Book review: Children’s Rights and the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility
| DOI | 10.1177/096466391102100106 |
| Author | Claire McDiarmid |
| Published date | 01 March 2012 |
| Date | 01 March 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
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users as autonomous, choice-making subjects, though with a comprehensive range of sur-
veillance, treatment and coercion measures. The nexus of neo-liberal drug regulation has
now started to take in tobacco and to an extent alcohol, and dissolves the licit/illicit sub-
stance distinction. But there is a distinct contrast here between political discourse and the
workings of governance. As Seddon points out, woe betide anyone who publicly questions
the basis for the drugs/alcohol distinction, even as that distinction is being eroded in prac-
tice; public disapproval of illicit drug use remains strong while policing and regulation has
started to work across that divide.
Seddon concludes by outlining an agenda for research and action on drug use that
moves beyond the dominating categories of state and law that have governed and limited
our approach for many decades. His comprehensive study of the regimes of governance
around drugs works both as a historical examination of the construction of the drug prob-
lem and a subtle critique of the contemporary framing of drugs and drug users. He gives
us a number of conceptual tools to understand the formation and direction of drug policy
in the UK that moves us beyond a simple dichotomy of criminalisation/liberalisation.
This book is useful to scholars of the ‘drug problem’ and also to students wanting an
incisive, closely argued historical genealogy of the structuring of public problems in
the age of welfare liberalism.
ANGUS BANCROFT
University of Edinburgh, UK
DON CIPRIANI, Children’s Rights and the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility. Farnham: Ashgate,
2009, 260 pp., ISBN 9780754677307, £65 (hbk)
This book reads as a call to arms for children’s rights proponents to mobilise behind the
provisions of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (‘CRC’), and related inter-
national instruments, in order to harness the full potential of these State obligations in the
pursuit of justice for children who offend. Its careful examination of the minimum age of
criminal responsibility (‘MACR’) as a key feature of the international children’s rights
landscape leaves the reader in no doubt as to the practical utility of such rights, if prop-
erly recognised and deployed, in providing protection to children in conflict with the law.
The book is divided into seven chapters, the first two of which, together with the final
one, set out its thesis that the children’s rights regimes...
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