A proposed amendment to the Justice Bill would raise Northern Ireland’s age of criminal responsibility. The principle of raising the age is welcome and overdue. Northern Ireland’s current position has long been difficult to defend. The criminal law remains capable of treating children as young as ten as criminally responsible, even in cases where a welfare, safeguarding or therapeutic response may be more appropriate.

But the structure of the reform matters. It is not enough simply to raise the age and leave the difficult issues to be worked out later. The legislation needs to be clear about where the line is being drawn, and why. That matters all the more because this is not a marginal proposal. The amendment has been tabled by MLAs from parties which together hold a majority of Assembly seats, so it should be treated as a serious legislative route rather than a symbolic gesture.

The amendment would create a tiered model. Children under 12 would be conclusively presumed incapable of committing any offence. For children aged 12 or 13, criminal responsibility would also be excluded as the general rule, but liability would be retained for a short list of offences: murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, rape and assault by penetration. The attraction of that compromise is clear: it raises the age to 12 across the board, while seeking to avoid the claim that the law would be powerless in the face of the most serious harm caused by a 12- or 13-year-old.

The proposed model appears to have been inspired by the Republic of Ireland’s approach, but the comparison needs care. In the Republic, children under 12 generally cannot be charged with an offence, but there is an exception for 10- and 11-year-olds charged with a small number of very serious offences, including murder, manslaughter, rape and aggravated sexual assault.

The Northern Ireland amendment would operate in a different age band and within a different offences framework from the Republic. The age point is important context. By 12 or 13, many children will have entered puberty, and difficult cases may arise around peer sexual behaviour, coercion, exploitation and non-penetrative sexual harm. A list of exceptions for this age group therefore needs to be tested carefully against Northern Ireland’s own sexual offences framework.

The Northern Irish amendment allows 12-and 13-year-olds to be charged with rape and assault by penetration. Both are plainly serious offences. But the list also draws a hard line around penetrative sexual offending. It excludes sexual assault and other non-penetrative sexual offences. That line may be easier to state than to justify. It excludes sexual assault and other non-penetrative sexual offences, even though non-penetrative sexual harm can still be grave. It may involve violence, coercion, humiliation, repeated conduct, exploitation, or the use of technology to record, threaten or share sexualised conduct.

This is where the limits of comparison with the Republic become most apparent. The key point is not simply that the two jurisdictions use different labels for penetrative sexual offences. It is that the Irish list includes aggravated sexual assault, an offence defined by reference to serious violence, threats of serious violence, or injury, humiliation or degradation of a grave nature. It therefore performs an important filtering function: it captures serious sexual violence falling short of rape without including every sexual assault allegation.

Northern Ireland does not have an equivalent offence. Its offence of sexual assault is much broader, covering intentional sexual touching without consent. That breadth matters because the category ranges from lower-level conduct to deeply harmful violations of bodily and sexual autonomy. As a result, a Northern Ireland list that omits sexual assault altogether leaves serious non-penetrative sexual harm outside the exception, while a list that includes sexual assault without qualification may bring a wide range of conduct within the exceptional category. One way through that difficulty would be to define a narrower aggravated form of sexual assault in the amendment itself, but that would need to be done expressly rather than assumed.

The list may also affect how cases are resolved in practice. Criminal cases do not always proceed only on the most serious charge originally contemplated. Pleas to lesser offences can sometimes provide a more proportionate outcome. But if a 12- or 13-year-old can only be guilty of the proposed listed offences, the ordinary possibility of accepting a plea to a lesser sexual offence may be unavailable. That could make some cases unnecessarily binary: either prosecute for a very serious listed offence, or remove the case from criminal liability altogether. In cases involving children on both sides, that rigidity may fail to do justice either to the child accused of causing harm or to the child who has been harmed.

The choice of sexual offences also has consequences beyond prosecution itself. In Northern Ireland, convictions for relevant sexual offences can trigger notification requirements, and sexual offending can also interact with preventative order regimes designed to manage future risk. The proposed amendment therefore does not simply decide which 12- and 13-year-olds may be prosecuted. It may also affect whether the ancillary public protection framework is available, and on what basis. That makes the boundaries of the sexual offences’ exception especially important.

None of this is an argument against raising the age of criminal responsibility. It is an argument for ensuring that the reform is not built around a compromise whose boundaries have not been fully thought through. One possible answer is to avoid offence-based exceptions altogether: children below the relevant age would not be criminally responsible, and serious harmful behaviour would be addressed through welfare, safeguarding, mental health, secure accommodation and public protection mechanisms rather than criminal conviction. The alternative is to retain a narrow exceptional category for the gravest cases. But if that route is taken, the category must be justified by a clear principle and drafted with close attention to how the relevant offences actually operate.

Hard cases should not dictate the architecture of youth justice, but neither can they be ignored. The law needs to be clear about what happens when a child below the ordinary threshold causes serious harm, and about why some forms of harm remain within criminal responsibility while others do not. That clarity matters not only for children accused of causing harm, but also for those who have been harmed, who in many of the most difficult cases will themselves be children. Raising the age of criminal responsibility is an important step. The challenge is to ensure that the reform is coherent, durable and not left weakest at precisely the points where the law most needs to explain itself.