LN: Youth offenders increasingly brutal

Prague, Jan 23 (CTK) - Brutality of underage perpetrators has been steeply rising in the Czech Republic and they often attack their victims merely to have fun without any apparent reason, the daily Lidove noviny (LN) writes yesterday.

It cites several acts recently committed by children and youth in the country.

In Pardubice, east Bohemia, six boys aged between 17 and 19 brutally beat up two homeless and they urinated on them just to vent their anger on them. The first victim nearly died and the other will have permanent health consequences. The perpetrators were sent to prison for many years last week.

The police say juvenile perpetrators intensify not only their physical brutality but also psychological tormenting of their victims, LN adds.

It refers to a case of a group of underage schoolmates in Central Bohemia who dragged a drunk student into a cellar and raped her. Moreover, they shot the act on a video camera and released the shots on the school's website. They face up to five years in prison

Criminal liability in the Czech Republic is from the age of 15. However, juvenile perpetrators aged 15-18 years face lower sentences than adult criminals, under the Penal Code.

Though the number of accused juvenile criminals has not much changed, their attacks are more and more brutal, LN writes. A total of 3714 juvenile perpetrators were prosecuted and another 1397 were suspected of crimes between January and November 2011, LN adds.

Psychologists, addressed by the paper, point out that negative role models in families, films full of violence as well as computer games are behind the aggressive behaviour of teenagers.

"Children have access to much more information than some ten years ago and they are often unable to asses them correctly," Jan Machuta, from the Prague vice squad, told the paper.

Current children cannot distinguish between a virtual world and reality, which is one of the causes of their brutal behaviour, psychologist Ludmila Cirtkova, from the Police Academy, said.

"Perpetrators are also losing respect for another human being. They are basically convinced that they can have a whale of a good time at the expense of others," she told the paper.

Some experts are of the view that the present upbringing is too liberal and it rather implants childrens' rights than duties in their mind.

Others point out that parents less and less often support conscience in their children's upbringing. The kids' behaviour thus reflects not only their education but also "the spirit of the times," Cirtkova said.

The most serious crimes are mainly committed by aggressive children from families with a low social status, whose parents can be alcohol addicts, for instance, while perpetrators of other delicts, such as vandalism, can be even from higher social strata and their parents do not have time for them, she added.

The lowering of criminal liability till the age of 14, like in the neighbouring Slovakia, for example, has been broadely discussed in the Czech Republic. Experts are disunited about a benefit of such a measure.

Cirtkova rather supports it as children might sooner realise responsibility for their deeds, she said.

"The sooner a problematic juvenile is confronted with the consequences of his act, the more probable it is that he will change his behaviour," she told LN.

The paper also writes that brutality of adult perpetrators of violent crimes has been on the rise as well and the number of multiple murders has been increasing year-on-year in the Czech Republic, LN writes.

It reminds of the most recent case of a 26-year-old man who stabbed his mother, 60, and grandmother, 80, to death in their flat Ceska Lipa, north Bohemia, last Saturday.