Age, Agency, Responsibility

Abstract

This chapter addresses the role of responsibility: as a legal element and as a socially constructed category that is context-dependent. First, age determinations are discussed, which serve to establish whether a young person qualifies for certain interventions of youth justice. Whereas highly intrusive age determinations (e.g. bone scans) attempt to challenge eligibility for protection, such attempts are originated and motivated by inherently social and cultural understandings of appearance, communication and behaviour. The following subsections address the discourses on age appropriate behaviour and agency. The fact that Roma youngsters did not comply with dominant notions surrounding childhood was interpreted as inherently ethnocultural or socioeconomically determined. The understandings of their self-reliance however did not result in direct responsibilisation: discourses of being manipulated counterbalanced this, while at the same time downplaying youngsters’ agency. This created an ambiguous shifting between infantilisation and adultification, which could be used pragmatically in judicial practice. The changing child-adult roles of Caucasian youth were narrated as a result of migration-related experiences or as youthful machismo. As such, lying about age, assuming adult roles, self-positioning in interactions with youth-justice professionals and so on were in this case problematised, but they were not described as a predetermined cultural outcome.