KEY POINTS:
A leading brain expert has called for raising the driving age to 18 to better match the age at which young people's brains mature.
Dr Simon Rowley, a paediatrician at National Women's Hospital and trustee of the Brainwave Trust, told a youth offending conference in Wellington yesterday that young women's brains did not fully mature until about 18, and young men's brains often not until their early 20s.
He also supported a plea by Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft for the age at which young offenders transfer from the Youth Court to adult courts to be lifted from 17 to 18.
"We should not be treating the adolescent in the same way we treat an adult," Dr Rowley said.
A parliamentary committee is accepting submissions until April on a bill from United Future leader Peter Dunne to raise the driving age from 15 to 16.
The Government is also due to introduce a rewrite of the 1989 Children, Young Persons and their Families Act before Christmas, which may include lifting the age of transition to adult courts from 17 to 18.
Dr Rowley said the most crucial period of human brain development was the first three years of life. But recent research had found a second growth spurt in the brain starting just before puberty - about age 11 for girls and around 12 for boys - and lasting for another eight to 10 years.
Brain scans showed that some brain functions shifted in those years from the primitive amygdala, which controls basic emotions, to the pre-frontal cortex, which handles "executive functions" such as rational thinking and decision-making. "That tells us that the adolescent brain is still under construction, and that adolescents are emotional rather than rational creatures," Dr Rowley said.
"They are impulsive. So why would you put someone like that behind the wheel of a car?"
Dr Rowley, who has four children aged 16 to 25, said brain development occurred at different rates in different people, and parents could help their teenagers mature by talking to them.
"One of the first questions we ask is, 'Does your child eat with you?'
"The dinner table conversation is integral. World War III at the dinner table, which is what we have, is what you need. When you are arguing with your parents every night, then your brain is being made to exercise."
New Zealand was in breach of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child by dealing with 17-year-olds in adult courts instead of defining adults as aged 18 and over, he said.
"Only the United States and Somalia haven't signed the convention. We lag behind the rest of the world."
Justice Minister Annette King told the conference the Government did not have any plans to lower the Youth Court's younger bound below 14.
"In my view that is not the way to foster prevention and reduce crime."
She made no comment on the proposal to raise the upper age limit to 18.
Judge Becroft said the best way to stop young people committing further crimes was to keep them out of the formal court system.
"Contact with the formal juvenile justice system has been shown to have a reasonable likelihood of increasing the level of criminal activity in early adulthood," he said.
"We know that, as currently managed, prison is unlikely to reduce recidivism significantly."
Between 83 and 87 per cent of all 14- to 16-year-olds caught by the police for non-traffic offences in every year of the decade to 2004 were handled without formal prosecutions through measures such as police warnings, family group conferences, apologies to the victims and monetary or work-based reparation.
But these informal measures dropped suddenly to only 77 per cent of all cases in the age group in 2005 and only 71 per cent last year. Judge Becroft said the shift partly reflected a jump in violent offending but it also reflected a shortage of police youth aid officers.
