| This article is an in-depth exploration of the contemporary criminal justice strategies in the prosecution of parental violence against children. These new strategies are represented by the multi-disciplinary, coordinated approaches to the identification and legal processing of crimes against children, the approaches which utilize teams consisting of the representatives from the police, the prosecution office, the Child Protection and social workers from private (e.g. the Victim Advocates), as well as public (the Administration for Children's Services) organizations, the psychologists and/or psychiatrists, medical examiners and child-advocates. Moreover, the police squads and the prosecution bureaqus involved in these approaches are specialized, and sometimes there are specialized judicial dockets as well, dealing strictly with criminal mistreatment of children. This paper develops an answer to the question, "What kind of phenomena are those recent legal strategies and organizational developments, and what trends and curernts in the criminal justice system and in the broader culture do they represent?" Firstly, I examine several "social control" theoretical approaches to the issue, specifically, the neo-Foucaultian, the class-conflict, and the feminist "patriarchal state" theories, and conclude that none of them can adequately assess and explain the development of the new strategies in question. Then I turn to the frameworks developed by John Hagan (1979; 1998), involving the "loosely-" and "tightly coupled" systems in the criminal justice establishments, and to historical approach to the connection of the welfare state and modern penalty advanced by David Garland (1986); and demonstrate how the combination of these theoretical frameworks can illuminate our undeetstanding of the contemporary trends in the processing of crimes against children. To substantiate and support these theoretical inferences and assertions, I use ethnographic and interview data collected from eight months of field work int he specialized Crimes Against Children prosecution bureau of a large urban jurisdiction. |
Updated 05/20/2006