Making addicts: critical reflections on agency and responsibility from lawyers and decision makers

Abstract

Various activities are increasingly characterised as ‘addictions’, including within the law, and raise important questions. Do ‘addicts’ have agency? Do addictions shape social problems such as family and sexual violence? And how do those involved in legal systems perceive addictions? This paper explores these questions. Drawing on qualitative interviews with lawyers and decision makers (N = 48), it explores addiction in law. Lawyers and decision makers see themselves as playing important roles in making addiction and ‘addicts’. Addiction is an effect principally of legal strategy, and other forces. Legal processes bring differing conceptions of agency and responsibility into being, problematising understandings of agency as an ‘effect’ of addiction, or as pre-existing legal processes. There are also important variations in approach regarding different addictions. Alcohol or other drug addiction is seen as ‘genuine’, and a major factor in family violence, while sex addiction lacks credibility. I explore some implications of these approaches.

Key words:

• addiction
• alcohol and other drugs
• family violence
• gender
• judges
• law
• lawyers
• qualitative research
• sexual violence

Ethical standards

Declaration of conflicts of interest

Kate Seear has no declared no conflicts of interest

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee (reference number CF16/1662−2016000868) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study

Additional information

Funding

The data reported here were collected for an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship [DE160100134]. A preliminary analysis was undertaken while funded by the DECRA Fellowship. A supplementary analysis of these data was conducted while the author was funded by Australian Research Council Future Fellowship [FT200100099]. This article was completed under the Future Fellowship.