October 2004 Bénisti Report on the prevention of delinquency. Detect, keep under surveillance, straighten out, place. Detect "behavioral disturbances" as of preschool; keep the child under surveillance in nursery school; straighten him out in elementary school, place him in a specialized structure as of ten years of age if the behavior continues; finally, should delinquent behavior outside of school increase, finish by making that placement irreversible. Among the risk factors for delinquency, the report highlights the bilingualism of immigrants' children.

Faced with this combined return of the teenager and the foreigner in the designation of the dangerous classes, the organizations Sud Éducation, Champ freudien, Réseau français de sociolinguistique, Marges linguistiques, Glottopol, AISL and Snuclias-FSU Ville de Paris began a serious mobilization that led to a new version of the report in October 2005.

September 2005. Inserm Report on "Behavioral Disturbances Among Children and Adolescents" in view of a proposed law on the prevention of delinquency. Screen for, spot, test, treat.As of 36 months of age, screen for disturbances that evidence a possible delinquent future; spot prenatal and peri-natal genetic and environmental risk factors linked to temperament, personality and to the notion of these disorders' heritability; subject the children tracked down by these means to tests based on behavioralist theories of neuropsychology, and, where necessary, treat them through re-education, psychotherapy and drugs.

In reaction to the Inserm appraisal, 200,000 signatories to the appeal "No zero-tolerance for the behavior of three-year-olds" denounced a predictive aberration in prevention and protested against the risks of aberrations in the practice of care, especially psychological care, for normative and social control objectives.

2006-2007. Progressive implementation in the schools of the "student data base." Record, monitor. Record personal data for each student through the establishment of a centralized national student identification system with the attribution of a unique student number.

In November 2008, the National Collective for Resistance to the Student Data Base launched a call for mobilization and in June 2009 referred the matter to the United Nations Committee on Children's Rights, which declared itself "concerned about the utilization of this data base for other objectives, such as detection of delinquency or of children of illegal immigrants, as well as about the inadequacy of legal measures designed to prevent its interconnection with other civil service administrations' data bases."

August 2007. Minimum sentencing.Deter, punish. The August 10, 2007, "Law strengthening the effort against recidivism among adults and children" establishes minimum sentences in cases of recidivism and may deny the exemption of minority for second offenders over 16 years old. For all crimes committed as a second offense, the magistrate or tribunal is required to condemn the defendant to a minimum prison sentence of a third of the maximum incurred for that offense. A sentence below this minimum may be pronounced only in "consideration of the circumstances of the infraction, the personality of its author or of reintegration or rehabilitation guarantees." In the event of a third offense, the minimum sentences may only be ruled out in the case of exceptional guarantees.

The minimum sentences were immediately denounced by numerous magistrates, including the magistrates' union, which sees them as a serious attack on the individualization of sentencing and its proportionality to the act committed.

July 2008. Creation of the Edvige data base.Create police files, monitor.Police files are created for all persons 13 years of age or older "likely to detract from public order" even though they have not committed any infraction: In addition to marital status, the file contains the person's address, even "identifying personal characteristics" and information gathered that bears on their behavior, acquaintance, movements, supposed ethnicity and sex life. These data may be kept for a maximum period of five years in the framework of an administrative investigation. In spite of the National Commission on Freedom and Computing's reservations, the government persisted.

After four rewritings of the proposal, in June 2009, before its adoption by the National Assembly's legal commission, the organizations signatory to the "No to Edvige" association rose up to protest "against the overall tendency demonstrated by this proposal which consists of extending the methods and tools previously reserved for serious crimes, even for acts of terrorism, to petty delinquency. A tendency which additionally leads to the control of populations, as well as to the criminalization of union and other militant activities."

December 2008. The Varinard Report, preliminary to the revision of the criminal code for minors. Judge, get tough.The Varinard Commission proposes to set criminal minority at 12 years of age. The judgment for an offense could either be pronounced by a children's judge, renamed a "minors' judge"; or by the minors' tribunal - ruling with a single judge if the minor is neither in custody nor a second-time offender; or by a children's judge and two civil assistants; or by a correctional tribunal including a minors' judge among the three professional magistrates that make up the court, which would be reserved for multi-repeat offenders from 16 to 18 years old and young adults in the year following their majority.

Taking their inspiration from the "No zero-tolerance for the behavior of three-year-olds" association, the association "What future for young delinquents?," which had collected a little over 14,000 signatures as of this writing, is on the war path against the regressions contained in the Varinard Report and denounces "the sums devoted to the imprisonment of children and teenagers at the expense of preventative measures and educational support."

May 2009. Proposed law aims to "strengthen the effort against group violence." The "anti-gang" law makes provision for three years imprisonment and 45,000 euros' fine for "knowingly participating in a group, even one formed in a temporary way, that pursues the objective, characterized by one or many material acts, of committing willful violence against persons or destruction of property."

In June 2009, the Liberté Égalité Justice Association denounced the seeds of judicial and police arbitrariness in this proposed law.

2004-2009. The mobilization launched by the Network for Education without Borders in 2004 continued. To protest against the acceleration in the expulsions of families of school children and in police interventions in the environs of kindergarten and primary schools, a national demonstration was organized on May 13, 2009.

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First Epilogue. In Floirac, on May 21, 2009, two cousins, aged 6 and 10 years old, suspected of stealing bicycles, were arrested at the exit of their school and taken to the police station following a complaint filed by the mother of another student for bicycle theft. Two crews and six policemen were mobilized to take away the two little boys, the claimant, her two children, and the bicycles. The Gironde prefecture notes that "the police acted in a well-defined framework, validated by the prosecutor," before adding: "When we have a complaint for theft and the clues that allow us to identify a suspect, even though it may be a minor, it is incumbent upon us to act." The Gironde's Public Security Chief speaks of a "non-event."

**

Since the Bénisti, Inserm and Varinard reports, the implementation of minimum sentencing, the police at school, children held in preventative detention for bicycle theft etc., concern in the face of events is growing with respect to the irregularities of a childhood that is stigmatized, under surveillance, judged and incarcerated. The scientistic temptation and the security bias that underlie these new legislations reduce childhood to the risk or the danger that it bears or incurs.

Already in 1975, in the introduction to his course on The Abnormal, Michel Foucault warned against the violence of such discourses that have "a power of life and death." "From whence do they hold this power? From the legal establishment, perhaps, but they also hold it as a result of their operating within that establishment as a truth discourse, truth discourse because of their scientific status [...], discourses that may kill, truth discourses and laughable discourses. And laughable truth discourses that have the institutional power to kill, are, after all, in a society like our own, discourses that deserve a little attention."

Concretely, today, what are these discourses that deserve a little attention constructing? In the place of truth, they are erecting determinist approaches that make the slightest gesture, like the least foolishness of a child, the sign of a pathology that it is appropriate to neutralize as soon as possible; they promote hypotheses that favor a biological origin for so-called deviant human behavior to justify the creation of data bases and treatments; they privilege isolation rather than appreciation, surveillance rather than support, the repressive rather than the educative response and claim that the second is an inescapable result of the first. A strange era that may count in the millions the little consumers of Ritalin, Concerta or similar molecules that transform fidgety children into well-behaved ones at school and little distracted or talkative rebels into disciplined students, a strange era that seeks to erase "symptoms" with any one of those drugs Freud called "Sorgenbrecher" (care-breakers).

This tougher stance vis-à-vis the irregularities of childhood in the criminal, social and educational fields highlights an abuse that has already been seen before in history: Waving the specter of dangerous youth, of incorrigible childhood, allows other malaises to be shrugged off, allows the questions and the rejections that these childhoods in their radical strangeness arouse to be ignored.

The theme of the irregularity of childhood cannot be exhausted by this reading. And if we have chosen this old term to designate the childhood subsequently called "maladjusted," "deviant," "delinquent" or "at risk," it's precisely for the polysemy it opens up. For childhood is irregular in itself in the sense that irregularity designates that which does not follow the regulation or the rule, but opens a gap, a discontinuity, a resistance or a new interpretation. So, it is with the irregularity in facial features, in a pulse, a gait, a language, the irregularity in the versification of a poem, the weave of a fabric, a musical measure. The irregular childhood, if it is familiar with the margins, opens another reading of those margins - the space of invention, of subversion, of creation.

Second Epilogue: "let us remember our own childhood," wrote August Aïchorn in 1925 in his book "Verwahrloste Jugend" (Fallow Youth). "What did a drawer, a box, a pocket, a corner mean to us, one that belonged to us alone, where we could hide from our parents and our brothers and sisters our secrets that we reordered when we pleased, but could mess up to our heart's content?"

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Translation: Truthout French Language Editor href="mailto:leslie@truthout.org">Leslie Thatcher.