ABSTRACT
Crime can be seen as a 'value-neutral' term, which operates as a means of classifying actions prohibited by laws, which in turn are the product of consensual deliberation, and therefore unproblematic. This is certainly the conventional and often implicit understanding which applies when most of the people begin to think about criminal behaviour. Childhood is very often conceptualised as a linear developmental life stage, whereby younger members of the population gradually acquire the levels of knowledge, understanding and maturity to take an accepted and responsible position as fully-fledged citizens, contributing productively to the common good. In recent times, theories of childhood and youth have become quite widely debated, and to some extent this has involved a considerable loosening of the prior conceptual straitjacket; but nonetheless, developmental assumptions remain a powerful element of people understanding of what it means to be a child or adolescent.
