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Research Article

Children’s Knowledge and Opinion of Sentencing

Professor Kathryn Hollingsworth
Dr Jonathan Bild
Dr Gavin Dingwall

October 2024

The Sentencing Academy has published a new report that explores what children above the above of criminal responsibility know and think about sentencing. The report is based on the findings of a survey of 1,038 children living in England and Wales aged between 10-17 years.

Read the full report on the Sentencing Hub: Children’s Knowledge and Opinion of Sentencing

Key findings:

  • Most children reported having spoken to someone about what happens in a criminal court. The most common answer (57%) was that they had spoken to ‘my family’, with 39% of respondents having spoken to ‘my teacher at school’. However, very few respondents (2%) reported having been to a criminal court.
  • Respondents reported having seen what happens in a criminal court from a variety of sources, with the two most common responses being ‘on a TV programme’ and ‘in a film’.
  • Despite all participants in the survey having reached the minimum age of criminal responsibility, respondents generally over-estimated the age at which children become criminally responsible: 61% of those who provided an answer to the question of at what age does a child become criminally responsible (i.e. excluding those who answered ‘don’t know’) thought it was over the correct age of 10-years-old.
  • The children in this survey were much less likely than adult respondents to think that the sentencing of adults is too lenient: 27% of respondents thought that sentencing was too lenient but a greater proportion – 34% – thought it was ‘about right’. Only 16% of respondents thought that the sentencing of children was too lenient.
  • Whilst the vast majority (81%) of respondents correctly identified that a judge ‘would’ sentence a 25-year-old more severely than a 15-year-old for an identical offence, only 50% of respondents thought that they ‘should’ do so; 38% thought that both offenders should receive the same punishment.
  • Respondents generally under-estimated the severity of sentencing for children convicted of a repeat knife offence. In a scenario crafted to engage a mandatory custodial sentence as the most likely outcome, 57% of respondents thought that the offending would most likely be met with a non-custodial sentence. This included a majority of 16- and 17-year-old respondents to whom the mandatory sentencing provisions apply.

Read the full report here.