WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE FRANCE - news journal UPDATE - (en) France, OCL CA #348 - REPRESSION: YOUTH IN DANGER (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr) [machine translation]

 We are witnessing the rise or rise of fascism in many countries. In

France, the far right is on the verge of power. Following the visibility
of the National Front's performance in the European elections, left-wing
forces seemed stunned and, in a major electoral surge, mobilized to form
a united front against fascism. It's as if, all of a sudden, without
warning, the left-wing population woke up with a terrible hangover! But
the warning signs were already there: states of emergency, social
setbacks, corruption, unpunished murderous cops, and repressive laws
have been in place for decades; little by little, they have destroyed
our working spaces and conditions, stolen our time, isolated us from one
another, changed our behaviors and vocabulary, and imposed security as
the first freedom, all in a rather deafening silence.

Childhood has not been spared; the best thing is to take them in as
early as possible and train them to be good managers, good workers,
docile precarious workers, depending on the situation. Teach them about
profitability, competition, hierarchy, order, and consumption in order
to become responsible citizens who would have a chance of finding a
place in this cruel world where jobs are expensive and reserved for the
best. It's like killing the child in each of us. And if we are to
believe the latest laws on the prevention of juvenile delinquency, or in
today's language, youth protection, it would seem that the goal of this
capitalist society is to kill children from an early age, if not in the
womb. Lithograph by Honoré Daumier, dated March 20, 1846, captioned by
himself: "Which solitary confinement does not always produce excellent
results."
The task is not simple because children struggle, want to live. We would
like them to be anesthetized by screens and consumerism, yet they
persist in mobilizing, in shouting their will to exist. From high school
mobilizations to suburban revolts, young people are trying to escape the
shackles in which the authorities would like to confine them. A simple
strike involving the occupation of a school building is followed by an
unleashing of police and administrative violence, with a notable lack of
empathy on the part of educational staff. But the violence is even more
acutely directed at the youth of the LEP, those who no longer have
school assignments, those with low-paid odd jobs, those who are rejected
and drag out their idleness, those who rose up in the summer of 2023.
The disproportionate repression meted out to the leaders of both
movements is indicative of the role played by the judicial system in
separating and classifying acts that would be acceptable from
illegitimate. Relative leniency for the former and prison sentences for
the latter should teach the former to respect order and justice, and the
latter to fear them.

To stigmatize those with little or no future, the authorities turn them
into devils, "scum," "savages," "barbarians," "the enemy within" who
must be exorcised, controlled, treated, or imprisoned. It is to these
people that the armada of laws and repressive measures has been
specifically aimed for decades, making it a national priority. The
urgency and supposed gravity of the situation are well worth some
renunciation of principles, even if it means freeing ourselves from the
fine speeches on the primacy of education over repression, the
specificity of juvenile justice with the attenuation of responsibility
based on age promoted by the 1945 ordinance (1). The accumulation of
laws, reforms, and circulars is dizzying. But despite the overbidding on
security, nothing particularly innovative. Governments produce
communication and no longer know what new to invent to repress juvenile
delinquency, for want of wanting to remedy the causes of delinquency and
revolts. It is necessary to reassure the good people whom they have
taken care to terrorize. The same old rhetoric continues, revolving
around the absurd idea that we must strike ever harder to stamp out
illegality and revolt.

When it comes to child protection, whether in danger or abused, the
state's failure is dramatic; it fails to provide care for unaccompanied
minors without papers, the homeless, the poorly housed, and the
malnourished. However, when it comes to repression, there is no shortage
of resources. The left had largely prepared the groundwork, stigmatizing
young people, with one imperative: to control and manage the explosion
of unemployed people and their offspring. It was necessary to put an end
to the social excuse and ensure that prevention was already repression.
The security shift of the 2000s and the following years, through bill
after bill, will give pride of place to confinement: building juvenile
detention centers, closed educational centers - a sort of revival of the
reformatories abandoned in the 1970s thanks to the mobilization of
educators, among others. These veritable antechambers of prison, which
are multiplying with a catastrophic result. The age of criminal
responsibility is lowered to 10 years, which allows for the imposition
of reparation measures, "educational sanctions," bans on public
appearances, punitive placements, and community service (TIG) for 10- to
13-year-olds. The incarceration of minors is becoming increasingly
young. It is becoming possible to incarcerate children as young as 13.
The mitigation of prison sentences and fines due to the "excuse of
minority" is tending to disappear. The age of criminal responsibility is
shifting to 16, and courts are increasingly sentencing adolescents as if
they were adults. Sentences are lengthening, and it is now possible to
impose them immediately upon trial. In 2016, senators reintroduced the
possibility of imposing life sentences for minors over 16. But the texts
are intended to be reassuring because the fundamental principles of
criminal law would be respected. If the law is what is written in the
various codes, this is a truism.

Excerpt from the film Sciuscia by Vittorio de Sica, released in 1947
How can we respond firmly to last summer's revolts with new
announcements? It's not as if the judicial system lacks resources, as we
have seen during the various movements and in the daily administration
of justice. Gabriel Attal's bill, supported by Darmanin, aims to punish
young offenders and their parents even more harshly by lowering the age
at which a minor can be subject to immediate court appearance (this has
already existed since 2021 in certain cases), by extending the curfew to
juvenile offenders, who would be deprived of weekend and after-school
outings, a sort of "semi-liberty" at the parents' expense, and by
strengthening the use of electronic bracelets for minors. This same
Attal, who understood the anger of the FNSEA agro-industrialists by
refusing to prosecute them, is less inclined to understand that of the
youth in outlying neighborhoods.

Since there are no social causes of delinquency, the state blames
parents for their offspring's delinquency. It burdens them with
unpayable fines, humiliating internships, and by suspending their child
benefits or their rights to social housing, which will further
insecurity them. These aren't new, but things are getting worse here too.
In 2022, 3,142 young people were incarcerated, a number that has jumped
34% over the past three years. Between October 2023 and August 2024,
five adolescents died in prison. Incarceration in general, but
particularly among young people in development, is a disaster that
solves nothing; the reconviction rate for minors within five years is
around 70%. For child psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, "it causes isolation,
the loss of empathy, increased anxiety, the maintenance of toxic
relationships, and humiliation. Upon leaving prison, we see that the
child is no longer able to regulate their emotions." The situation has
been unbearable for a growing number of the population for quite some
time, and the least we can say is that progressive and revolutionary
forces have not grasped the extent of it. The most vulnerable are
abandoned to their fate. Fighting fascism means fighting its
manifestations today, because capitalism carries within itself the seeds
of fascism, which will be its recourse if it deems it necessary. Let's
fight it now!

Nadia M.

Note
(1) The ordinance of February 2, 1945, constitutes the reference text
establishing the rules and principles applicable to juvenile criminal
justice. At the end of the war, "France is not rich enough in children
to have the right to neglect everything that can make them healthy
beings." Therefore, it prioritized protection over repression.

http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4388
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