Juvenile, Not Delinquent: Children in Conflict with the Law is a powerful and timely intervention into the contemporary landscape of juvenile justice in India. Authored by veteran child rights activist Enakshi Ganguly, clinical psychologist Dr Kalpana Purushothaman and expressive arts practitioner Puneeta Roy, the text is fundamentally grounded in advocacy and lived praxis, emerging against the punitive policy shifts witnessed in the post-Nirbhaya era and echoing the global trends of carceral governance (Wacquant, 2009). The book’s primary objective is to humanize Children in Conflict with the Law, arguing forcefully that “delinquency” is not an inherent trait but rather a social construction rooted in systemic neglect, structural violence, and the criminalization of poverty and marginalization.
The book is thoughtfully divided into two complementary sections. Part One, led by Ganguly, provides a critical socio-legal history of India’s juvenile justice framework. Through vivid ethnographic accounts drawn from observation homes, courtroom encounters and high-stakes advocacy battles, this section exposes the systemic inequities. This includes judicial bias, corruption, and societal prejudice that shape children’s interactions with the law. Ganguly anchors her argument with real-life case studies, demonstrating how factors like caste and class profoundly determine whether a child is afforded compassion or condemned as a criminal. This part functions as a sharp, rights-based critique of institutional failures.
Part Two shifts focus to therapeutic and reformative practice. Purushothaman’s chapter, titled “Moving On,” draws on her extensive mental health work with Juvenile Justice Boards, providing insights into psychosocial assessment and intervention strategies. This is complemented by Roy’s contribution, “Main Bhi Insaan Hoon,” which showcases the transformative potential of expressive arts, psychodrama and community engagement as tools for emotional rehabilitation and healing. Collectively, the authors advance a multidisciplinary, rights-based approach that aims to reframe Children in Conflict with the Law as rights-bearing subjects deserving of care and systemic reform, rather than as objects of control or punitive measure.
The book’s most significant strength lies in its rights-based and empathetic lens. It masterfully counters sensationalized media narratives and societal stereotypes by foregrounding the humanity of Children in Conflict with the Law, presenting them predominantly as victims of circumstance and systemic neglect. The synthesis of perspectives is another major asset: the integration of legal critique (Ganguly), clinical psychology (Purushothaman) and therapeutic arts practice (Roy) offers a rare, comprehensive view that bridges traditionally siloed disciplines. Furthermore, the inclusion of comparative contexts by drawing parallels between the challenges in India, radicalized incarceration in the USA and Indigenous overrepresentation in Australia helps in successfully situating the Indian experience within transnational conversations on structural injustice and carceral systems.
While the book’s advocacy stance is powerful, its selective epistemology limits its engagement with the core tenets of academic criminal psychology. By strongly portraying children as victims of circumstance, the text inadvertently risks idealizing the population it defends and avoids a sustained analytical exploration of behavioral and personality correlates of offending. Domains widely studied in developmental and personality-based criminology such as impulsivity, aggression, psychopathic traits and the interaction between individual deficits and environmental adversity are acknowledged in the text (Eysenck, 1996; Farrington, 2005; Moffitt, 1993).
For a work aspiring to influence practitioners and policy in a field like criminal psychology, this omission presents a challenge. Without grappling analytically with the “difficult” personalities often encountered in life-course-persistent antisocial behavior (Sampson and Laub, 2005). The text functions more as a normative critique than as a methodological study; it critiques punitive trends but stops short of proposing a sustained, mixed-methods alternative that could empirically substantiate its rights-based claims, thereby leaving a gap for future scholarship to bridge the normative commitment with rigorous empirical frameworks.
In essence, the book excels at answering the “why” but is less equipped to fully address the “how” of going about fixing the realities of the situations it presents. The book’s central arguments and multidisciplinary approach are highly relevant and deeply necessary for the current needs of the criminal justice and psychological community, particularly for those operating in the Global South.
The most critical contribution of Juvenile, Not Delinquent is its exposure of the systemic links between poverty, marginalization and criminalization in India. This resonates directly with the international criminological need to analyze how state policies govern insecurity through the penal apparatus, as detailed in Wacquant’s (2009) thesis on the penalization of poverty. For policymakers and legal practitioners, the book serves as an indispensable reference, providing the moral and narrative ammunition required to challenge laws and institutional practices that disproportionately target children from disadvantaged backgrounds, often defined by caste or socioeconomic status.
The second major necessity addressed by the book is the imperative to move beyond purely legalistic or punitive responses. The chapters by Purushothaman and Roy provide accessible, praxis-driven blueprints for integrating mental health services and therapeutic arts into the juvenile justice system. For clinical psychologists, social workers and correctional staff, these sections offer tangible, low-resource models for intervention. The focus on expressive arts, in particular, provides a creative framework for addressing trauma and facilitating emotional literacy in settings where traditional verbal therapy might be inaccessible or culturally inappropriate. This multidisciplinary approach is essential for creating genuinely reformative institutions, fulfilling the broader goal of justice that respects the child’s citizenship and developmental needs (Balagopalan, 2019).
Finally, the book highlights a critical need for the academic community: the synthesis of rights-based advocacy with empirical psychological research. The limitation regarding the selective portrayal of personality should be viewed not as a failure, but as an agenda-setting challenge. Future research, ideally utilizing participatory or mixed-methodologies, must work to integrate the book’s powerful normative commitments with personality-informed, evidence-based rehabilitation models. Practitioners require tools that affirm the child’s rights while simultaneously providing evidence-based strategies for managing and modifying high-risk behavior and addressing deeply entrenched psychological deficits.
In conclusion, Juvenile, Not Delinquent is a vital, compassionate and urgently needed text. It functions as a conscience for the judiciary and an instructional guide for practitioners seeking trauma-informed, ethical engagement with Children in Conflict with the Law. Its primary audience remains advocates and policymakers, but for the criminal psychology researcher, it offers a provocative reminder that achieving justice requires both the passion of an activist and the critical rigor of empirical inquiry.
