Personal touch helps juvenile offenders

Prosecutor puts children's future well-being first when dealing with their cases. Cao Yin reports.

Editor's note: To mark the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, China Daily is producing 10 profile stories to show the changes in the subjects' fields in the past decade. This is the third of the series.

Ten years ago, when Liu Chaoying handled her first juvenile case, her focus lay on legal issues. Now, though, she is more concerned about whether her solution is conducive to helping the child and improving their future.

"Over the past decade, I've learned to think from the child's point of view while solving their problems through education and rehabilitation," said Liu, who specializes in juvenile cases at the Dongcheng District People's Procuratorate in Beijing.

A graduate of Capital Normal University, she became a prosecutor in charge of financial cases in July 2001. She started dealing with juvenile cases in 2012, when China added special rules designed to improve the methods of tackling offenses involving young people by amending the Criminal Procedure Law. At the same time, the procuratorate set up a new office for handling such cases.

"I was interested in the juvenile department, and I believed I could be competent at the job, because I was studying law as a major and was also a graduate in pedagogy," the 46-year-old said.

At first, she studied 11 new provisions in the new law, including the need to seal case files, the compilation of background reports on young offenders and ensuring that appropriate adults were present during questioning by prosecutors "as I thought juvenile cases would be resolved if there were no flaws in the application of the articles", she said.

She quickly discovered that it was not an easy job. "The method for solving child-related cases is different from the way we deal with ordinary offenses," she said. "Juveniles need us to be more patient and put their future as the top priority in handling their cases.

"Meanwhile, juvenile work isn't being done by prosecutors alone. Although the law provides higher requirements for prosecutors, it also demands that many experts from all walks of life, such as government agencies, schools, social organizations and businesses, join in."