Practitioners' discourse of juvenile delinquency at a child and youth care centre in the Western Cape from 1990 to 2020

Swanepoel, Loulou

Practitioners' discourse of juvenile delinquency at a child and youth care centre in the Western Cape from 1990 to 2020

Thesis / Dissertation

2024

Abstract

This paper examines the evolving discourse of juvenile delinquency among practitioners who documented their observations and interactions with juveniles from a Western Cape Child and Youth Care Centre. It employs the Foucauldian discourse analysis approach when analysing the content of thirty learner casefiles from 1990 to 2020. The discourses are analysed in terms of shifts in power over the institutional care of the children brought on by the new democratic government, childcare and justice policies, and the coinciding growth of the restorative approach to juvenile justice. The discourse themes examined include how practitioners consistently conceptualised the juvenile and their delinquency across the thirty years. This was seen in terms of the juvenile's medical health, their ‘criminality', substance use, gang involvement, and tendency to abscond. The juveniles' history of alternative care placements was also frequently documented. Practices eclipsed by the democratic government and restorative justice movement include punitive forms of punishment at the facility and the need for documentation of the child's race. However, only after the enactment of the Children's Act no.38 of 2005, as amended (2010), did a restorative approach to juvenile care, outside of education and vocational training, take significant precedence.

Keywords

public law

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Masters

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