I'll just use one of my own personal examples. You mentioned that some people grow up faster through circumstances. As a young person, I found myself engaged with the Young Offenders Act and the criminal justice system. Coming through high school I was always considered smart. I was captain of my football team, on the yearbook committee, and did all this kind of stuff, but I had a problem with beating folks up. It wasn't until I found myself incarcerated and in trouble that I was forced to take a look at my life and ask the pertinent question, “How the hell did I end up here?”
I went all the way back to Guyana, to where I was born, before I came to this country, and all acts of violence that I witnessed against women around me, against kids around me, with no protection from officers or any legal organization, domestic violence within my own home between my mother and my father while my father was there.
Then I came to Canada and it all kind of carried over. There was certainly a beating from my mom from time to time. It just seemed that, my entire life, I was raised by violence. Everything that ever happened to me was violent, and I carried all those scars, emotional and physical. I came to the realization that what I had was a learned behaviour and that my outcome could not have been different given the structures that raised me throughout my life.
I see that today with a lot of the kids we face in the community. On one hand, you want to say that some of them deserve adult charges, because it comes with a stiffer sentence. You get them out of the community for a longer period of time and you don't have to deal with it any more. But I think there needs to be an understanding that what these young people are facing today has been festering over many, many years, and their emotional and physical development has not been up to par with a kid who hasn't gone through this kind of stuff.
Age as a number is a very inadequate measuring stick to determine someone's emotional and mental maturity, and that was the case with me. A lot of this was learned, and at the end of the day, it needs to be addressed and unlearned with these young people. I think that's a smarter way to go, and it's more sustainable in the long term.