‘Developing’ the governance of childhood: The (In)compatibility of protection and punishment in juvenile courts

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze the changing discourses and practices of juvenile courts in Turkey with the enactment of the Child Protection Law from a critical legal perspective. By problematizing this denoted ‘development’ in child law, the study conveys the relationship between law’s calculated prospective and unintended impacts. It begins with tracing how children are constituted as particular governable subjects and how a legal reform concerning them relates to Turkey’s performance of progression in larger scales. Then, it examines the Child Protection Law as a governmental intervention which introduces novel epistemologico-juridical emphasis in reconfiguring the child issue. The thesis further maps the entanglement of this intervention with the legal processes that it aims to regulate which sparks off conflictual, ambiguous and competing forms of judgment. As the research shows, means of technical management and vocation of protection increases along with the intensified punitive apparatuses of juvenile courts. To this end, the emerging breaches and the incompatible mixture of legal discourses and practices are addressed as productive sites that (re)forms the ensemble of distinct power modalities. The thesis argues that focusing on the ways in which law works enable to see the articulation of punishment and protection in juvenile justice system as law’s compatible responses. In relation to this, and on broader level, the study demonstrates the transactional zones and reciprocal alliance between law’s sovereign and disciplinary effects in Turkey’s juvenile courts.