Temporality and trauma: Towards an articulation between the judicial, educational and psychological times in repeat teenage offenders

Within the past few years, the problem of repeat teenage offenders has raised troubling questions among the various institutions in charge of this population. The temporalities of these adolescents are marked by immediacy, urgency, and repetition that circumvent a linear view of time and the programs set up to handle them. Studies on repeat teenage aggressors (notably, sexual aggressors) have shown that these young people often have a history of an acknowledged or unacknowledged trauma. The fact of having been a victim of abuse during childhood is thought to be a factor leading to later acting out. Our objective is to inquire into these juvenile delinquents and their treatment using a temporal framework of their life pathway that will influence the ways in which they are treated by professionals. By tracing back through the lives of these young authors of violence, we can find out whether they were themselves victims. Repeated acts of violence by a youth could then be seen not as isolated acts but as expressions of ill-being, of having been a victim, whether recognized or not. The act thus represents a link between the present and the past that can be analyzed by looking at occurrences of acting out. It would be interesting, moreover, to reflect upon how continuity could be created there where disruption strikes the youth and often the institutions too. We provide a detailed description of the notion of trauma by recalling its definition and its possible immediate and deferred effects on these youths. In the immediate time frame, the subject may present a physical reaction to the trauma. The psychological reaction will determine a psychic time frame expressed in several ways, whether immediately or at a distance from the traumatic event. Posttraumatic reactions may hamper the development of the teenager's personality. Some traumatized adolescents will express their ill-being by aggressiveness, as they replay the traumatic scene by staging violent and dangerous actions. Next we examine the different intertwined and interacting temporalities of the concerned institutions - namely, the legal, educational, and psychological therapeutic time frames - and how they contribute to creating a link between the past and the present in order to reconstruct the subject's life history. Legal time corresponds to the time during which the committed act is put into words, its significance is determined and judged, and a penal response to the offense is issued. Judgment time