Preliminary Programme

The issue I would like to raise here is that of the emergence of the category of “juvenile delinquency”, perceived by experts, political authorities and public opinion as one of the major mental health risks lying in wait for the national youth population from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1950’s. I will try to track down the origins of this medicalization process from the 1900 onwards, when the first national and local movements favouring a massive intervention (public and private) in order to save the children at risk took place at the turn of the century, contributing to the gradual process of screening and sorting them through the agency of both juvenile court judges (children under the supervision of guardianship) medical school system (children diagnosed with mental retardation or mental pathology), and medico-social institutions (child guidance clinics). From the very beginning, this process tended to categorize the delinquent or difficult child as a morally and/or mentally deficient being, best to be removed from his usual environment and cared for in an altogether new context, either medical or educational. We will endeavour to focus on the numerous public debates that have been instrumental in forging this obsession about juvenile delinquency, in order to understand whatever institutional solutions were chosen to treat these problematic children. For example, the fact that delinquent youth or children were perceived as mentally ill children in need of a social and psychological cure to be implemented through a temporary process of exclusion was widely admitted, as will be shown through the analysis of the medical, educational, judicial and psycho-educational media, as well as in the legislative process. The main question that will be discussed here is whether this dynamic around the exclusion-medicalization axis did much to help framing the delinquent youth as a potentially normal citizen in need of reintegration-re-education to be gained through adapted treatment, or mainly contributed to his/her gradual process of marginalisation-stigmatization due to his/her impaired mental health status, finally leading him/her to a no-return point of social exclusion. (Show less)

The onset of war in 1939 sparked fears about the ‘moral health’ of Germany’s youth - with many fathers being mobilized and many mothers having to work in the war industry, the image of an unsupervised, unruly youth compromising the stability of the home front emerged. This was corroborated by statistics showing the rate of prosecutions involving persons under 18 rising by some 66 percent in the third-quarter of 1940 over the same period in the previous year. By 1942, over 52,000 juveniles had been sentenced throughout the Greater Reich, representing a 300 percent increase on the 1939 figure.

The period 1939 to 1953 saw a considerable amount of activity within the (still young) German juvenile justice system, beginning with a Decree for Protection against Juvenile Felons (Verordnung zum Schutz gegen Jugendliche Schwerverbrecher) on 4th September 1939 that allowed a person over 16 to be tried as an adult when “required for the protection of the people” and ending with a Youth Court Law (Jugendgerichtgesetz) passed on 4th August 1953 which aimed at the ‘denazification’ of the juvenile justice system. However, many of the laws and measures introduced during the National Socialist period were retained after 1945 by an allied administration in Berlin attempting to gain a handhold on what statistics showed to be a rapidly increasing juvenile crime rate.

Despite the considerable amount of attention afforded to delinquent and criminal youths within the wartime and immediate post-war period by institutions such as the court, the police and the welfare system, historians have to date predominantly investigated youth only where they were involved in the Hitler Youth or so-called oppositional youth groups such as the Edelweiss Pirates or the Swing Youth. The paper casts the net of enquiry further.
Utilising over 200 criminal case records from several youth courts in Berlin, which contain welfare office reports on the accused youth’s socio-economic environment (family life, work, general behaviour and so on) as well as the trial proceedings (with the reasons for the ‘appropriateness’ of the sentence as an ‘educational’ measure explained by the judge), a new insight into the importance of ‘wayward youth’ is afforded. Furthermore, discussions of the causes and consequences of youth crime in legal journals, newspaper articles and police reports provide additional perspectives on an evaluation of youth and crime in this period and allow the particular role of the court to be put into context.
The paper, focussing on the much neglected issue of youth crime spanning the Zero Hour into the post-war period, permits a new perspective in the ongoing assessment of continuities and discontinuities present in modern German history. (Show less)

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. (Show less)