Children who commit violent crimes test our views

How do we define a "child"? The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child holds that a child is "every human being under the age of 18 years".

Yet in South Africa, as in many other countries, we allow "children" to do particularly "unchildlike" things before they reach 18.

According to UCT's Children's Institute, a child can be a witness to a will at 14. South Africans can serve as reservists for the fire services at 16. A girl can marry at 12, as long as she has the consent of her parents and the home affairs minister.

From 12 a child can consent to surgical operations - including sex changes - provided the child is considered to be of sufficient maturity to understand the implications. A child is allowed to have an abortion at any age. If we think children can take responsibility for these things before 18, should they be given special protection when it comes to crimes?

It's a question people have been grappling with internationally in the wake of India's brutal New Delhi gang rape and murder. The recent sentencing of the men convicted of the crime meant the courts were faced with a problem. Four of the accused were adults, and were sentenced to be "hanged by the neck until they are dead". But the fifth was counted as a juvenile at 17-and-a-half years old, and that means the maximum sentence the courts could hand down to him was three years in a reformatory - despite leaks from the prosecution suggesting he may have participated in the gruesome crime with even more cruelty and enthusiasm than the others. Many were outraged.

Certain countries, like the US, have historically treated juvenile offenders very harshly. Until 2005, it was lawful to execute child offenders in 12 US states. But groups like Human Rights Watch have argued it should be unconscionable to treat children as adults when it comes to penalties for crime. They say children can never be considered as culpable for their actions as adults since there is biological evidence to suggest adolescent brains are not yet fully developed, and that children have a capacity to change their future behaviour.

Our constitution and Child Justice Act tend towards this approach too, holding that children should be detained in prison as a last resort, and for the shortest time possible. This is with good reason; international research suggests the longer juveniles spend in prison, the more likely they are to re-offend.

But even those who hold the most liberal views on the issue of the detention of minors may find their principles strained by cases of extreme violence. In the Indian gang rape case, the charge sheet stated the 17-year-old attacker pulled out the victim's intestines with his hands. The family of the victim said they will appeal his sentence: the three years he will spend in a reformatory home will be less the eight months he spent in remand awaiting trial. Two years and four months in a reform school for a crime that shocked the world seems like pretty meagre justice indeed.