Boundary situations of irregular childhood – SFEI

The research project presented here proposes a sociology of so-called “irregular” childhood based on cases of double institutional monitoring : young people placed under child welfare services, school droupouts, unaccompanied minors (UAM) who have committed delinquent acts, young people with disabilities placed by civil justice and/or who have started a penal process. These juvenile situations can be thought of as "boundaries situations" revealing the institutional mechanisms of youth differenciation. Inscribed at the crossroads of a sociology of institutions and socialization on one hand, and a sociology of the social differentiation of children on the other hand, this research examines the institutional functioning of these atypical situations and their effects on young people and their trajectories. This leads us to analyze three moments of these specific types of follow-up : before the implementation of judicial measures (the construction of the law, its local variations in public policy, the categories of judicial understanding that preside over a social sorting of children), during the implementation of the measure (the measures put in place to respond to these "border situations" and their effects on the young people's lives) and after the measure, questionning the effects on the social life courses. The methodology is based on several interviews conducted with juvenile court judges in seven different jurisdictions, ethnographic case studies based on a dozen judicial or disability-related institutional sites (four of which are the result of a reprocessing of previously collected ethnographic data), secondary processing of existing national databases, and documentary analyses conducted from both perspectives : legal and socio-historical.