Criminology in Europe

Any notion that there is a distinctive pan-European approach to juvenile justice is a fallacy. Having completed an ambitious and detailed survey of 34 European jurisdictions, for example, Dünkel (2015: 49) reflects that ‘juvenile justice systems in Europe have developed in various forms and with different orientations’. He further observes that

‘in the past 25 years, [juvenile] justice systems in Europe have undergone considerable changes … [and] differing and sometimes contradictory [juvenile] justice policies have also emerged’ (ibid: 9).

The ‘differing’ and ‘contradictory’ nature of juvenile justice policies might, at the most fundamental level, be conceptualized as the embodiment of tensions between a human-rights-centred ‘child-friendly justice’ on one hand, and a harsher and more punitive penality on the other. It is certainly true that the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers has adopted specific ‘Guidelines for Child Friendly Justice’ that are intended to

‘achieve a greater unity between the [47] member states … [and] ensure the effective implementation of … binding universal and European standards protecting and promoting children’s rights’ (Council of Europe, 2010: Preamble).

Stalford (2012: 1) has also drawn attention to parallel developments within the European Commission and the 28 Member States of the European Union (EU). But in stark contrast, Bailleau et al. (2010: 13) have argued that a

‘weakening of the founding principles of juvenile justice’ is evident in the ‘majority of countries in Europe’ where ‘social intolerance … is rising against a backdrop of a drift to hard-line law-and-order policies and practices’ (ibid: 7–8).

Such totalizing pan-European or transnational narratives shine a light on the tensions and contradictions embodied within juvenile justice in Europe, but they are also intrinsically flawed, and more nuanced international and intra-national analyses are necessary.

At the international level of analysis two key indicators of difference are especially noteworthy; the minimum age of criminal responsibility (the entry point at the ‘front end’ or the ‘shallow end’ of juvenile justice systems) and the recorded rates of penal detention (at the ‘back end’ or the ‘deep end’ of the same systems). The most obvious point to make pertaining to the minimum age of criminal responsibility across the 47 Member States of the Council of Europe is that it extends from 10 years (in Switzerland and in two of the UK jurisdictions—England and Wales and Northern Ireland), to 18 years (in Belgium). The minimum age of criminal responsibility stands at 14 years in most of the Member States, but 10 countries ‘responsibilise’ children below the age of 14 years and 11 jurisdictions refrain from imposing such responsibility until children reach the age of 15 years or beyond (Goldson, 2019: 223–224). If we shift attention to recorded rates of penal detention within the 28 Member States of the European Union, similar diversity is apparent. Indeed, the recorded rates of penal detention for children and young people aged 17 years or under, extend from less than 1:100,000 (in Sweden) to 44:100,000 (in Poland). At face value, Member States in the West and North of Europe appear to be less inclined to hold children and young people in penal detention than their neighbouring States in the South and East of Europe. But closer analysis reveals that the picture is more complicated than this might otherwise imply and there are also both relatively low and high rates of penal detention to be found within each of the regions of Europe: North, South, East and West (Goldson 2019: 224).

In this way, fixing the analytical gaze at the international level reveals significant disparities across juvenile justice systems in Europe. But it also tends to conceal intra-national or sub-national differences and, as Christiaens (2015: 11) observes, ‘no model [of juvenile justice] remains completely pure’ in its translation, implementation and practical operationalisation. Ultimately, it is only by adopting a sub-national ‘area studies’ (Nelken, 2017: 428) approach that we might begin to understand how national juvenile justice policy is ‘visioned and reworked (or made to work) by those “on the ground”’ (Muncie, 2015: 383), or how ‘top-down national policies are necessarily mediated and filtered from below’ (Goldson 2019: 229).

So, comprehending the diverse and divergent nature of contemporary juvenile justice in Europe is a complex exercise. Furthermore, juvenile justice is never fixed or static and current transformational shifts in European political economies present additional challenges that will necessitate further change.

Indeed, if post-war welfare state settlements—in Western Europe at least—were underpinned by support for a relatively high standard of social provision and sustained by a ‘politics of social solidarity’ (Baldwin, 1990), more recent social, economic and political developments appear to signify the incremental weakening and undermining of such consensual solidarities. Economic globalisation, demographic changes, shifts in family structures and formations, contracting labour market opportunities, greater job insecurity, casualisation and precarity (especially for the least well-paid) and widening and deepening inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth have consolidated (Piketty, 2014). Of course, the precise nature, pace and impact of such changing conditions—that are serving to disrupt welfare state settlements—vary across European countries and regions, but their overall effects have been generally deleterious. As Taylor-Gooby et al. (2017: 8–9) note

‘the structures that previously sustained the various welfare systems … are being dismantled [and] there is considerable uncertainty as to the form of welfare state that will emerge, or whether a transition to a different political economy with weaker provision for the most vulnerable … is under way’.

The reformulation of welfare settlements and related processes of welfare state retrenchment are obviously impacting upon children and young people; a ‘generation that will remember the crash of 2008 most acutely’ (Ballas et al, 2014: :65), even a ‘lost generation’ (Malik, 2012: 13). Data derived and collated from various European Commission sources reveal that in 2013, 11.6% of all young people aged 15–19 years who were living in the European Union were enduring ‘severe material deprivation’ and, by 2016, 30.1% were deemed to be ‘at risk of poverty and social exclusion’ (Goldson, 2019: 235). Such EU-wide averages conceal striking disparities between countries and regions but, overall, poverty rates are high in an otherwise ‘rich continent’ (Atkinson et al, 2017: 47).

Growing rates of youth unemployment are also deeply problematic. At the European Union level, the average rate of youth (15–19 years) unemployment across the 28 Member States at the beginning of 2016, stood at 21.8% (Goldson, 2019: 236)—just over 2% higher than the corresponding rate in 2008 (19.7%) (European Commission, 2017). Again, the European Union-wide average conceals disparities between countries and regions. For example, the youth unemployment rate ranges from a low of 7.3% (in Germany) to a high of 60.6% per cent (in Spain). In 7 countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Malta, the Netherlands and Slovenia) fewer than 2 in 10 young people are recorded as unemployed, whereas in 6 countries (Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain and Slovakia) the rate ranges between 4 in 10 and 6 in 10 (Goldson, 2019: 236).

High rates of youth unemployment in Europe are accompanied by equally high numbers of children and young people who are institutionally excluded from education and training programmes. Indeed, according to the European Commission (2015: 3–4) approximately 13.7 million young people ‘are neither in employment nor education or training (NEETs)’ and such young people tend to ‘have less trust in public institutions and participate less in social and civic activities than their peers’.

Such adverse conditions co-exist with unprecedented levels of migration. Throughout history, migration(s) has/have enriched Europe in innumerable ways; culturally, socially, economically. But current patterns of migration and immigration are not only assuming unprecedented levels but are also occurring at precisely the same time that welfare state retrenchment and conditions of austerity, family poverty, youth unemployment and NEET status are escalating. In the summer of 2015 alone, 1.5 million refugees arrived at Europe’s borders and, in the same year, 1.3 million people applied for asylum in Norway, Switzerland and the 28 European Union Member States (Tyler, 2017).

At a global level, approximately 50% (or 30 million) of the world’s involuntarily displaced people—including refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced persons —are children (United Nations Secretary General, 2016: para. 18). At a European level, ‘the current refugee crisis is the greatest humanitarian challenge to have faced the European Union since its foundation [and] in 2015 88,245 unaccompanied children applied for asylum in the EU’ (House of Lords European Union Committee, 2016: 3). Unaccompanied child migrants comprise a profoundly vulnerable group who have often experienced separation from their parents, caregivers and families; traumatic episodes in their countries of origin; irregular and dangerous migration routes and deeply adversarial conditions in countries of transit/transition (Pisani, 2019). Perhaps more telling, however, ‘is the fact that when unaccompanied migrant children arrive in the EU, they [often] face suspicion and disbelief’ (House of Lords European Union Committee, 2016: para. 2). Against this backdrop, Europol estimates that at least 10,000 unaccompanied minors are now ‘missing’ in the European Union and are potentially victims of sexual exploitation, trafficking or other criminal activity (ibid: para 3). Other processes of criminalisation are also at work and ‘accompanied or unaccompanied, all children travelling without official documents, whether seeking asylum or as refugees or irregular migrants, are at risk of being detained, given that in many countries illegal entry and illegal residence are considered as criminal offences’ (Sykiotou, 2017: 9).

Diminishing welfare states, chronic social exclusion, poverty unemployment, NEET status, deep-cutting and wide-ranging austerity measures, patterns of forced migration and the prospect of exploitation, trafficking and detention. Taken together, these are the conditions that currently confront millions of young Europeans. The same conditions also create social and economic environments that are known to give rise to juvenile crime and the disproportionate criminalisation of identifiable groups of children and young people. To put it another way, current changes in European political economies raise big questions of, and pose serious challenges for, the protectionist principles that have historically defined welfare states and juvenile justice systems in Europe.

Going forward, juvenile justice systems in Europe will need to address and reconcile the challenges presented by the macro-level social, economic and political conditions of late-modernity. And we know that Europe is not a monolithic or homogeneous entity and the formidable challenges currently confronting her constituent nation-states are distributed unevenly and are experienced with varying levels of gravity. It seems likely, for example, that some countries (in the South and East) will endure more prolonged and intense hostile conditions than others (in the North and West), possibly giving rise to a spectrum of differentiated responses. But although such responses will almost certainly be structurally related they will not necessarily be structurally determined. As Garland (2001: 201–202) has observed, ‘the same structural co-ordinates can support quite different political and cultural arrangements’. In other words, the future(s) of juvenile justice systems in Europe are not pre-ordained and the manner in which they respond to changing conditions will be made, shaped and formed by choices, the exercise of individual and collective agency and particularized political and professional adaptations.

So, the future shape and form of juvenile justice in Europe? Any attempt to prophesize detailed specificities is necessarily hampered by the uncertainties, contingencies, complexities and challenges that operate at each of the pan-European/transnational, international and intra-national/sub-national levels that are signaled above. That said, if reforms and adaptations take account of accumulated knowledge, evidence and experience, the combined effect will be to construct approaches that: foster social cohesion and facilitate informal mechanisms of social control (commanding trust and enjoying legitimacy) (Lappi-Seppälä, 2012); limit criminalizing modes of intervention by maximizing diversion (and community support) (McAra and McVie, 2019); and, ultimately, avoid the calamitous practices of child and youth imprisonment (Goldson, 2019). But it could also look very different.

Barry Goldson is Professor/Charles Booth Chair of Social Science at the School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool, UK and Co-Chair of the ESC Thematic Working Group on Juvenile Justice.

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