Coercive Normalization and Family Policing: The Limits of the ‘Psy-Complex’ in Australian Penal Systems
| Author | David McCallum |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663907073452 |
| Published date | 01 March 2007 |
| Date | 01 March 2007 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
COERCIVE NORMALIZATION
AND FAMILY POLICING: THE
LIMITS OF THE ‘PSY-COMPLEX’
IN AUSTRALIAN PENAL
SYSTEMS
DAVID MCCALLUM
Victoria University, Australia
ABSTRACT
Much contemporary social and historical research on problem children and families
focuses on the different kinds of power deployed in a complex of legal and non-legal
settings. This article reviews socio-legal studies in Europe, Australia and the UK, and
additional archival evidence in Victoria, Australia, in relation to a shift towards posi-
tivist and ‘welfarist’ approaches to the problem of child criminality and family regu-
lation from the turn of the 20th century. The aim is to assess the applicability for
Australia of trends in European social theory that emphasize non-coercive, non-legal
correction of families, a productive rather than repressive form of power which incites
families to seek to align their conduct to social norms. The article argues that ‘coercive
normalization’ – systems of knowing and acting upon children and families arising
from the penal system and images of threat – is a significant presence in the complex
of power relations that make up a genealogy of family and child regulation in Australia.
KEY WORDS
family; history; juvenile justice; power; psy-knowledge
INTRODUCTION: PSY-TECHNIQUES OF POWER
SOCIOLOGICAL and criminological literature in Europe, the United
Kingdom and Australia acknowledges the late 19th century as a pivotal
moment in the construction of the main institutional forms of child
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 16(1), 113–129
DOI: 10.1177/0964663907073452
114
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 16(1)
welfare and the emergence of a modern welfarist approach to governing
neglected and offending children. These developments are understood to
reflect historical movements from a classical to a positivist model of crimi-
nology, the latter highlighting an individualist, interventionist and scientific
study of criminality and neglect (Garland, 1985; Naffine, 1992; White and
Haines, 2001). In addition, Garland’s (1985) concept of ‘penal-welfare
complex’, or Rose and Valverde’s (1998) notion of ‘legal complex’, serve to
demonstrate the close integration of both legal and non-legal interventions
in the ways in which problem children and families come to be conceived
and regulated. The Children’s Court was an early instance of the growth of
‘informal power’ as a means to achieve a moderation of behaviour and overall
wellbeing, as against formal legal process (Harrington, 1992; van Krieken,
2000). Moreover, in many of these accounts power is conceived in terms of
psy-interventions, a form of regulation that puts the family in a position
where it becomes in its own interests to conduct itself according to social
norms in such matters as education and the healthy upbringing of children.
In Donzelot’s Policing of Families (1979), for example, psy-techniques estab-
lish a discrepancy between images and reality, which incite families to adjust
(or ‘float’) their behaviours towards that ideal image. Regulating the family,
in this view, is a kind of ‘governing through freedom’, a productive rather
than repressive power that incites self-adjustment and presupposes a certain
agency or ‘capacity to act’. That way of conceiving power draws on the
observation that liberal political reason presupposes a notion of power as
working through the ‘free’ activities of members of the population to be
governed (Foucault, 1979; Hindess, 2000; Rose, 2004). This article investi-
gates the pertinence of certain Euro-centred conceptions of power in
analysing the construction of penal and welfare institutions in Australia, and
examines the nature of child and family interventions in this formative period
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Comparisons with European evidence may help to draw out the specifi-
cally Australian mode of ‘imaging’ that sought to regulate the production of
the ‘normal family’. Drawing on evidence from the UK that uses Donzelot’s
understanding of ‘the regulation of images’, Nikolas Rose (1990) looks at
examples of historical process that underpinned productive forms of power
in relation to family and achieved ‘subjective commitment’ to good parent-
ing. He points to the philanthropic, ‘familializing’ projects in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries in which experts sought to ‘shape and infuse’ personal
investments in parenthood and family life. Rose argues that this would be
accomplished ‘not by coercion or threat’, but rather ‘through the production
of mothers who would want hygienic homes and healthy children’ (p. 130).
Later, in the 1940s, under the tutelage of psychologists such as Donald
Winnicott, it is the language and evaluations of expertise that ‘bind’ parents
of the need to be educated about their own parenting and have confidence in
their own capacities. Where the modern family has available to it images of
the pathological family in the context of scandals, illicit sexuality or violence
on the part of a minority, ‘the potency and pervasiveness of normality is
MCCALLUM: COERCIVE NORMALIZATION AND FAMILY POLICING 115
reactivated . . . the self-judgement of each of us against its standards is reac-
tivated’ (p. 203). Here, Rose draws out a self-governing regime that dimin-
ishes the significance of coercive forms of power in the regulation of parents
and children.
A further analysis of these events and interventions is offered by David
Garland (1985), in which he argues that discourses of penality concerned
with welfarist social and criminological interventions in the UK were indica-
tive of a programme of reform rather than a description of actual interven-
tions. More recently, Garland (1997) also questions the concept of freedom
and choice in the ‘governmentality’ literature when applied to some forms of
regulatory power: does the Foucauldian notion of ‘governing through
freedom’ understate the presence of constraint and discipline?
Freedom . . . generally refers to a capacity to choose one’s actions without
external contraint. Freedom (unlike agency) is necessarily a matter of degree –
it is the configured range of unconstrained choice in which agency can operate.
The truth is that the exercise of governmental power, and particularly neo-
liberal techniques of government, rely on, and stimulate, agency while simul-
taneously reconfiguring (rather than removing) the constraints upon the freedom
of choice of the agent. (p. 197, emphasis in the original)
For Garland, this consideration is important for the genealogical method
itself. While it is necessary to develop an understanding of rationalities and
technologies of governing, it is equally important to consider the specific
historical events that give the institutions of child and family regulation their
present shape. A genealogical understanding of rationalities and technologies
is relevant if they continue to function in the present (Garland, 1997: 202). It
follows, then, that analyses of power that focus on the historical presence of
coercion and threat also problematize this kind of power in the present.
Each of the analytical tools deployed in the above accounts – positivism,
the decentering of law, governing through freedom – has been important and
influential in recent socio-legal studies of child and family regulation. A
reconceptualization of power, founded largely in the late-Foucauldian litera-
ture on ‘governmentality’, has prompted questions about the significance of
law and normalization, and in particular the continuing importance of juridi-
cal kinds of power in the regulation of families and children (Foucault, 1991;
see also Ewald, 1990; Hunt, 1992). Moreover, this literature draws heavily on
European evidence. Its relevance for understanding the specificity of relations
of power in the evolving Australian penal-welfare complex remains relatively
unexplored (Brown, 2001; Hogg and Carrington, 2001). In this article I
attempt to identify specifically Australian approaches to the restructuring of
institutional arrangements affecting child and family regulation during the
late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In particular, I argue that attempts to enforce familial ties and obligations
were carried out through what could be termed coercive normalization. By
this I refer to systems of knowing and acting upon children and families that
arise from the penal apparatus itself, systems that sought to lever an adherence
116
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 16(1)
to norms of family living through images of threat. I will attempt to show
how these systems entailed an extension of the prison as a governing idea
beyond the immediate sites of penal institutions; a reinforcement of economic
power by its transmutation into moral categories; and a way of knowing the
problem child that was a product of both judicial forms of power and the
conduct of the human sciences. The next section reviews the emergence of
new powers that characterized the Australian institutional landscape, in key
areas that allow some points of comparison with developments in Europe,
and particularly the United Kingdom, to be acknowledged: the growth of a
children’s court bureaucracy, the regulation of Aboriginal children, and the
enrolment of the human sciences in judicial processes. The final part of the
article discusses evidence about the nature of welfarist interventions in child
and family regulation in both the UK and Australia.
The article poses questions about the application of recent social theory to
...
AND FAMILY POLICING: THE
LIMITS OF THE ‘PSY-COMPLEX’
IN AUSTRALIAN PENAL
SYSTEMS
DAVID MCCALLUM
Victoria University, Australia
ABSTRACT
Much contemporary social and historical research on problem children and families
focuses on the different kinds of power deployed in a complex of legal and non-legal
settings. This article reviews socio-legal studies in Europe, Australia and the UK, and
additional archival evidence in Victoria, Australia, in relation to a shift towards posi-
tivist and ‘welfarist’ approaches to the problem of child criminality and family regu-
lation from the turn of the 20th century. The aim is to assess the applicability for
Australia of trends in European social theory that emphasize non-coercive, non-legal
correction of families, a productive rather than repressive form of power which incites
families to seek to align their conduct to social norms. The article argues that ‘coercive
normalization’ – systems of knowing and acting upon children and families arising
from the penal system and images of threat – is a significant presence in the complex
of power relations that make up a genealogy of family and child regulation in Australia.
KEY WORDS
family; history; juvenile justice; power; psy-knowledge
INTRODUCTION: PSY-TECHNIQUES OF POWER
SOCIOLOGICAL and criminological literature in Europe, the United
Kingdom and Australia acknowledges the late 19th century as a pivotal
moment in the construction of the main institutional forms of child
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, www.sagepublications.com
0964 6639, Vol. 16(1), 113–129
DOI: 10.1177/0964663907073452
114
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 16(1)
welfare and the emergence of a modern welfarist approach to governing
neglected and offending children. These developments are understood to
reflect historical movements from a classical to a positivist model of crimi-
nology, the latter highlighting an individualist, interventionist and scientific
study of criminality and neglect (Garland, 1985; Naffine, 1992; White and
Haines, 2001). In addition, Garland’s (1985) concept of ‘penal-welfare
complex’, or Rose and Valverde’s (1998) notion of ‘legal complex’, serve to
demonstrate the close integration of both legal and non-legal interventions
in the ways in which problem children and families come to be conceived
and regulated. The Children’s Court was an early instance of the growth of
‘informal power’ as a means to achieve a moderation of behaviour and overall
wellbeing, as against formal legal process (Harrington, 1992; van Krieken,
2000). Moreover, in many of these accounts power is conceived in terms of
psy-interventions, a form of regulation that puts the family in a position
where it becomes in its own interests to conduct itself according to social
norms in such matters as education and the healthy upbringing of children.
In Donzelot’s Policing of Families (1979), for example, psy-techniques estab-
lish a discrepancy between images and reality, which incite families to adjust
(or ‘float’) their behaviours towards that ideal image. Regulating the family,
in this view, is a kind of ‘governing through freedom’, a productive rather
than repressive power that incites self-adjustment and presupposes a certain
agency or ‘capacity to act’. That way of conceiving power draws on the
observation that liberal political reason presupposes a notion of power as
working through the ‘free’ activities of members of the population to be
governed (Foucault, 1979; Hindess, 2000; Rose, 2004). This article investi-
gates the pertinence of certain Euro-centred conceptions of power in
analysing the construction of penal and welfare institutions in Australia, and
examines the nature of child and family interventions in this formative period
in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Comparisons with European evidence may help to draw out the specifi-
cally Australian mode of ‘imaging’ that sought to regulate the production of
the ‘normal family’. Drawing on evidence from the UK that uses Donzelot’s
understanding of ‘the regulation of images’, Nikolas Rose (1990) looks at
examples of historical process that underpinned productive forms of power
in relation to family and achieved ‘subjective commitment’ to good parent-
ing. He points to the philanthropic, ‘familializing’ projects in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries in which experts sought to ‘shape and infuse’ personal
investments in parenthood and family life. Rose argues that this would be
accomplished ‘not by coercion or threat’, but rather ‘through the production
of mothers who would want hygienic homes and healthy children’ (p. 130).
Later, in the 1940s, under the tutelage of psychologists such as Donald
Winnicott, it is the language and evaluations of expertise that ‘bind’ parents
of the need to be educated about their own parenting and have confidence in
their own capacities. Where the modern family has available to it images of
the pathological family in the context of scandals, illicit sexuality or violence
on the part of a minority, ‘the potency and pervasiveness of normality is
MCCALLUM: COERCIVE NORMALIZATION AND FAMILY POLICING 115
reactivated . . . the self-judgement of each of us against its standards is reac-
tivated’ (p. 203). Here, Rose draws out a self-governing regime that dimin-
ishes the significance of coercive forms of power in the regulation of parents
and children.
A further analysis of these events and interventions is offered by David
Garland (1985), in which he argues that discourses of penality concerned
with welfarist social and criminological interventions in the UK were indica-
tive of a programme of reform rather than a description of actual interven-
tions. More recently, Garland (1997) also questions the concept of freedom
and choice in the ‘governmentality’ literature when applied to some forms of
regulatory power: does the Foucauldian notion of ‘governing through
freedom’ understate the presence of constraint and discipline?
Freedom . . . generally refers to a capacity to choose one’s actions without
external contraint. Freedom (unlike agency) is necessarily a matter of degree –
it is the configured range of unconstrained choice in which agency can operate.
The truth is that the exercise of governmental power, and particularly neo-
liberal techniques of government, rely on, and stimulate, agency while simul-
taneously reconfiguring (rather than removing) the constraints upon the freedom
of choice of the agent. (p. 197, emphasis in the original)
For Garland, this consideration is important for the genealogical method
itself. While it is necessary to develop an understanding of rationalities and
technologies of governing, it is equally important to consider the specific
historical events that give the institutions of child and family regulation their
present shape. A genealogical understanding of rationalities and technologies
is relevant if they continue to function in the present (Garland, 1997: 202). It
follows, then, that analyses of power that focus on the historical presence of
coercion and threat also problematize this kind of power in the present.
Each of the analytical tools deployed in the above accounts – positivism,
the decentering of law, governing through freedom – has been important and
influential in recent socio-legal studies of child and family regulation. A
reconceptualization of power, founded largely in the late-Foucauldian litera-
ture on ‘governmentality’, has prompted questions about the significance of
law and normalization, and in particular the continuing importance of juridi-
cal kinds of power in the regulation of families and children (Foucault, 1991;
see also Ewald, 1990; Hunt, 1992). Moreover, this literature draws heavily on
European evidence. Its relevance for understanding the specificity of relations
of power in the evolving Australian penal-welfare complex remains relatively
unexplored (Brown, 2001; Hogg and Carrington, 2001). In this article I
attempt to identify specifically Australian approaches to the restructuring of
institutional arrangements affecting child and family regulation during the
late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In particular, I argue that attempts to enforce familial ties and obligations
were carried out through what could be termed coercive normalization. By
this I refer to systems of knowing and acting upon children and families that
arise from the penal apparatus itself, systems that sought to lever an adherence
116
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 16(1)
to norms of family living through images of threat. I will attempt to show
how these systems entailed an extension of the prison as a governing idea
beyond the immediate sites of penal institutions; a reinforcement of economic
power by its transmutation into moral categories; and a way of knowing the
problem child that was a product of both judicial forms of power and the
conduct of the human sciences. The next section reviews the emergence of
new powers that characterized the Australian institutional landscape, in key
areas that allow some points of comparison with developments in Europe,
and particularly the United Kingdom, to be acknowledged: the growth of a
children’s court bureaucracy, the regulation of Aboriginal children, and the
enrolment of the human sciences in judicial processes. The final part of the
article discusses evidence about the nature of welfarist interventions in child
and family regulation in both the UK and Australia.
The article poses questions about the application of recent social theory to
...
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