Carceral Care? Juvenile justice institutions in India and girls’ protection underBrahmanical patriarchy

Abstract

The experts, state, and non-state institutions that constitute India’s juvenile justice system frame it as a system that protects and cares for vulnerable girls and promotes their healing, empowerment, and rehabilitation. These bodies of knowledge erase how caste in the form of Brahmanical patriarchy undergirds India’s juvenile justice system.

Employing anti-caste feminist epistemologies and drawing on the voices and experiences of girls confined in juvenile institutions, I argue that the juvenile justice system’s policies of care and protection punish girls by regulating, confining, and fixing girls’ sexualities, relationships, and mobilities. My focus is on therapeutic interventions in the juvenile justice system and my paper explores how the enactment and practice of therapeutic care by the staff of juvenile institutions contributes to the processes of labeling girls and their sexualities. I argue that far from enacting care in the lives of girls, therapeutic interventions in India’s juvenile justice system entrench Brahmanical patriarchal constructions of multiply-marginalized girls as incapable, unreliable, and hypersexual. I argue that therapeutic care interventions inside juvenile institutions, rather than healing girls, lead to girls feeling isolated and experiencing a shrinking of liberatory possibilities in their lives, both inside and outside juvenile institutions.