Should parents pay for the crimes of their kids?
The news that Jennifer and James Crumbley, parents of 15-year-old Ethan, held guilty of the 2021 killing of four fellow students in Michigan, US, have been convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 10-15 years in prison, is a wake-up call for all of us. Jury trials of the hapless parents held them guilty for deaths caused by their offspring.
Their crime? Failing to prevent their son from committing the heinous crime. In a day and age when many parents, even in relatively traditional societies like ours, bemoan the loss of parental ‘control’ over their kids, the growing incidence of juvenile crime is a sad fact of life.
But the conviction of an offender’s parents, a first in US history, is a call for parents and kids— and indeed for society at large—to introspect. Where does parental responsibility begin and end in the context of juvenile crime? Sure, America’s failure on gun control—a big bone of contention between Republicans and Democrats—must share a large part of the blame for such killings.
Mass shootings are distressingly frequent in the US. Still, that leaves us with the more disturbing question of parental responsibility.
“Parents are not expected to be psychic," said Judge Cheryl Matthews of the Oakland County Circuit Court in Pontiac, Michigan, before issuing the sentence, “But these convictions are not about poor parenting. These convictions confirm repeated acts or lack of acts that could have halted an oncoming runaway train—repeatedly ignoring things that would make a reasonable person feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up." One may not agree with an anguished parent of one of the victims that “the tragedy was completely preventable." Yet, as the Crumbleys’ trial showed, there was
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