Historically the ringing of a curfew bell alerted the community
that young people should be returning home, ideally to a healthy family environment and a good night's sleep. Yet by the
early 20th century adolescent culture merged with a commercial leisure industry that depended on
nightly outings. As adolescents sought out public spaces ...
(Show more)Historically the ringing of a curfew bell alerted the community
that young people should be returning home, ideally to a healthy family environment and a good night's sleep. Yet by the
early 20th century adolescent culture merged with a commercial leisure industry that depended on
nightly outings. As adolescents sought out public spaces and forged alternative cultures, curfew law seemed an imperative to some observers and as important as compulsory schooling or child labour laws. Canada was a leader in implementing juvenile nocturnal curfew regulations.
Beginning in the 1880s, nocturnal curfews aimed at youth have been a
feature of modern life in Canada, in fact, the unfolding of Canadian curfew law is part of a broad national narrative,
spreading as it did from the small towns of the young Dominion to the suburbs of cosmopolitan
Canada. Canadians lobbied for, and debated, the regulation of youth's and children's behaviour,
especially at night. Advocating this street-clearing measure in the nineteenth century were early
women's organizations associated with Christian churches, like the
Woman's Christian Temperance Union. Because of their early association with repression and
small-town illiberalism,
larger cities resisted such measures, leaving the fantastic growth in curfew by-laws to smaller municipalities, towns and villages. In the larger centers, such as Montreal, curfews were
implemented by juvenile courts whose origins lie in the decades
following the 1908 Juvenile
Delinquents Act.
Curfew laws were a popular community resolution for combating an
uncontrollable
element within its boundaries: modern adolescence. Curfews spread to
large cities in the 1920s
and 1930s as the perception that modern youth were out of control
grew. In Montreal, for
example, it was during the interwar period that community groups began
lobbying the municipal
government for the juvenile curfew. Resistance to the curfew came from
politicians who felt
reluctant to put the state in the role of parent. The Second World War
changed this: as fathers
marched off to war and mothers were recruited into the war production,
latch-key children
multiplied, convincing municipal authorities and child welfare advocates
of the necessity of the
state to regulate children and youth at nightfall. During the Second
World War and in the
immediate postwar period anxieties about youth problems reinforced a
notion that community
policing of young people at night was not only wise but critical. More
recently, during the 1990s
the juvenile curfew has been embraced as a panacea for escalating
juvenile crime.
This paper surveys the development and usage of curfew law in
Canada beginning in the
1880s. Its principal purpose is to examine the underlying reasons why
and when nighttime
curfews for adolescents were implemented and contested. My aim is to
explain under what
circumstances towns and cities turned to curfews and how such laws have
been used to discipline
adolescents.
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