Children Do Not Commit Crimes

In the last year, 186,000 children in Türkiye were involved in criminal offences. 186,000. Some of those offences were murders. As children such as Mattia Ahmet Minguzzi and Atlas Çağlayan lost their lives, the country was drawn into a tragic debate: is there such a thing as a child pushed into crime, or not?

Today I read the life story of a man known on social media as ‘Ceyhanlı Hakan’. At one point I had to stop. This was not simply a news story. It was evidence of the chain of indifference that causes us to lose children as precious as diamonds.

His mother was slandered. His younger uncle was stabbed fourteen times. ‘We gathered his intestines from the ground,’ he says. How can a person utter such a sentence? More importantly, how can a child live through it? His mother was beaten and lost her mental health. Two of his siblings died at their mother’s hands. He was only seven. Seven. At that age, a child should experience nothing worse than a grazed knee. He saw his mother’s intestines. Then came the orphanage, then prison, and eventually the life he has today.

The sentence that shook me most was this: ‘I wish I had had a child’s bedroom too. I wish someone had said, “Hakan, get up, your father is home, son.”’ While many of us are carried along by the speed of life, someone else wanted only a room of his own. Someone wanted only to hear his father’s voice.

This story reminded me of something: children do not merely commit crimes; they are pushed toward them. Of course we grieve especially for the young lives that were taken. Yet there is another issue that should make us not only sad but deeply concerned: demographic demoralisation. This deterioration begins with our children.

Let us accept one universal point of reference: every child is a child of this country. Ahmet Minguzzi and Atlas were, and so are the children who have been pushed toward crime. I know some people say, ‘They should not be considered this country’s children.’ I understand the anger, but first it is time to think more deeply.

You are seven years old—still little more than a baby. At seven, your mother beats two of your siblings to death before your eyes. That mother is herself a victim of another form of evil: first damaged by rage and nervous illness, then driven into mental illness through ignorance and manipulation. Until the age of eight, the only lesson you receive is hatred—how to hate, how to kill and how to lose your mind. There is no tenderness, no mercy, no sentence saying, ‘Get up, son, your father is home.’ The word ‘son’ is absent from your life.

At eight, while your mother is admitted to a psychiatric hospital, the state takes you to an orphanage. You grow up alone in cold corridors far removed from the peace of a mother’s embrace, alongside hundreds of other children ground down by the same system, each feeding the same hatred within.

You reach fourteen. Before your eyes, your mother is stabbed fourteen times, and you are made to gather her intestines. As you live through this at fourteen, with all the volatility of adolescence, you fight simply to survive in life’s bloodstream. You have been raised in such a vast culture of hatred that you may not even know mercy exists.

Recently, many people have rushed toward one demand regarding children pushed into crime: ‘Give them the harshest punishment, even for ordinary offences.’ Yes, punish serious wrongdoing—but punishment alone does not solve the problem.

Every adult reading this should remember his or her own childhood and adolescence. You skipped school, secretly met a boyfriend or girlfriend, fought with friends or were introduced to cigarettes. Some were drawn into alcohol or drugs. And you did these things while growing up in an environment that was relatively protected compared with the child you now label a criminal.

Tell me: until the ages of fourteen, fifteen, sixteen or even seventeen, which of you consistently made sound choices through fully developed willpower? You had living parents whose greatest worry might have been which university you would attend. There was a warm meal at home and a private world in your room. Even then, who could always stop you? Had you been raised in a cage full of hatred and released into life with no one beside you, knowing nothing of a mother’s or father’s love, who knows what you might have done?

From the comfort of comparatively safe homes, you now look at these children and call them ‘criminal children’. Do not treat them as something alien. Let them face the legal consequences, but do not deny their humanity. You began life ten goals ahead; what they endured was not the same childhood. In many cases, it was not a childhood at all. Do not judge them from the comfort of having been born into a fortunate family.

These children were pushed into crime. Ahmet lost his life and Atlas lost his life, but in another sense these children lost their lives too. I am not trying to portray murder as innocent or justified. A crime must certainly have a consequence. I am saying that a fifteen-year-old raised at the peak of adolescence amid hatred, crime and blood cannot be ‘corrected’ by imprisonment alone.

If we do not want more precious children to be taken from life, we must create strong new policies capable of changing the outlook of those who began ten goals behind. For a fifteen-year-old who has grown up with nothing but hatred, prison can function like a medal—both for him and for hundreds of peers outside who are being drawn toward crime. They may take pride in it. This is one outcome of demographic demoralisation that the state has not taken seriously enough.

You cannot reach a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old merely by saying, ‘You will rot in prison and lose your youth.’ The essential task is to anticipate and build, generations in advance, the family and social environment that can raise children well. Otherwise, children will continue both to die and to disappear for nothing.

Those children need mercy, tenderness and lives surrounded by a continuing cycle of both. We urgently need calm, rational policies capable of protecting the children on every side of this tragedy.

Civilisation has learned through painful experience to call them not ‘children who commit crimes’ but ‘children pushed into crime’. A child does not simply commit a crime in isolation; a child is pushed toward it. We must prevent children from being pushed into crime and keep all our children alive. Otherwise, everything else will remain empty rhetoric.

That is all.