Inconsistencies in Legislative Criminal Policy of "Child and Adolescent Protection Code" and "Family and Youth Protection Code"

Paying attention to the interests of children and teenagers in formulating an efficient criminal policy is an important part of rationalization and transformation of the legal system in interaction with science and paralegal institutions that are effective in the efficiency of the criminal policy system. Adopting a differential criminal policy towards children and teenagers, in the areas of preventing their delinquency and victimization, requires legislative change in the first step.

The current research is of a qualitative type and the research method is document analysis with a critical approach to two approved laws in the field of family law.

Iran's legislative criminal policy in protecting children against delinquency and victimization suffers from goal-based, structure-oriented and function-oriented inadequacies. The two laws criticized in this article have problems in the three mentioned levels.

Iran's criminal policy maker, with the approval of the "Law on the Protection of Children and Adolescents" and the "Law on the Protection of the Family and Youth of the Population" in recent years, despite advancing the strategy of differential protection of children, according to the present article, has suffered from inadequacies in the prevention, criminalization, prosecution and punishment of crimes related to children and adolescents. Violation of some rules of criminal liability, lack of attention to the types of prevention and the capacity of actors in charge of each type, failure to respect the hierarchy and separation of powers, orders contrary to social norms and scientific data are some of the challenges raised in this research. The effects of this challenge are discussed, explained and criticized in the articles of the laws. This article, by descriptive analytical method and collecting printed and electronic sources, in the field of protective criminal policy and critical legal criminology, proposes necessary amendments to the two aforementioned laws and a related law.