Manama: Fights and altercations make up around half of the cases involving juveniles, the head of outreach and media at Qatar’s interior ministry juvenile department has said.
“Based on our statistics, crimes against persons (fights), represent 46 per cent of the number of cases that reach the Department,” Banna Al Khailifi said. “Theft is second at 32 per cent and involves mainly young men, while moral crimes were only 2 per cent. There was no record of any drug case,” she said, quoted by Arabic daily Al Raya.
According to the officer, most of the theft cases were not motivated by poverty or needs.
“Juveniles were driven mainly by a desire to possess or an urge to take revenge. For some, theft was the result of not respecting other people’s property as a significant value,” she said. “Some of the cases were related to needs, but they were mostly to keep up with bad company.”
Al Khailifi told the daily that there was no organised crime involving young people in Qatar and insisted that the offenses brought to the attention of the authorities were individual cases.
“We did not have any juvenile involved in trafficking in drugs or in armed assault,” she told the Qatari daily.
Qatar is working on raising the age at which a person attains majority under juvenile law to 18 years instead of the current 16.
The move should put an end to the anomaly between the provisions of the juvenile law and those of the civil and criminal law that consider people under the age of 18 as minors.
