Juvenile Delinquency and the Limits of Western Influence, 1850-2000

H. Ellis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137349521
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume brings together a wide range of case studies from across the globe, written by some of the leading scholars in the field, to explore the complex ways in which historical understandings of childhood and juvenile delinquency have been constructed in a global context.

1

Introduction: Constructing Juvenile Delinquency in a Global Context

Heather Ellis

East–West divisions

The division between East and West has been one of the most important structuring principles used to make sense of the world both today and in the past. Historically, it has been most commonly applied by individuals and groups who have identified with the West and has been used to denote a particular geopolitical relationship, between the West as the stronger, superior partner and the weaker, dependent East.¹ Insofar as transfers of legal ideas and institutions have been considered by historians in the context of East–West divisions, they have mostly been seen as taking place from West to East, and tend to be interpreted within a discourse of imperial “improvement” and “civilization”. In recent years (in particular, since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism²), it has become popular to critique this division and to question how it came into being and what relation it bears to historical reality.³ The East– West binary has been articulated in a variety of geopolitical contexts: within the continent of Europe, between Western imperial powers and their “Eastern” colonies and between the Western and Eastern hemispheres more broadly. In the post-war period, the East–West division was once again reinterpreted against the background of the Cold War to refer primarily to the division between the capitalist “free” West and the Soviet Communist East. Although this was a significant variation of the traditional East–West division, it should not be seen as a separate phenomenon, as it continued to bear the familiar imprint of “superior” West versus “inferior” East.⁴

Juvenile delinquency and the East–West division

Although perhaps not at first apparent, the East–West binary has been fundamental to the ways in which juvenile delinquency has been understood both by contemporary actors and scholars studying delinquency in the past. It is often identified as a profoundly Western problem. This is primarily due to the close association it enjoys with another idea with which the West is often coupled conceptually – modernity.⁵ Scholars tend to link the appearance of juvenile delinquency as a social problem in western Europe and the US with the emergence of certain “processes of modernity” – industrialization, urbanization and the associated weakening of traditional social bonds and authority structures, in particular the separation of home and work. This link is frequently made even more specific by focusing attention on the nineteenth century in particular, during which the term “juvenile delinquency” first appeared and gained widespread usage in Britain. By contrast, the East (imagined variously as eastern Europe, the colonial East, the Far East or the Communist East) has often been seen to exhibit low levels of juvenile crime, which is explained either in terms of its pre-modern state (in the case of the colonial East or the Far East) or as a result of its rejection of “Western” modernity (in the case of the Communist East).⁶ The relative strength of familial and community bonds and traditional structures of authority in the East are often stressed by contrast. Likewise, any signs of juvenile delinquency tend to be associated with the onset of “modernization processes”, which, in turn, are seen as the result of “Western” influence.⁷ The emergence of juvenile crime as a problem in the colonies of west European empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been interpreted in this way, as have similar developments in the non-colonial East, for example, in China. In the latter case, growing levels of youth crime are attributed to the influence of the West through trade, war, migration and other forms of contact.⁸ In this oversimplified picture, the East is idealized as naïve, romantic, pre-modern and peaceful and is used as a foil to condemn the modern West as fallen, immoral and corrupt by comparison. Although the East would seem to emerge as the moral victor in representations like these, they are narratives created by Western nations in order to critique their own societies. They have in most cases little or nothing to do with the reality of life in whichever “East” is being discussed. In other narratives of juvenile delinquency involving the East–West division, the moral superiority of the West is stressed. Legal and institutional measures acknowledging and addressing juvenile crime are interpreted as a result of contact with the West and usually seen as progressive marks of “civilization”. Once again, in such narratives the agency and importance of individuals and groups within the East are reduced, if not nullified.

Historians of juvenile delinquency and the East–West division

It is important to note that very few of the debates just mentioned involve historians. The vast majority of studies involving international, let alone intercontinental comparative studies of juvenile delinquency (which have become increasingly numerous in recent years) have been carried out by criminologists and sociologists.⁹ Insofar as such works engage with a historical dimension at all, they tend to include at best a short historical overview, focused on a narrative of key legal and institutional developments in the last 50 or at most 100 years.¹⁰ Although there have been isolated historical studies of juvenile delinquency in other parts of the world,¹¹ in general, historians have been reluctant to look outside of the West.¹² The standard work is a national study focused on the period from the mid-to-late nineteenth century to the present, which continues to assume a necessary link between juvenile delinquency, the West and processes of modernity. In this way, historians of juvenile delinquency have tended to produce narratives of Western superiority and Eastern dependence similar to those we have already examined.¹³ They rarely ask important questions such as: can one speak of “juvenile delinquency” before the modern period, before the term itself was coined? What about older, non-Western ideas and assumptions about the behaviour of children and juveniles? How do imported Western ideas about juvenile delinquency interact with pre-existing traditions? How completely were Western notions taken up in both colonial and non-colonial settings, and what were the reasons behind the different impact of Western ideas about juvenile delinquency in different parts of the world? Most importantly, such studies rarely ask, what is the Western notion of juvenile delinquency? Does it only exist in stereotype form outside the West, or can we really speak of one, coherent understanding of delinquency and of childhood, which underpins it, in the West itself?

The two-volume History of Juvenile Delinquency: A Collection of Essays on Crime Committed by Young Offenders, in History and in Selected Countries, edited by Priscilla F. Clement and Albert G. Hess and published between 1990 and 1993, at first appears to engage with precisely these questions. However, although countries such as Egypt and Japan are included, it is always with a focus on the successful exporting of Western ideas about juvenile crime. Older, pre-existing notions of childhood and juvenile delinquency and their interactions with imported Western ideas are not discussed. As Priscilla Clement explains in the introductory chapter,

The parts of the world studied include the Near East, Western Europe, North America and Asia. However, the emphasis is on Western nations and on countries elsewhere in the world which have been particularly influenced by Western approaches to juvenile justice.¹⁴

This bias is arguably a side effect of the fact that this study is an exercise in traditional comparative rather than in transnational or global history. The writers do not seek to understand the ways in which understandings of childhood and delinquency were shaped by, and in, the very act of border-crossing, of cultural encounter. All cultural agency is located in the Western idea of delinquency; there seems to be an implicit assumption that this idea will subdue and ultimately replace pre-existing notions, which are not discussed in any detail. A more recent study, Child Welfare and Social Action in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: International Perspectives, published in 2001 and edited by Jon Lawrence and Pat Starkey, is entirely limited to countries traditionally seen as belonging to the West: Canada, Britain and America.¹⁵

Pamela Cox and Heather Shore’s important edited volume Becoming Delinquent, which appeared in 2002, has moved the study of historical juvenile delinquency forward. Promisingly, they set themselves the aim of exploring how juvenile delinquency has varied “between and within states and across different periods of time”.¹⁶ The second aspect of this research question they go a considerable way toward achieving. They make a convincing case for arguing that many features of juvenile delinquency (panics about urban culture, poor parenting, dangerous pleasures, family breakdown, national fitness and future social stability) which historians have felt to be particularly characteristic of the nineteenth century can be found in earlier centuries, going back well into the early modern period.¹⁷ Indeed, they argue against the popular idea that juvenile delinquency was “invented” in the early nineteenth century, despite this being the period in which the term came into use.¹⁸ Building primarily on the work of Paul Griffiths, they argue convincingly that the early nineteenth-century discourse represents at most a “re-invention”¹⁹ or reconceptualization of earlier understandings of juvenile crime, just one more “sequential stage in social commentaries on youth that evolved over time”.²⁰ This is without doubt an important theoretical gain in work on historical delinquency as it provides an answer to one of the most important open questions – “can something exist without the power of prior definition”?²¹ In his chapter in Becoming Delinquent, Paul Griffiths answers in the affirmative, describing delinquent youth as a transhistorical phenomenon, something which “can be found in all centuries”.²² The editor and contributors to this volume are in full agreement with this view of juvenile delinquency.

Arguably, though, Cox and Shore were somewhat less successful with regard to their first aim – to study how ideas of delinquency vary “between and within states”. The chapters included focused mostly on the unit of the nation state and were limited to countries within western Europe. While such a survey is necessary and valuable, there are significant problems with restricting the geographical reach of the case studies in this way. Most importantly, as Cox and Shore themselves acknowledge, their study tends to emphasize similarity over difference and creates the impression of “a uniquely European construction or response to juvenile delinquency”.²³ While the various chapters reveal some variations between the individual states, the editors nonetheless place considerable emphasis on the “many important parallels in different European communities’ attempts to frame and to solve the question of delinquency”.²⁴ They admit that by restricting their analysis to western Europe they “overlook vital developments in other parts of the world, not least Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, North America and European colonial societies”.²⁵

Although the volume is useful in extending backwards into the seventeenth century the period in which we see ideas of juvenile delinquency developing, it fails to say much about juvenile delinquency as it existed across space – not just about delinquency within different countries (although there is clearly a need for a wider geographical spread), but also about the ways in which Western ideas travelled to other cultural contexts via colonial and imperial systems, transnational migration for economic or political reasons, the spread of international media, magazines, television and the internet, and even more importantly, the differing degree to which Western understandings and assumptions about childhood and juvenile crime were adopted, rejected or adapted in different parts of the world. It is a basic theoretical assumption underpinning all the essays in this volume, that notions of juvenile delinquency, both in the West and in non-Western contexts, are constructed and understood within and through cross-cultural encounters and can only be made sense of by placing developments within a global frame. Looking at individual countries in isolation and comparing them alongside each other neglects the considerable extent to which cultural interactions and transfers were responsible for constructing understandings of juvenile delinquency in different parts of the world. A cross-border or cultural transfer model also allows for more interest and agency to be given to the parts of the world affected by Western ideas, for the strength of pre-existing notions to be realized and for the (often very real) limitations of Western influence in these areas to be appreciated.

By contrast, this collection is divided into five parts based on a combination of different geopolitical spaces and thematic concepts relevant to questions of historical juvenile delinquency. While the sections are divided into “Colonial Contexts”, “Transnational Migration”, “Juvenile Delinquency and War”, “Cold War Contexts” and “The Post-war State”, the terms “East” and “West” are also examined critically throughout. Multiple meanings of East and West are examined, and the validity of the terms themselves and the binary opposition they seek to establish is also questioned.

The first part explores the construction of the East–West relationship through the discourse of colonialism, with essays looking at the construction of moral and immoral boyhood in metropolitan Britain and colonial India in the late nineteenth century and the problems faced by the Netherlands Indies colonial administration in implementing juvenile justice in the early twentieth century. The second part looks at juvenile delinquency and transnational migration, placing the emphasis on movement across boundaries (both national and cultural) and seeking to move beyond the tendency to think in fixed categories of East and West. Here, the importance of cross-cultural movement in establishing and contesting meanings of juvenile delinquency and crime is examined in two very different, yet mutually illuminating case studies of Jewish communities in late nineteenth-century Budapest and Latino youth gangs in late twentieth and early twenty-first century Spain. In both cases, the complexity of ideas and assumptions about childhood and the meaning of delinquency within particular transnational communities is highlighted, as is the degree to which some sections of those communities adapt “foreign” ideas about juvenile delinquency much more readily than others. The third part focuses on the relationship between juvenile crime and war in an early twentieth-century context, with essays looking at the experience of young offenders in Germany’s courts against the background of the First World War and the reconceptualization of the relationship between juvenile delinquency and the state in East Asia within the context of the First and Second Sino-Japanese Wars. Both studies highlight the role of war as a transnational experience, resulting in acute cultural dislocation at home, and, as part of this, a fundamental rethinking of the function of traditionally conceived juvenile delinquency. The final two parts move forward in time to focus on the post-war period. The fourth part concentrates on the construction of East and West in the context of the Cold War and examines the implications of the opposition between capitalist West and Communist East for understandings of juvenile delinquency in Soviet Russia and white middle-class America. Although traditionally seen as belonging to the diametrically opposed binaries of East and West, both case studies reveal the complex ways in which ideas of childhood and youth crime in both societies were shaped by, and were indeed dependent on, the broader global context and transnational experience of the Cold War. The final part focuses on the relationship between juvenile delinquency and the post-war state in Britain and Turkey, two countries which, in different ways, struggled to define themselves within a world increasingly polarized between East and West. As Kate Bradley shows, the debate in Britain (traditionally seen as a purely internal conversation) about the apparent failure of the welfare state to reduce rates of juvenile crime was shaped within a wider global context of British imperial decline, rising immigration and decolonization. From this, and from other case studies (including those examining Cold War America, and Latino/a youth gangs in modern Spain), we see that ideas about juvenile delinquency and childhood in the West were equally dependent upon and shaped within a b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction: Constructing Juvenile Delinquency in a Global Context
• Part I: Colonial Contexts
• Part II: Juvenile Delinquency and Transnational Migration
• Part III: Juvenile Delinquency and War: Early Twentieth-Century Perspectives
• Part IV: Cold War Contexts
• Part V Juvenile Delinquency and the Post-War State
• Index