A Child Presumed Adult: The italian “anti-maranza” politics of punishment — and the convenience of not understanding

Photo Renan Lima

“Anti-maranza” is not, thankfully, the official title of the bill approved by the Italian Council of Ministers on 23 July. Its actual title is the rather more sober Amendments concerning the criminal responsibility of minors. But “anti-maranza” is the name under which the measure has been sold to the public and, perhaps for that very reason, it tells us far more about the political culture that produced it. The bill is not yet in force: it must still be debated and approved by the Parliament.

“Maranza” is not a legal category. It does not describe a criminal offence. It is a word borrowed from the street and social media, a generic label attached to young people perceived as loud, aggressive or vulgar — often poor, often from migrant families.

Calling a measure “anti-maranza” means constructing the target before writing the law. It does not identify a particular act: it identifies a type of person. It does not say “against assault”, “against robbery” or “against violence”. It says: against those people.

It is a small masterpiece of simplification, however the content of the bill is no less troubling.

Under the current system, a young person aged fourteen to seventeen can be held criminally responsible only if it is established that, at the time of the offence, they were capable of understanding the meaning and consequences of their actions and of controlling their behaviour. It is not enough to look at a date of birth. The court must look at the person.

The new provision reverses that starting point. It establishes that a minor’s capacity for understanding and self-control is to be presumed unless proven otherwise. In other words, from the age of fourteen, a young person would be considered mature enough to bear criminal responsibility unless the proceedings establish the contrary.

The Minister of Justice himself has explicitly described this as a reversal of the burden of proof.

To be clear: this does not mean that the young person is automatically presumed guilty of the offence. The presumption of innocence remains. It means, however, that they are presumed adult enough to be punished.

The distinction can seem insignificant only to someone who has never met an adolescent in serious difficulty.

Until now, the State had a duty to examine carefully the person standing before it: their maturity, family history, educational path, any violence or abuse they had experienced, their cognitive and psychological condition, and their social environment.

Under the proposed approach, maturity is taken for granted. Immaturity — the inability fully to understand or control one’s actions — must somehow succeed in emerging from the proceedings.

And assuming a young person genuinely lacks that capacity, what exactly is the plan?

To fill detention centres that are already under severe pressure, place vulnerable adolescents in the hands of increasingly scarce educational and mental-health services, and wait for them to emerge as better human beings?

First, everything that should prevent harm, provide support or offer treatment is cut. Then the consequences are gathered in the same building and renamed “security”.

It looks less like rehabilitation than flushing the key down the toilet and issuing a triumphant press release.

There is another question: who will find it easier to prove their immaturity?

The child of an educated family, supported by specialists and represented by an experienced lawyer? Or the young person who has left school, lives in residential care, speaks poorly Italian, comes from an absent, vulnerable or violent family, and encounters social services only after the police and the criminal file have already arrived?

Photo Talha Kuğu

The law is equal for everyone.

The resources required to be understood and to gain access to justice are somewhat less evenly distributed.

The same is true of the opportunities to grow, learn, imagine a future and become someone. They are distributed in a remarkably undemocratic fashion.

In Italy, this inequality has a name: educational poverty.

For many years, the poverty experienced by children and adolescents was measured almost exclusively in financial terms, through their parents’ income and wealth. But that perspective is insufficient. It fails to capture everything that shapes the course of a life: access to education, culture, sport, relationships, healthcare, public spaces and the possibility of being listened to.

Italy’s National Institute of Statistics defines educational poverty as a multidimensional phenomenon produced by the interaction between the family, social and economic conditions in which children grow up.

It is not only about what a child possesses. It is about what they have the opportunity to learn, desire and become. In 2024, more than one child under sixteen in four lived in a household at risk of poverty or social exclusion. The disparities were even greater in southern Italy, in single-parent households and among children without Italian citizenship.

Educational poverty is not simply a lack of schooling. It is the absence of spaces, experiences, trusted adults and any credible sense of a future.

It is the distance between a young person who can make a mistake while relying on a network capable of catching them and one who, at the first mistake, discovers that they have always been alone.

And it is within this landscape of inequality that another safeguard is now being weakened: the specialised nature of juvenile justice.

For decades, the Italian system was considered one of the most advanced precisely because it did not confuse responsibility with revenge. It was built around an observation that is almost revolutionary in its simplicity: an adolescent is still developing.

A young person may commit terrible acts, but they are not a smaller version of an adult. They must answer for what they have done, certainly, but within a system capable of helping them assume responsibility, continue their education and return to society.

Italian juvenile justice was based on individual assessment, the least intrusive possible use of criminal proceedings, probation, community-based measures and an educational purpose. Not because it was “soft”, but because it sought to prevent an offence from becoming an identity and a sentence from becoming a label carried for the rest of a person’s life.

Then we began to unravel the whole thing.

We left social services under immense pressure, with too few educators and increasingly isolated schools and families. We treated adolescent wellbeing, mental health and emotional development as seasonal emergencies.

We weakened educational communities and abandoned neighbourhoods in which the State appears mainly in uniform, after having been absent for years in almost every other form.

As the educational and social system was impoverished — or entrusted to the goodwill of professionals, voluntary organisations and families — the criminal response became faster, more muscular and, above all, easier to sell on the evening news.

The so-called Caivano Decree has already pushed juvenile justice in a markedly more punitive direction. According to Antigone Onlus, between 2022 and 2025 the population of juvenile detention centres increased by approximately 50 per cent. Nine of Italy’s seventeen institutions are now overcrowded — a condition that the Italian juvenile system had not previously experienced.

These figures should prompt reflection. Complex social phenomena should not be turned into an imaginary invasion whose principal purpose is to justify the next emergency measure.

The idea that judges are releasing hordes of adolescents because they are deemed insufficiently mature also belongs more to propaganda than to reality.

But political emergencies have one enormous advantage: they do not necessarily have to exist.

They only have to function and get attention.

And this one works beautifully. It makes those in government appear tough. It reassures frightened people for a few minutes. And it allows everyone to avoid the more expensive questions.

Why are so many young people leaving school? Why does violence become a language of belonging? Where are the street educators, free psychological services and support for parents? What is happening inside homes, schools, neighbourhoods and communities? Which adults and institutions failed before that young person was declared a failure?

It is much cheaper to presume.

It is no coincidence that the suggested bill ends with the customary financial-neutrality clause: implementing it must not create any new or additional cost to the State.

The maturity of young people will be presumed and the money required to understand them will not.

Caivano

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child takes a different approach. It requires the best interests of the child to be a primary consideration in legislative and judicial decisions. It also calls on States to provide a specialised system of justice capable of respecting young people’s dignity and supporting their reintegration into society.

This does not mean erasing responsibility. It means addressing responsibility within a system different from the adult system, because development, vulnerability and the capacity for change are also different.

This is also the context in which Future Rights is drawing attention to the development of General Comment No. 27 of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, dedicated to children’s right of access to justice and to an effective remedy.

The title may sound like material reserved for lawyers. In reality, it concerns something very concrete: what can a young person do when one of their rights is violated?

Who can they tell? Who will listen? How can they ask for the violation to stop, for the harm to be acknowledged and for it not to happen again?

The draft General Comment starts from a simple principle: children are not passive objects of protection. They are people who hold rights.

They must be able to express their views, make a complaint, receive legal and psychological assistance, understand what is happening and obtain a remedy when a school, hospital, social service, public institution, business or adult violates those rights.

Justice, therefore, does not begin and end in the courtroom.

It begins in a school that knows how to receive a disclosure, in a social service that children can understand, in a hospital that listens, in an accessible complaints mechanism and in a trained adult who knows what to do.

It requires the removal of financial, linguistic, physical and psychological barriers. It requires protection from retaliation, information that children can understand, specialist support and the genuine consideration of their views — not merely collecting a few quotations so that the final report can announce that “young people participated”.

Justice should not be a maze designed by adults and then handed to children with instructions to find the exit on their own.

This is precisely what is now at risk: the idea that a young person should be accompanied through the justice system, rather than simply exposed to it.

It is troubling that the direction of this bill has caused so little alarm. We know the language through which societies grow accustomed to authoritarianism. First, the population is divided into respectable people and suspicious categories. Then social problems are transformed into matters of public order. Finally, every legal safeguard is presented as a privilege granted to the guilty.

The law stops asking: “Who are you? What happened? How can we prevent it from happening again?”

It begins to say: “I already know who you are.”

This policy is short-sighted because it looks only at the moment of the offence, ignoring everything that came before it and everything that will follow. It is harsh because it calls abandonment “firmness”.

And it is ineffective because a young person who is humiliated, imprisoned and returned to society without education, relationships or alternatives does not magically become more responsible. They often become angrier, more isolated and easier to recruit into the very criminal networks that the measure claims to oppose.

There is also a paradox that should cause at least a little embarrassment.

We expect young people to respect rules, rights and responsibilities that nobody may ever have explained to them. Many teachers and educators receive no consistent training on children’s rights, protection mechanisms or the ways in which a young person can seek help or obtain justice.More seriously still, neither do the students.

Education about rights is not a structural and continuous part of the curriculum. It is entrusted to NGOs, civil-society organisations, outside experts and projects that last only as long as their funding.

It arrives at school for a couple of hours, suspended somewhere between a grant application and the sound of the bell. It is often delivered through the unpaid or underpaid work of someone expected to compress the UN Convention, participation, discrimination, violence, access to justice and, if possible, the future of democracy into a single morning.

Then the project ends. So does the funding. And rights become a subject for experts once again.

The work of NGOs and civil society is, of course, invaluable. It is often thanks to educators, associations and external professionals that issues otherwise absent from the classroom enter schools at all. But it is curious that learning about one’s rights should be treated as an extracurricular activity.

A young person can complete their entire education knowing how to identify the agent in a passive sentence, without knowing which public office to contact when the agent of their problem is an adult. They can leave school without knowing that they have the right to be heard, how to recognise a violation, whom to approach or how to challenge an unjust decision.

But when they commit an offence, we suddenly presume that they possess full awareness, maturity and powers of judgement.

To understand and exercise their rights, they are still too young. To be punished, they are already adult enough.

Responsibility is indispensable. Including the responsibility of young people. But there must also be responsibility on the adults side , institutions and politics: the responsibility to educate before judging, to listen before classifying, and not to leave young people alone until the moment when everyone can finally arrive to punish them.

A strong State is not one that presumes an adolescent to be an adult.

It is one that does not give up on helping them become one.

Z. Liew