This article is taken from the July 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Should parents of delinquent children be punished? This question keeps resurfacing in the French political debate. The French have long been overwhelmingly in favour of this idea. In response to this persistent social demand, which could therefore be electorally profitable, we regularly hear one politician or another proposing some form of sanction against the parents of delinquent or “problem” juveniles. 

Last summer, following the huge urban riots that shook France for three weeks and in which mainly minors were involved, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, said: “At the first offence, we should be able to punish families financially and easily.” A little later, in the autumn, Aurore Berger, the Minister for Solidarity and Families, put forward the idea of punishing defaulting parents with community service. And very recently, at the beginning of May, Guillaume Kasbarian, the Minister for Housing, declared that he was in favour of evicting delinquent families from their social housing.

Those whose offspring are guilty of offences rarely have to pay damages to the victims

Legally, punishing the parents of juvenile delinquents should not be difficult, as the necessary instruments already exist. Article 1242 of the Civil Code states: “The father and mother, insofar as they exercise parental authority, are jointly and severally liable for damage caused by their minor children living with them.” 

This liability is a civil liability: it means that parents are obliged to make good any damage caused by their minor children over whom they effectively exercise parental authority.

It is not a criminal responsibility: parents cannot be punished for offences committed by their children, because article 121-2 of the French Criminal Code states that “no one is criminally responsible except for his or her own actions”. This is what is known as the principle of personalised punishment, a principle that is easy to understand: it would be unfair to be punished for something you have not done.

However, parents can be penalised if they deliberately neglect their parental obligations. This is provided for in article 227-17 of the Criminal Code, which states: “The act by the father or mother of failing, without legitimate reason, to fulfil their legal obligations to the extent of compromising the health, safety, morality or education of their minor child is punishable by two years’ imprisonment and a fine of €30,000.” This culpable negligence can be proven, for example, by the fact that the child repeatedly commits offences. 

So, French law already provides for measures designed to make the parents of juvenile delinquents at least partly responsible for the consequences of their children’s actions. The logic behind this is irrefutable: parents have parental authority, the purpose of which is to protect the child’s “safety, health and morals” (article 371-1 of the Civil Code). Exercising this authority is their duty, not their right, and they must therefore be held accountable if they fail to exercise it properly or at all.

Sanctioning the parents of juvenile delinquents therefore poses no problem of principle, quite the contrary: indeed what shocks the vast majority of French people is when negligent, defaulting or complicit parents do not bear the consequences of the damage committed by their children. Furthermore, many people would be outraged if they knew these parents continue to receive welfare benefits even when their children behave in an anti-social manner.

In reality, however, it is very rare for parents of delinquent juveniles to bear the financial consequences of their children’s offences. Not only are those whose offspring are guilty of repeated offences almost never ordered to pay damages to the victims, but in almost all cases they can quietly continue to receive their “family allowances”, which are supposed to help them support their families, as well as the many other financial benefits that generally accompany these allowances. They can also continue to benefit from publicly-funded “social housing”, where the rent is well below the market rate, and so on.

It is even rarer for them to be penalised for failing in their educational duties. To my knowledge, article 227-17 of the Criminal Code is never applied.

The reason is simple. Those responsible for administering the control and sanction system provided for by the law — educators, social workers, magistrates, social security officials, etc. — are deeply reluctant to implement it. 

They see that the families of delinquents are typically from less privileged backgrounds, and that they often have a combination of “social handicaps”: poverty, unemployment, low level of qualifications, single parenthood, etc. They consider that their educational failings are the result of these disadvantages, and that therefore parents of delinquents cannot really be held responsible for their children’s actions. In fact, punishing them would only add to their many difficulties.

At the root of this reluctance to use legal instruments is the idea that poverty, or more broadly social inequality, is the cause of delinquency. From this point of view, withdrawing public assistance from the parents of delinquents seems absurd, since all we are doing is exacerbating the poverty that is supposed to be at the root of the problem we are trying to tackle. Ultimately, using this logic, we should on the contrary increase benefits for the parents of delinquents and, in general, increase all the public assistance they receive.

This old idea that delinquency is caused by poverty — an idea that has very little credence with the working classes, who are most directly confronted with insecurity, and which on the other hand has a great deal of credence with the more highly educated, who are rarely confronted with delinquency — has been demonstrably refuted countless times, but to no avail. It continues to exert its deleterious grip on many of the key players in the socio-criminal system. 

Yet the judicious and firm use of legal instruments would not only be fair but also in the best interests of society and the minors themselves.

The child psychiatrist Maurice Berger, well known for his work on violent teenagers, points out in his Sur la violence gratuite en France (2019) that:

It appears that only a material measure, i.e. a concrete measure, has any meaning for many of these young people, and that verbal admonition is useless … They need a real and not a symbolic prohibition to act, a stopper to understand that the law exists and to stop committing acts at the very moment it comes to their mind.

Yet one of the things that constitutes a concrete stumbling block for many of these juvenile delinquents is the harm that their actions can cause their families. They are indifferent to the physical and psychological damage they may have caused to others, but the trouble they cause their parents really affects them.

As Maurice Berger writes: “These minors have no social superego concerning what they do to people outside their group. They have no regrets about their violent acts, except when they cause trouble for their family.” Making parents bear at least part of the financial consequences of the misdeeds committed by their children, or even punishing them for deliberate failure to fulfil their parental obligations, could therefore dissuade some of these minors from acting out, and thus from embarking on a path of delinquency from which they will then find it extremely difficult to escape.

The idea that delinquency is caused by poverty has been refuted countless times

These sanctions should be administered with discernment, because families are not always responsible for the behaviour of their offspring: it unfortunately happens that excellent parents have very bad children. It is no less obvious that punishing the parents of delinquent children is tantamount to making life temporarily more difficult for them. But that’s the whole point. A punishment is only a punishment if it hurts.

Moreover, these difficulties can also have the immense virtue of teaching their children, in the only way they can learn it, that our actions have consequences, that we break the law at our peril and that delinquency does not pay. Conversely, the absence of any sanction teaches them the opposite lesson: that irresponsibility is always forgiven and even, in a sense, rewarded, since those who cause the most problems are also those who benefit most from the assistance and solicitude of the welfare state.

No doubt this will seem too harsh to many but, as Tocqueville said in his Mémoire sur le paupérisme (1835), charity must be “a male and reasoned virtue, not a weak and thoughtless taste”; it is not a question of “doing the good that pleases the giver most, but the one that is most truly useful to the receiver”.

And to convince ourselves that firmness can sometimes be true charity, perhaps we can indulge in a little mental experiment.

Suppose we knew that tomorrow our children would be orphans and that we had the choice of the family to whom we would entrust them. 

We could entrust our children to a very poor family, so poor that our children will sometimes go hungry and will always be poorly clothed. But we also know that in this poor family the parents have always worked hard, that they will make sure that our children go to school, that they will study, that they will teach them respect for the law and that being independent is the condition for self-respect. 

Or we could entrust our children to a family whose parents have never seriously worked, who are largely indifferent to what their children do, who care neither for their schooling nor that they respect the laws and rules of civility, but who will always have food, clothing, housing and money, provided by the public authorities. 

Faced with such an alternative, who among us would really hesitate? But if the decision is obvious to us, why should we favour a system that, in practice, makes the opposite choice when it comes to other people’s children?

If we really cared about improving the lot of the most disadvantaged, the choice should not be in doubt.