A-Infos (en) France, UCL AL #361 - Politics - Attal Law: In the Face of Repression, Repoliticize Childhood (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The mobilization of juvenile justice professionals did not prevent the 
Attal Law from being passed. This reform, which will increase the 
incarceration of children, lower the age of criminal responsibility 
thresholds for some of them, and punish parents in difficulty, is a 
further step towards the dismantling of juvenile justice as we have 
known it since 1945. ---- Bétharram affair, Le Scouarnec trial: we have 
been talking non-stop about the extent of violence against children for 
several months. But meanwhile, what are the right and the far right 
doing in Parliament? They are once again attacking children's rights. 
The treatment of delinquent youth is part of a long history, at the 
intersection of child protection and the repression of so-called 
"dangerous" classes. If, at the Liberation, a new perspective on 
so-called "unhappy" childhoods helped to soften the divide between 
"childhood victims" and "childhood culprits," for the past twenty years 
we have witnessed a return to repression, to the "incorrigible" youth 
who must be subdued.

Gabriel Attal's bill "aimed at restoring the authority of the justice 
system over juvenile offenders and their parents" was definitively 
adopted on May 19. Despite warnings from the Defender of Rights and 
UNICEF about provisions that contradict international conventions on the 
rights of the child, and despite the mobilization of professionals.

It doesn't matter that delinquency has been decreasing for twenty years, 
that the 1945 ordinance has already been reformed forty times, that 
sentences have become harsher over the past ten years[1], suggesting 
that the justice system is lax and powerless when it comes to young 
people seems to be a winning electoral success. This, in any case, is 
what the former Prime Minister defended following the July 2023 riots. 
And regardless of whether their origin was the murder of a teenager by 
the police, the urgent need was to point out the irresponsibility of 
"failing parents" and allow the justice system to incarcerate more 
quickly and more frequently.

In their race to the bottom with the National Rally, the Macronists are 
thus repeating the same lies about youth that we've been hearing since 
the birth of juvenile justice 200 years ago. Young offenders are said to 
be increasingly younger, more numerous, and dangerous to society. In the 
face of attempts to rewrite history, it is important to place this 
reform in the long term.

Working classes, dangerous classes
The first part of the law concerns parents. They will now have to pay a 
fine if they fail to attend court hearings, will receive heavier 
sentences if the failure to fulfill their family obligations has led the 
young person to break the law, and will be held liable for any damage 
caused by their child.

Some amendments from the LR and RN sought to go further by cutting child 
benefits, while Gérald Darmanin proposed evicting families from their 
social housing. Here too, suggesting that delinquency is primarily the 
work of bad working-class parents who don't know how to manage their 
children rather than the product of our society is nothing new.

In the 19th century, the theories of the "born criminal" by the Italian 
criminologist Lombroso, who spoke of the hereditary nature of vice, 
justified targeting the working class and its children, who were 
inherently dangerous. Even more so if they were foreigners. While these 
scientific theories have now been refuted, we are witnessing, in a 
context of completely unashamed racism, a renewed focus on the link 
between delinquency and immigration. The target here is clearly families 
from working-class neighborhoods, those of immigrant origin, or those of 
Muslim faith. And behind the families, it is actually populations 
suspected of unwillingness to integrate that are being targeted.

Example: the long list of violence inflicted on children in the name of 
justice, the "chicken cages" of the Aniane reform school in 1930.
ENPJJ
State Responsibility
On the other hand, nothing will be found in the law in the event that 
the failure emanates from the state. Social sector professionals 
demonstrated on May 15th to denounce the deterioration of working and 
reception conditions for the public. In child protection, reports 
warning of the dire situation are coming thick and fast: placement 
measures are not being implemented, homes are being described as places 
of danger, and prevention associations are closing one after the other. 
Faced with the scale of the problems, the Defender of Rights has finally 
issued a decision highlighting the serious and massive violations of 
children's rights.

Because it was indeed a child in the care of Child Welfare Services 
(ASE) who killed a private hire car driver in Marseille in October 2024 
after two months of running away. And it is also the public authorities 
who are absent when families call for help for their children: a year of 
waiting for open educational assistance, 
medical-psychological-pedagogical centers completely blocked, and not to 
mention the disappearing public services. Neoliberal policies have 
exacerbated segregation and social inequality, and to hide this class 
violence, the bourgeoisie is scapegoating.
Expeditious Justice
The rest of the law concerns minors more directly. One of the most 
important measures is immediate appearance in court from the age of 16. 
Not only will this increase sentences[2], but with the principle of a 
single hearing and the mitigation of responsibility (misnamed "minority 
excuse"), which will now be the exception, juvenile justice after the 
age of 16 is being reduced to a trickle. This expeditious justice system 
being implemented is, in fact, totally incompatible with the principles 
and functioning of juvenile justice since 1945.

Since 1810 and the creation of the Penal Code, the French justice system 
has considered that below a certain age (criminal majority), sentences 
must be adapted. This is firstly the case with imprisonment, which must 
be distinct from that of adults and whose sentences are halved. Then, 
placement measures, presented as alternatives to incarceration: these 
are the agricultural and penal colonies of the 19th century, the 
reformatories, and more recently the Closed Educational Centers (CEF) or 
Reinforced Educational Centers (CER).

And since 1945, a specific justice system has operated with different 
personnel: youth justice educators, juvenile judges, etc. Punishment 
only occurs at a later stage, after the young person found guilty has 
undergone an educational measure to become aware of their actions: 
reparation measures, citizenship training, community service, placement 
in a home or closed center. This follows a logic that has prevailed 
since the 1945 ordinance: the primacy of education over punishment.

Of course, there is always a difference between what is written and 
practice. Until the 1970s, for example, the state showed total disregard 
for the fate of girls, and the practices of correction and child abuse 
never disappeared. This is evidenced by the numerous cases of violence 
suffered in reeducation boarding schools recounted by former students of 
the Bons Pasteurs or other children in care[3]. And above all, despite 
the protests, the detention of children has continued. Children as young 
as 13 have been detained. There are currently over 900 of them, 
incarcerated in juvenile detention centers or juvenile correctional 
facilities.

And let's not forget the administrative detention centers, where 
children of all ages have been detained. This detention has intensified 
since the early 2000s with the Perben II laws. The CEFs and CERs, 
supposedly alternatives to prison, are in fact additional places of 
deprivation of liberty. Several reports have highlighted the major 
dysfunctions that characterize these centers. And very recently, 
Mediapart revealed an internal evaluation by the Ministry of Justice 
concluding that "integration solutions frequently fail"[4].

Bringing Working-Class Youth into Line
No matter, the CEFs continue to be popular. After Emmanuel Macron 
announced the creation of twenty new centers by 2027 (in the end, only 
three have been built since 2018) and Gérald Darmanin proposed building 
them in Mayotte, under military supervision, the Attal law aims to 
facilitate placements in CEFs, for a few months or even a few days.

The law will also create short sentences of one month, and pretrial 
detention from the age of 13 for a year. At the same age, a child will 
also be able to be placed under house arrest with an electronic tag, 
subject to a curfew whose authorized times and locations will be set by 
the judge, or even be detained for 12 hours. While for some of the 
population, the onset of adulthood is occurring later and later, the end 
of childhood for the working class is being delayed. After the reform of 
vocational training, attempts at universal national service, and school 
uniforms, right-wingers continue to rein in working-class youth.

Read Tal Piterbraut-Merx, La domination oubliée (The Forgotten 
Domination), Blast, October 2024, EUR15.
Childhood as victim and childhood as guilty are inseparable. There is no 
such thing as a pure and innocent childhood that is naturally 
vulnerable[5], just as there is no such thing as a born delinquent. 
Repoliticizing childhood would broaden the fight against violence 
against those considered second-class, and link it to issues of race and 
gender.

Faced with the exploitation of children's rights by the far right, which 
is infiltrating parents' groups, we must denounce the various forms of 
domination between family, homes, and prisons. To this end, it is urgent 
to strengthen the unions of the Judicial Protection of Youth (PJJ) and 
social workers, which uphold an emancipatory and liberating vision of 
education by and for children.

Paola

Validate

[1]https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/04/24/christian-mouhanna-sociologue-en-depit-de-dramatiques-faits-divers-le-nombre-de-mineurs-auteurs-de-delits-baisse_6229499_3232.html.

[2]Eight times more: this is the probability of going to prison 
following an immediate appearance compared to a traditional hearing, 
according to Virginie Gautron and Jean-Noël Retière, Is Criminal Justice 
Discriminatory? An Empirical Study of Decision-Making Practices in Five 
Criminal Courts, 2013.

[3]On this subject, see Clémence Davigot's documentary, Les Oubliés de 
la Belle Étoile, and the one on Les Mauvaises filles by Emérance Dubas.

[4]https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/france/060525/centres-educatifs-fermes-l-embarrassante-etude-que-l-executif-veut-cacher.

[5]See on this subject the writings left by the writer and philosophy 
researcher Tal Piterbraut-Merx, notably 
https://www.editionsblast.fr/boutique/p/la-domination-oubliee.

https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Loi-Attal-Face-a-la-repression-repolitiser-l-enfance
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