If the crime was gruesome, the punishment was equally so. On Monday, a 13-year-old was sentenced to life imprisonment in China.

How can a child be condemned to spend his life behind bars? The answer to that lies in the cold-blooded crime this child committed, along with two friends of the same age. The victim was their classmate, one whom they had long bullied in school.

In March last year, one of the three decided to kill the victim, shared his plan with friends and proceeded to execute it with their help. He got the victim to accompany him to an abandoned shed where his co-conspirators were waiting. While he hit his classmate with a shovel, the second boy restrained the victim and stopped him from escaping. However, the third conspirator, unable to take what was happening, ran out. But he did not run away. After the victim had been beaten to death, the three used the same shovel to bury him in the shed.

Meanwhile, the victim’s parents, worried that he had not returned home, and unable to call him, started searching for him and finally went to the police at night. Through CCTV footage and mobile records, the police found that the boy had been in touch with three classmates. But the three denied having met him. However, his call records showed that he had transferred money to one of their accounts.

Confronted with that evidence, the third child confessed and led the police to
the shed. Turned out that the boy who had assaulted the victim had transferred money from the latter’s account to his own. He shared the money with the second boy, told him to dispose of the phone and ordered the third boy to destroy the SIM card.

For the parents, the discovery of their child’s body, his face disfigured with repeated shovel blows, was bad enough. What made it worse was an awful realisation. Their son had, for a long time, expressed reluctance to go to school, but they had not taken this seriously enough to even ask him why. They understood too late the reason for his reluctance.

The court found that the first boy had conceived of the murder, got others to participate in it, prepared for it and then gone ahead with it, through a particularly brutal method. He was judged as the principal offender, bearing primary responsibility for the crime of intentional homicide. In 2021, an amendment lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 14 to 12 for intentional homicide, especially if done by “cruel means”, came into effect. Accordingly, he was awarded life imprisonment.

The second boy, who actively participated in the conspiracy and the murder, and afterwards shared the stolen money, was also regarded as a principal offender, but with lesser culpability. He got 12 years in prison. The third boy was let off with no punishment.

This is the first case in which the amendment has been applied. The outrage it caused when it happened created the ground for such a punishment. Close on its heels, a series of vicious school bullying incidents was reported. In one of them, a 14-year-old, tired of being bullied, stabbed his classmates. His action was seen as self-defence and he was not punished.

But will these harsh sentences tackle the causes of such juvenile violence? The three juvenile convicts were all ‘left-behind children’, a phrase used for those left in the care of grandparents while parents slog to earn a living far away. Does the State not share responsibility for the environment in which these left-behind children — 33% of all rural children — grow up?