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

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.