Youth Justice and Migration by Olga Petintseva

Author:Olga Petintseva
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319942087
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

As noted earlier, understandings of ‘adult behaviour’ do not straightforwardly translate into assumptions of accountability for youth crime. Regarding agency, maturity and accountability, quite a mixed discourse emerged from the data. Concerning Roma youngsters, this discourse encompassed elements such as autonomy, resourcefulness and being slick, yet not being clever or mature. Moreover, the autonomy aspect was contrasted with a positioning of Roma youth as being influenced and exploited by adults. At the same time, whereas such influences and exploitation imply that young persons are passive, their agency and intent in offences were acknowledged to varying extents. I elaborate on each of these elements.

As for autonomy (‘self-reliance’ would be a more accurate term), an often-recurring statement was that, as a result of a too lax ‘Roma upbringing style’ (see also the following chapter), the minors decide for themselves what they do, including engaging in criminalised activities. This was however not equated to maturity; a judge referred to this as ‘being autonomous, doing things alone, but that is not wise autonomous’ and therefore an ‘empty maturity’ (Respondent 1).

Such definition of self-reliance had consequences for the definition of ‘youth protection’ in the sense that some professionals (7 respondents stated this explicitly) saw Roma youth as capable of taking care of themselves, in case youth-justice institutions fail to provide assistance, for instance, because of overcrowding.

Whereas self-reliance was not necessarily equated to maturity, avowal and guilt realisation were prominently singled out as signs of responsibility and maturity. Although the youth court does not investigate the question of guilt, avowal is interpreted as problem insight (in individual professionals’ understandings but also explicitly in the motivation of decisions). While avowal was one of the highest valued techniques for producing the truth (see Brion & Harcourt, 2014), denial was easily equated to amorality or different norms (Françoise & Christiaens, 2015). In order to have deviancy framed as a temporary transgression, and hence not as a characteristic of the ordinary self (Sandberg, Tutenges, & Copes, 2015), the youth had to be at odds with rather loosely defined expectations regarding compliance, guilt realisation, communication and emotional expression that is designated as ‘reasonable’. Somehow Roma youth seemed to fail to meet the latter conventions. In case files and in professionals’ understandings, their behaviour was easily designated as unrepentant or as merely socially desirable. In this respect, the discourse on the behaviour of Roma adolescents contained the element of being ‘slick’:Aside from the language barrier and self-identification as a victim, we see that there are other tricks: wrong representation of the offences, minimalisation, blaming the others, little sense of responsibility and the inability to put things in perspective. (Report from a Community institution, File 60)

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