Towards a global ‘child friendly’ juvenile justice?

The impact of globalisation on juvenile justice is increasingly conceptualised with reference to neo-liberal governance and the intensification of ‘new punitiveness’. Whatever the merits of such analyses, they have the effect of marginalising, if not completely overlooking, the extent to which international human rights instruments might serve to neutralise and/or mediate punitive currents. Indeed, it might be argued that the commitment – repeatedly expressed in official discourse – to both protect and promote the human rights of children in conflict with the law has itself come to comprise a discursive and tangible dimension of global child governance. Key signifiers of this phenomenon – at the global level – include a corpus of interrelated human rights conventions, standards, treaties and rules, formally adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, whilst at the European level authoritative rights-informed guidelines on ‘child friendly justice’, ratified by the Council of Europe, are similarly representative. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to investigate the degree to which individual nation states receive and respond to their human rights and ‘child friendly justice’ obligations. Whilst recognising the mediating capacities of formal human rights instruments, we aim to critically interrogate the relations between globalised rhetoric and localised reality; between the promise of international rights discourse on the one hand and the limitations of territorial jurisdictional implementation on the other.     

FROM ADDICTION TO ABSTINENCE: MAXIMIZING THE CHANCES OF SUCCESS

While advances in neuroscience have clearly delineated the areas of the brain that are affected by mood-altering drugs, the success rate of treatment for people dependent upon or addicted to these drugs remains essentially unchanged over the last several decades. This is due in large part to paying inadequate attention to the craving that occurs after discontinuing a mood-altering drug that produces physical dependency. This article will review the changes that occur when one becomes physically dependent on a mood-altering drug and the process to follow in order to maximize the chances of success in maintaining abstinence when drug use has been discontinued.