Living Up to ‘Good Family’ Ideals

Abstract

Family situation is a central pillar in youth-justice assessments. Parents are supposed to react in an ‘appropriate’ manner. This includes certain emotional reactions, cooperation with youth-justice professionals and so on so that, eventually, their parenting role can be fully reestablished and the judicial intervention makes itself redundant. This chapter scrutinises the frames of reference against which families are evaluated. Migrant families are subject to dual discourses: on the one hand, critiquing patriarchal structures and illiberal practices while, on the other, praising their cohesiveness. For the most part, in professionals’ understandings, Roma families did not possess the expected virtues. Roma families often got designated as (negatively) ‘different’. Frequently, such demarcations were made based on expectations. Although family problematisations were not necessarily translated into intrusive interventions in family life, they at times justified the wish or the actual decision to incarcerate youngsters or to otherwise separate them from their families. For youngsters born in the Northern Caucasus, family situations were at times highlighted as problematic. This was either ascribed to culturally determined upbringing styles or to single-parenting. Nevertheless, these problematisations were mostly corrected or erased. Here, the ‘problem’ was considered to be single case-based, not an overall Caucasian or migrants’ issue.