The concept of “constitutional identity” in the context of the EU has evolved significantly over the years, leading to complex debates and challenges. This chapter explores the historical trajectory of constitutional identity in the EU, from its early emergence in response to concerns about sovereignty to its current state of political and legal contestation. The chapter highlights that while constitutional identity is a global concept, the European experience exhibits distinct characteristics. Two noteworthy factors contributing to this distinctiveness are Europe’s legal integration and the inclusion of an identity clause in EU law (Article 4(2) TEU), a unique feature in supranational constitutionalism. The chapter argues against abandoning the concept of constitutional identity due to its recent abuses, asserting that it is a legally recognized notion within EU law. Instead, the chapter claims the focus should be on identifying and addressing abuses while acknowledging the concept’s importance in balancing competing fundamental principles within the EU legal framework. It concludes by emphasizing the need to distinguish between legitimate uses of constitutional identity and its abusive applications, advocating for the protection of constitutional identities that align with EU core principles and calling for the development of a European constitutional identity as a complementary concept.

This chapter examines the specific challenges faced by individuals with a history of childhood maltreatment (CM) as they transition into parenthood. The transition to parenthood involves many challenges that require adjustment, such as adapting to one’s own bodily changes (for the birthing parent), forging a parental identity, and attaching to the infant. Although these tasks may not be easy for any parent-to-be, those who have experienced maltreatment during their childhood may find them especially difficult. One crucial domain in which these early life experiences might influence their core parenting skills is the ability to emotionally regulate themselves as well as model positive emotional regulatory processes for their children. The author presents various perspectives to explain how these early life experiences of abuse and neglect affect parental emotion self-regulation and current parenting approaches. This chapter adds valuable tools to the parental toolbox of those with a history of CM and guides such parents on how their regulatory skills can be improved to better equip themselves to cope with potential parenting challenges and raise well-adjusted children.

Chapter 5 deals extensively with tutelle in the late nineteenth century by concentrating on the working lives of minors, mostly as apprentices and domestics. Minors performed a wide variety of tasks, some of them gender-specific. Young girls did mostly household and domestic tasks; boys became apprentices and learned artisanal crafts. Of the artisanal crafts, carpentry was the most popular, but masons, blacksmiths, tailors, seamstresses, and grain pounders took wards as apprentices. In the 1880s and 1890s, the state confided minors to institutions including Catholic missions, though not always to serve as apprentices. Case studies detail the ways in which their labor was exploited and how they responded to coercion and abuse. They reveal considerable delinquency and misery, which sometimes led to incarceration. The relationship between minors and their guardians in work settings was often characterized by discord, even violence. The chapter explores abuses in tutelle including the hiring out of minors without informing French authorities and the refusal of guardians to compensate minors for their labor when warranted. The chapter analyzes complaints lodged by guardians about minors and the ways in which minors exercised agency. It ends with an exploration of sexual exploitation and prostitution.

Chapter 6 deals with twentieth-century legislation of tutelle in response to earlier legislative failures, revelations about the lack of supervision, abuse of minors, and the disregard for French laws governing slavery and slave trading, all of which led to the crisis of 1903 and 1904.. It begins with the central legislative question in 1903 which revolved around contravention of the 1831 law which prohibited the purchase or selling of slaves. The question was whether the law applied to slave trading in Africa. Were French citizens engaging in outright slave trading or doing so under the guise of rachat? Revelations and judgments rendered in court cases at the time led to state intervention that gave rise to calls for censuses of liberated minors and rigorous accountability of guardianship. The chapter analyzes prominent cases of slave trading and their ramifications. It explores Governor Guy’s Act of 1903, which attempted to regulate guardianship effectively following his complaint that the redemption of minors was a subterfuge for slavery. The chapter offers an assessment of the clashes between leading French officials and ends with the replacement of the Procureur Général by the Secretaire Général as the primary administrator of guardianship.

Flight and other aspects of life in tutelle, such as marriage, abuse, and death, are taken up in Chapter 8. The chapter analyzes flight from the 1870s. Many minors fled after alleging mistreatment by their guardians. Others absconded to rid themselves of unhappy circumstances. The legal authorities normally acted and launched searches, often to no avail. Guardians generally disregarded the laws and regulations governing guardianship with impunity, including the requirement to notify the authorities when leaving Senegal with their wards. Some moved to other parts of Senegal; others to other parts of Africa; still others to France, temporarily or permanently. Although guardians had the upper hand in their dealings with minors and prevailed with the administration, the latter lodged complaints against them for poor treatment, deprivation, and abuse with police commissioners. Guardians often kept wards in tutelle well beyond the age of eighteen. While in tutelle, some wards, mostly females, got married following proposals mainly from newly emancipated slaves, predominantly Tirailleurs Sénégalais. In all cases, guardians took charge, made the arrangements, and notified the authorities. The chapter ends with the death of liberated minors in tutelle in both Senegal and France.

The separation of powers principle and antitrust both relate to power – a multidimensional, multifactorial, contextual, and evolutive notion – and notably deal with the concentration or the abuse of power. The separation of powers principle primarily relates to the branches of government and state functions. For its part, antitrust is linked to economic power.

Chapter 7 summarises the book’s findings and explains their implications for advocacy and law reform. It argues that recognition of the indivisibility of human rights is important to ensure that targeted services are provided for people with disability to address their disproportionate levels of socio-economic disadvantage. It decries the privileging of civil and political rights especially the right to legal capacity over all other rights, for encouraging the ‘lazy state’ that erroneously justifies its neglect of marginalised people in the name of upholding their human rights. It provides the example of personalised or individualised services premised on simplistic notions of choice and control, which often fail to uphold the rights of people with cognitive disabilities. It stresses the importance for the state and community of acknowledging difference to promote services that ensure civil, economic, political, social and cultural inclusion in all cases.

Shakespeare’s White Others’ conclusion engages The Comedy of Errors to reaffirm how race always matters. I argue that The Comedy of Errors’ concern with mistaken identity resonates with the modern Black experience. While considering my book’s preoccupation with the effects of racism, othering, anti-Blackness, and racial profiling, I turn to Patricia Akhimie’s Comedy of Errors criticism to consider how one can be “bruised with adversity” not just physically, but also psychologically. The conclusion’s title plays on the name of Shakespeare’s comedy because, as I see it, anti-blackness and anti-Black racism position white people, including white others, in opposition to Black people in what feels like a comedy of (t)errors: a space that is a genre of its own and akin to Negro-Sarah’s funnyhouse environment in Adrienne Kennedy’s Funnyhouse of a Negro. Racial tribulation is a life sentence tied to the Black existence.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) concluded that Canada had committed “cultural genocide” in government-supported residential schools that aimed to forcibly assimilate First Nations peoples since the nineteenth century. The TRC’s finding of cultural genocide in Canada can inform our understanding of American Indian boarding schools in the U.S. given the similarities and connections between the two systems. Both countries founded their schools with the aim of achieving total assimilation, or cultural genocide. Both, however, did much more than forcibly assimilate Indigenous youth. At the root of U.S. and Canadian Indigenous education project rests a genocidal truth: they may have committed all of the genocidal crimes enumerated in the UNGC. School administrators held people year after year with full knowledge of how lethal the schools were and an explicit plan to commit cultural genocide. This chapter demonstrates how scholars of the American Indian boarding schools can learn from the TRC, consider how we may evaluate the schools under the UNGC, and ultimately conduct additional data-gathering in order to reach a better understanding of what happened in these institutions.

Throughout human evolutionary history, infants and children have been dependent on adult caregivers for survival. The care that adults give is greatly influenced by prevailing conditions, including the availability of food and their social contacts, and also by their own experience of care. We use an evolutionary perspective to discuss possible reasons why children may suffer trauma at the hands of their parents and consider how children have adapted in response to such trauma to maximise their chances of survival in order to reach reproductive age and produce their own offspring. We examine how child maltreatment might differ at the hands of mothers, fathers and step-parents and discuss parent–offspring conflict, life history theory, attachment theory and differential susceptibility to help explain the complexity of childhood trauma. We end with recommendations for clinical practice.

This chapter looks at killers who were subject to abuse from their fathers. Heterosexual killer Richard Ramirez was subject to severe punishment and witnessed punishment of his brothers, while his cousin showed him photographs of the sexual assault of Vietnamese women. He consumed large amounts of drugs, which could have had a sensitizing effect on his violent tendencies. It appears that masturbatory fantasy involved domination and sexual violence against women. Danny Rolling is a heterosexual killer who had a terrible upbringing in which nothing seemed to go right. Rolling described the thrill of house-breaking. He took souvenirs from his killings and left his victims sexually posed, suggesting a signature. He described a struggle between right and wrong and showed dissociation. Heterosexual lust killer Keith Jesperson described the thrill that he derived from arson. Jane Toppan described a sexual thrill that she got from killing her patients with morphine injections.