Children and the ‘new biopolitics of control’: Identification, identity and social order

This article addresses questions arising from debates surrounding issues of surveillance and privacy in the light of rapid developments in new technologies, specifi cally electronic databases for information sharing between professionals and agencies. We examine claims that the con-juncture of technology and genetics, producing identifi cation technologies that ‘read ’ the body, have heralded the emergence of a ‘biopolitics of control’, paying particular attention to the ways in which children and young people in the UK have become a focus of new control techno-logies. We argue that current developments, in neglecting the embodied nature of subjectivity, confuse identifi cation with processes of identity formation, thereby contributing to conditions that nurture the problems of social disorder such technology is meant to reduce. This argument raises a set of questions for the law and processes of youth justice that we explore through a discussion of the inclusion of children and young people in the UK DNA data base