Crime Is Not the Beginning: Health Rights and Adolescent Criminalization in Conflict-Affected Colombia
VIEWPOINT 15 April 2026
Felipe Agudelo-Hernández and Javier Díaz-Amaya
When a conflict-affected adolescent appears before a juvenile judge in Colombia, the hearing often comes at the end of a much longer trajectory of harm. Many adolescents have already endured displacement, confinement, hunger, school interruption, family rupture, coercive control by armed actors, and untreated psychological distress. Their contact with the justice system thus reflects not an isolated act but the cumulative effects of prolonged exposure to violence, deprivation, and state neglect. In many cases, criminalization becomes the point at which the state finally confronts a life it has long failed to protect.[1]
That is the central human rights problem. The right to health does not end with clinical care following recruitment into armed groups, detention, or punishment. For conflict-affected adolescents, health is inseparable from protection, food, education, housing, territory, and dignity across the life course. A rights-based lens changes the question. Instead of asking only how to “correct” adolescents after they enter punitive systems, it asks what was denied in childhood and adolescence that made punishment more likely in the first place.[2]
In Colombia, this is not an abstract concern. In the department of Chocó, armed conflict and institutional neglect overlap in ways that make the problem difficult to evade. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported that in 2023 Chocó accounted for 44% of the country’s confined population, with direct effects on access to food, education, and health care.[3] The Ombudsperson’s Office later reported 6,898 cases involving violations of fundamental rights in the department in 2024.[4] Research on child recruitment in Colombia shows that children and adolescents are drawn into armed dynamics where coercion, economic vulnerability, weak state presence, and illicit economies converge.[5] These are the conditions in which many adolescents are socialized before the state encounters them through punishment.
In Colombia, adolescents aged 14–17 who are accused of or found responsible for crimes enter the Criminal Responsibility System for Adolescents (abbreviated as SRPA in Spanish), a specialized framework established by the Code of Childhood and Adolescence. Formally, the SRPA is pedagogical, specific, and differentiated from the adult criminal system, and it is intended to guarantee restorative justice, truth, and reparation. Judges may impose a warning, rules of conduct, community service, assisted liberty, placement in a semi-closed setting, or, in limited cases, deprivation of liberty in a specialized center. All sanctions are legally defined as protective, educational, and restorative.[6]
This pattern reflects abandonment as much as resilience. The language of resilience can become politically convenient because it shifts attention away from states as duty bearers and onto the capacity of marginalized communities to survive repeated harm.[7] Adolescent suffering is often framed primarily as an individual mental health problem, obscuring the political and moral conditions that produce distress. The more distress is detached from those conditions, the easier it becomes for institutions to prioritize screening, diagnosis, correction, and treatment while leaving structural remedies aside.[8] An adequate response therefore requires confronting the conditions in which these adolescents have grown up, including war, deprivation, and institutional neglect.
That formal architecture matters because the problem is not that Colombian law openly endorses punishment over rights. The problem is the gap between formal design and lived sequence. Although the Colombian juvenile justice framework is formally rights based and restorative, conflict-affected adolescents often encounter state authority only once multiple rights failures have already accumulated. In that sense, the system risks functioning as a late response to long-standing neglect rather than as a form of early protection.[9] What many conflict-affected adolescents learn from the justice system is therefore not protection but hierarchy. Published research with justice-involved youth shows that legal institutions are often experienced less as spaces of rights realization than as punitive settings marked by weak voice, low trust, and limited respect. Under those conditions, young people learn that justice is something done to them, not something that protects them.[10] In conflict-affected settings, that distinction matters. A state that arrives late and mainly through sanction teaches a lesson about law that no civic education campaign can easily undo.
Critical children’s rights scholarship helps explain this pattern. In highly unequal settings, the formal recognition of rights often provides limited protection in everyday life. Conflict-affected children frequently encounter institutions through categories of suspicion, punishment, and control, even when legal frameworks recognize them as rights holders. By the time rights-based language reaches them, much of its protective force has already been weakened by prolonged exposure to violence, exclusion, and institutional neglect.[11] In this context, juvenile justice systems often operate as mechanisms for managing inequality after harm has accumulated, rather than as institutions capable of preventing it.
A more serious response would move upstream. Governments should treat forced displacement, recruitment exposure, confinement, school exclusion, food insecurity, family incarceration, and barriers to care not merely as predictive risk factors but as rights-deprivation indicators that should trigger specific state duties. The difference is functional rather than semantic: “Risk factors” describe the probability of later harm, while rights-deprivation indicators identify failures of protection that require a public response. In this sense, the path from diagnosis to action becomes clearer. School interruption should trigger school-retention and school-protection measures, and recruitment exposure and confinement should trigger territorial protection, humanitarian access, and safe mobility. Likewise, food insecurity should trigger nutritional and income support, and family rupture or incarceration should trigger family-based accompaniment and community reintegration.
Colombian law already requires the state to guarantee children’s rights, prevent their violation, restore them when breached, and ensure that sanctions are implemented with protective and educational guarantees.[12] Fulfilling these obligations demands more than the provision of mental health care or the management of adolescent conduct. Sustained disengagement from violence depends on institutions that are credible, reciprocal, and dignifying, as well as on communities that are prepared to receive adolescents without reproducing stigma and exclusion.[13] Reintegration, therefore, should be understood as a broader social and institutional process grounded in rights, protection, and recognition.
This is also the direction already set by international human rights law. General Comment 15 understands the child’s right to health as interdependent with the wider set of rights protected under the Convention on the Rights of the Child. General Comment 24 makes equally clear that every child accused of or recognized as having infringed the penal law must be treated in a manner consistent with dignity and worth.[14]
For conflict-affected adolescents in Colombia, this standard defines the minimum conditions for prevention, recovery, and non-repetition. Rights require effective protection before young people enter punitive systems, not simply once harm has already accumulated. When state action begins only after judicialization, institutions reinforce a pattern in which prior neglect is recast as an individual problem to be managed. In this sense, the delayed activation of rights reflects a broader failure of protection, recognition, and accountability.
The human rights community should be clearer about the stakes. Youth crime in conflict-affected settings should be understood as evidence of what happens when unprotected childhoods are later managed through punishment. Crime is not the beginning. That is precisely why punishment cannot be the answer.
Felipe Agudelo-Hernández, PhD, is a professor of social psychiatry at the University of Manizales, Colombia; director of the social health research line in the doctoral program in social sciences, childhood, and youth at the University of Manizales; and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Burgos, Spain.
Javier Díaz-Amaya, MSc, is a clinical professor of pediatrics at the Technological University of Pereira, Colombia.
Please address correspondence to Felipe Agudelo-Hernández. Email: afagudeloh81703@umanizales.edu.co.
Competing interests: None declared.
Copyright © 2026 Agudelo-Hernández and Díaz-Amaya. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
References
[1] J. L. Goldhagen, S. Shenoda, C. Oberg, et al., “Rights, Justice, and Equity: A Global Agenda for Child Health and Wellbeing,” Lancet Child and Adolescent Health 4/1 (2020); N. Hughes, M. Ungar, A. Fagan, et al., “Health Determinants of Adolescent Criminalisation,” Lancet Child and Adolescent Health 4/2 (2020); C. G. Victora, F. P. Hartwig, L. P. Vidaletti, et al., “Effects of Early-Life Poverty on Health and Human Capital in Children and Adolescents: Analyses of National Surveys and Birth Cohort Studies in LMICs,” Lancet 399/10336 (2022).
[2] Goldhagen et al. (see note 1); Hughes et al. (see note 2); Victora et al. (see note 1).
[3] International Committee of the Red Cross, “Balance humanitario Colombia 2024” (April 3, 2024), https://www.icrc.org/es/document/colombia-balance-humanitario-2024.
[4] Defensoría del Pueblo, “Cerca de 7.000 casos de derechos fundamentales vulnerados atendió la Defensoría en Chocó en 2024” (May 26, 2025), https://www.defensoria.gov.co/-/7000-casos-de-derecho-vulnerados-atendio-choco.
[5] M. Hurtado, Á. Iranzo Dosdad, and W. F. Rodríguez, “Labor Markets in Contexts of War: Recruitment and Trafficking of Child Soldiers in Colombia,” Colombia Internacional 114 (2023); W. Ortiz-Jiménez, “Reclutamiento forzado de niños, niñas y adolescentes: De víctimas a victimarios,” Encuentros 15/1 (2017).
[6] Ley 1098 de 2006, arts. 139, 140, 177, 178, 187; Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, “Sistema de Responsabilidad Penal para Adolescentes – SRPA,” https://www.icbf.gov.co/programas-y-estrategias/proteccion/sistema-de-responsabilidad-penal-para-adolescentes-srpa; Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, Manual Operativo de las Modalidades que Atienden Medidas y Sanciones del Proceso Judicial – SRPA (July 25, 2024), https://www.icbf.gov.co/manual-operativo-de-las-modalidades-que-atienden-medidas-y-sanciones-del-proceso-judicial-srpa-v4.
[7] J. Sedky, “Resilience Is No Substitute for Justice,” WBUR Cognoscenti (2025), https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2025/11/21/development-donor-sector-humanitarian-aid-human-rights-un-jehane-sedky; L. Cosgrove, “Addressing the Global Mental Health Crisis: How a Human Rights Approach Can Help End the Search for Pharmaceutical Magic Bullets,” Health and Human Rights 27/2 (2025).
[8] Sedky (see note 7); Cosgrove (see note 7).
[9] Ley 1098 de 2006; Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar, “Sistema de Responsabilidad Penal para Adolescentes” (see note 6); Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar (2024, see note 6).
[10] S. C. Enujioke, M. C. Aalsma, C. G. Meagher, et al., “Perception of Procedural Justice Amongst Previously Incarcerated Youth: Procedural Justice in Incarcerated Youth,” International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology 69/6–7 (2025); M. J. Bernuz Beneitez and E. Dumortier, “Why Children Obey the Law: Rethinking Juvenile Justice and Children’s Rights in Europe Through Procedural Justice,” Youth Justice 18/1 (2018); E. L. Portillos, A. A. Peguero, J. C. González, et al., “C’mon—You Should Know the Rules, Man’: Latinx Youth’s Perceptions of Procedural Justice and Chronic Punishment,” Urban Education 60/10 (2025).
[11] D. Reynaert, W. Vandenhole, A. Twum-Danso Imoh, and V. Llobet, “Critical Children’s Rights Studies: An Introduction,” in V. Llobet, D. Reynaert, A. Twum-Danso Imoh, and W. Vandenhole (eds), Critical Children’s Rights Studies: A Research Companion (Routledge, 2025).
[12] Ley 1098 de 2006, arts. 41, 177–178.
[13] Goldhagen et al. (see note 1); Cosgrove (see note 7); J. Garbarino, A. Governale, and D. Nesi, “Vulnerable Children: Protection and Social Reintegration of Child Soldiers and Youth Members of Gangs,” Child Abuse and Neglect 110 (2020); T. S. Betancourt, D. L. Thomson, R. T. Brennan, et al., “Stigma and Acceptance of Sierra Leone’s Child Soldiers: A Prospective Longitudinal Study of Adult Mental Health and Social Functioning,” Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry 59/6 (2020).
[14] Committee on the Rights of the Child, General Comment No. 15, UN Doc. CRC/C/GC/15 (2013); Committee on the Rights of the Child, General Comment No. 24, UN Doc. CRC/C/GC/24 (2019).