“Young people over 13 will understand”
Abolition
That is the age when Weng started debating. “The death penalty was the first topic I had to debate on. I thought I supported it, but the moment you have to switch and support the other argument, you start changing your opinion,” she said.
Weng believes that presenting both sides of the argument would be a very efficient way of winning young people over to the abolitionist side. According to her, they generally know very little about the issue and never give it much thought.
“Whenever I coach debating, the death penalty is the classic issue I bring up to get people to start thinking,” she said.
Other options discussed during the workshop included using examples with which young people can easily identify. “If you were a child in Iran and did this, you could be killed,” was one of the lines suggested to help kids from abolitionist countries realize the horror of the death penalty.
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Thailand
