompanied by the development of the principles of responsibility-belonging of criminal law. Early in the development of society, people have a low ability to identify and control their behaviors, they only can know the damage that caused by criminal behavior itself, and cannot explore people's subjective world. As a result, they have to follow the objective responsibility- belonging system to decide whether one people's act is a crime. With the progress of society, people's cognitive ability has been improved, and they realize that our subjective vicious play an important role in the constitution of crime. From then on, System of age of criminal responsibility had been established. Generally speaking, the system of age of criminal responsibility started from the slave society and got development in the feudal society. The modern criminal responsibility age system began in the period of capitalist society. Since then, age of criminal responsibility system has been significantly improved with the establishment of the principle of unity of subjective and objective.In many of factors to decide whether a behavioral person should bear criminal responsibility and how much to bear, the age of criminal responsibility is a critical one. It has much to do with the application of penalties and legal proceedings. So it is very important in every country's theory of criminal law no matter whether it's a country of continental genealogy of law, a country of British-American genealogy of law, or the socialist country such as China. The kernel content system is the division of criminal responsibility age level. Furthermore, it also consists of the rules on the management of the absolute non-criminal responsibility age person and the relation-criminal responsibility age person, the system of using leniency in meting out punishment or mitigating a punishment to a special criminal responsibility age person. At present, the system lays emphasis on the human-right protection, it agrees with the criminal policy of non-crime, non-penalty.People's criminal responsibility is not only to link with puberty, but also with psychological maturity, which is an impartment social factor. Now, many countries decide whether a minor should bear criminal responsibility based on their physiological age and mental age, and emphasize whether their mental are mature and have an ability to identify and control their behaviors. In our Criminal Law, we still have being used the provisions about the age of criminal responsibility which was established thirty years ago. Minors under fourteen years are the absolute non-criminal responsibility age person. However, with the progress of the times, political, economic and the great advance of minors physical and psychological maturity, the reality of juvenile delinquency is very grim, and it has some new features: the trends of younger age crime is significant; the subjective vicious of crime has been increased; criminal acts tend to adult; violent crime tendency is serious and so on. The current system of the minimum age of criminal responsibility has been unable to meet the needs of the actual objective. It cannot answer the public media's various questions about the drawbacks raised by rigid of the age of criminal responsibility, or cannot make a rational and comprehensive response to media and public's clamor for reducing the age of criminal responsibility .In view of this, it's necessary to have a deep research about the system age of criminal responsibility; we should enrich relevant content of the system of age of criminal responsibility from a new perspective and ideas. In this paper, I attempt to excavating cultural and theory background of the age of criminal responsibility, so that to give us a system that has more three-dimensional and thickness. Finally, combined with the juvenile justice system, the security measures and education system that supporting the system of age of criminal responsibility and the interaction between Elimination of Criminal Record and Criminal Penalties, we can make a rational and comprehensive response to media and public's clamor for reducing the age of criminal responsibility.