“Responsible Child”, the ripped-from-the-headlines story of a 12-year-old boy who stands trial for murder, is top of the Netflix film charts.

The TV movie, which first aired on the BBC in 2019, “explores the nuanced issue of what age children ought to be responsible for their actions in a legal context”, said Cosmopolitan . It is loosely based on the real-life story of Jerome and Joshua Ellis, who were 14 and 23 when they killed their stepfather in 2013.

Filmmaker Nick Holt had “started asking more questions about the age at which people can stand trial in front of a jury”, he told Radio Times in 2019, after witnessing the trial of a young boy first hand. “When it turned out it was 10, and I saw how it compared to other countries, I was even more surprised. It’s substantially out of

See Full Page