Juvenile Sexual Violence Against Women and the Conceptual Limits of Criminal Liability

Event details

The Yorkshire Criminal Law Forum, a collaborative research initiative by the Universities of York, Leeds, and Sheffield, welcomes Marina Sáen (EUI) to York. She will present her paper: 'Juvenile Sexual Violence Against Women and the Conceptual Limits of Criminal Liability'.

Rape committed by children below the minimum age of criminal responsibility exposes a fundamental strain in criminal law’s justificatory structure. In such cases, the state must simultaneously recognise the child as a subject of diminished culpability and as an agent of serious harm, while also sustaining its claim to protect those harmed by sexual violence, often women and girls. Shielding minors from prosecution prevents premature criminalisation but often leaves the state unable to vindicate the survivor’s harm. Conversely, prosecuting in the name of public condemnation vindicates the survivor’s harm but risks collapsing developmental safeguards and criminalising children in ways that foreclose their own vulnerability. The dilemma thus reveals a structural tension within criminal law: one form of vulnerability can only be acknowledged through the negation of the other.

This paper argues that the problem is not a marginal anomaly but a revelation of criminal law’s conceptual architecture. Built upon individuated responsibility and incident-centred harm, its core categories—culpability and proportionality—together with its protective functions, are structurally incapable of accommodating situations where duties of protection and punishment converge. The treatment of juvenile sexual violence thus exposes the limits of criminal liability: the binary categories of liable/non-liable and culpable/inculpable prove inadequate when victimhood and perpetration are entangled. In these cases, criminal law’s claim to serve as an instrument of justice, order, and societal protection becomes unsettled.

To move beyond this impasse, the paper develops a feminist abolitionist critique through three interlinked concepts: structural safety, which reconceives justice as infrastructural labour transforming the conditions that produce sexual harm; durational justice, which shifts accountability onto a temporal register aligning survivor recognition with the offender’s developmental trajectory; and a cumulative epistemology of harm, which reframes knowledge away from discrete incidents and towards the institutional pathways that sediment vulnerability. While situated within abolitionist critique, the argument ultimately engages criminal law theory at its core: the justification of liability and the state’s authority to punish.

If you wish to attend remotely, please contact Dr Mattia Pinto who will be able to share the Zoom details.

About the speaker

Marina Sáen

Marina Sáenz is a PhD candidate at the European University Institute. Her PhD thesis is entitled "Reimagining Justice for Underage Offenders and Female Victims of Rape".