Considering the Adult a Child Becomes: Why Criminalising Children Creates Harm, Not Safety
In Weaving a Web of Belonging, Dr Lisa Cherry invites us to “consider the adult a child becomes.”
It is a deceptively simple phrase, yet we believe it cuts to the heart of one of the most urgent challenges facing our justice and safeguarding systems today: the criminalising of children who have been harmed, exploited, and failed long before they offended.
At ECO, our work is grounded in the belief that children are not problems to be managed but people to be understood. When we criminalise children, we do not create safety—we create criminality. We manufacture the very outcomes we claim to be trying to prevent.
A system is criminogenic when it increases the likelihood of future offending. The evidence shows us that over-criminalisation of children does exactly that.
Trauma-informed practice asks us to reframe behaviour as communication. ECO’s values are rooted in this understanding: harm does not emerge in a vacuum.
Criminalisation ignores context. It strips behaviour from its causes and treats survival strategies as moral failures rather than signals of unmet need and coercion.
When we fail to ask why, we punish children for adapting to unsafe worlds. And when we do that early, repeatedly, and publicly, we:
normalise exclusion
sever protective relationships
and reduce the chances of positive adulthood
That is not justice. That is abandonment.
Dr Cherry’s framing compels us to think longitudinally.
Every decision made about a child today shapes:
their sense of self
their trust in authority
their belief in belonging
their capacity to imagine a future
A child who is repeatedly criminalised internalises negative messages, and an adult shaped by those messages is far more likely to remain entangled in systems of harm—not because they chose that path freely, but because all other doors were closed.
ECO is clear: ending criminalisation does not mean ignoring harm.
Children must be supported to understand impact, repair relationships, and take responsibility — but responsibility is not the same as punishment.
True accountability requires:
safety
stability
trusted adults
time to develop emotional regulation and moral reasoning
Criminal justice processes, particularly when applied early and aggressively, undermine all four.
Restorative, child-centred, exploitation-aware responses create far better outcomes — not just for children, but for communities — and would allow us all to return to Dr Cherry’s important prompt to consider the adult a child becomes with more confidence as a society that we are really doing that.
Written by: ECO