Ages of Anxiety

Historical and Transnational Perspectives on Juvenile Justice

William S. Bush, David S. Tanenhaus

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479816675
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Family Law
• Index: Law

Six compelling histories of youth crime in the twentieth century Ages of Anxiety presents six case studies of juvenile justice policy in the twentieth century from around the world, adding context to the urgent and international conversation about youth, crime, and justice. By focusing on magistrates, social workers, probation and police officers, and youth themselves, editors William S. Bush and David S. Tanenhaus highlight the role of ordinary people as meaningful and consequential historical actors. After providing an international perspective on the social history of ideas about how children are different from adults, the contributors explain why those differences should matter for the administration of justice. They examine how reformers used the idea of modernization to build and legitimize juvenile justice systems in Europe and Mexico, and present histories of policing and punishing youth crime. Ages of Anxiety introduces a new theoretical model for interpreting historical research to demonstrate the usefulness of social histories of children and youth for policy analysis and decision-making in the twenty-first century. Shedding new light on the substantive aims of the juvenile court, the book is a historically informed perspective on the critical topic of youth, crime, and justice.

Part I

Juvenile Delinquency and Modernization Projects

1

From Criminal Justice to the Social Clinic

The Role of Magistrates in the Circulation of Transnational Models in the Twentieth Century

David Niget

The invention of the juvenile court in the early 20th century gave rise to a transnational movement in which Belgium was a major player. Reconciling legal orthodoxy and the socialization of criminal law practices, the country was a bastion of “social defense,” a penal doctrine that aimed to reconcile child protection and the protection of society through a preventive approach combining penal and social techniques. Belgium was also a prominent actor in the process of medicalizing juvenile delinquency. In a country where moral tradition meets scientific thinking, a system of medical and pedagogical guidance was set up to rehabilitate young offenders to make them useful, autonomous citizens. Belgium’s juvenile justice system was the synthesis of a postpenal approach with a medical one.

From the late 19th century, Belgium played an important role on the international scene, contributing to the international movement that introduced the juvenile court as a legal and institutional model. The first International Association of Child Welfare (1921) had its headquarters in Brussels. This association played a key role in the Child Welfare Committee of the League of Nations (LON) created in 1924, following the adoption of the first Declaration of the Rights of the Child. It gave rise to the first International Association of Children’s Judges (IACJ, 1930), also based in Brussels.

But the international scene was a field of concurrences. Aside from the normative approach adopted by Belgian jurists, new actors in the field, such as the Save the Children International Union (SCIU), established in the aftermath of the First World War, advocated humanitarian intervention, which was deemed preferable by the British Foreign Office. Several conceptions of child welfare thus appeared in a context of increasing child welfare policies as a means of political pacification in Europe.

More broadly, we can discuss the tension that plagued the field of child advocacy throughout the 20th century between risk management imperatives aimed at protecting vulnerable children and the individual rights of minors who acquire citizenship status in the name of political emancipation.

Belgian child savers and the International Association of Children’s Judges influenced the evolution of models and proposals that were disseminated internationally. We shall explore the main issues that were debated on the international scene following this “transnationalization” of child welfare policies, through the construction of a cause presented as universal even though it was the fruit of highly specific, historical contingencies.1

From Philanthropy to Public Policies: The “Transnationalization” of Child Welfare

The end of the 19th century saw the emergence of a vast international movement supporting the introduction of specialized justice for minors. The international cosmopolitan philanthropy of charity and national aspirations found common ground.2 Individual countries at the time were seeking to introduce public policies to deal with poverty, of which juvenile delinquency was an alarming manifestation.

A popular means of bringing about social reform during this period was the congress. As an international meeting, albeit on a private basis, the congress became the modern means of political communication, allying expertise with lobbying for reform. The transnational space carved out here was not only a broad stage for communication occupied by a network of diverse actors; the transnational concept became a source of knowledge and expertise in itself, enabling the circulation of know-how. Furthermore, the transnational structure even served as an argument for reform: by encouraging national legislators to cast off potential conservatisms, the foreign example was held up as a reason to “modernize” legislation and public action.3 This movement also gained currency in an age that we nowadays describe as the “first globalization,” which reached its height between 1880 and 1914. The “social question” at the time became a popular subject of transnational exchanges in the name of a shared sense of the limitations of liberal laissez-faire, alongside the socialist political “threat” that was alarming the elites. In this context, the dialectics between the “Old” and the “New” world paid off: social innovations crossed the Atlantic, associated with all the trappings of expertise and modernity.4

Through these congresses, the new reformers formulated their aspirations and so defined an ideal type of juvenile justice, based on the “American model.”5 A symbol of social innovation, juvenile courts, the first of which opened in Chicago in 1899, subsequently became the universal reference.6 The American and European reformers adopted its principles. Edouard Julhiet, a French engineer who traveled abroad, gave an enthusiastic talk on the subject at the Musée social in Paris upon his return from the United States.7 In Belgium, after several aborted reforms following Jules Lejeune’s proposals of 1889, which were inspired by French legislation on the destitution of paternal authority, the more family-oriented American innovation was presented at the congress for child protection in Liège in 1905 by the philanthropist Madame Juliette Carton de Wiart, following a visit to the United States.8 As the wife of the minister for justice appointed in 1911, she played a decisive role in passing new legislation in Belgium, despite reticence in legal circles.9

The penitentiary congress held in Washington in 1910 endorsed the reform movement and proposed more precise definitions of institutional standards, making the children’s judge central to the reformed system:

The magistrates responsible for hearing the cases of juvenile delinquents, including the examining magistrates for such cases, should be selected above all based on their aptitude to understand and sympathize with minors, and they should also have some specific knowledge of social and psychological sciences.

The acceptance of the measure attests to its perceived significance: the resolution was adopted unanimously by the fourth section of the Penitentiary Commission.10 A similar impulse emerged in Paris in 1911, at the first Congrés des tribunaux pour enfants (Juvenile Court Congress). There, as in Washington, the conferees agreed that the juvenile judge should be specialized, sit alone in the manner of a benevolent father, and “may only take measures to protect, defend and assist the child.”11

The age of criminal responsibility then became the subject of debates and strategies among “child savers.” Raised from 16 to 18 years in France by law in 1906, it remained at 16 years in Belgium with regard to offences, and was increased to 18 in the event of incorrigibility. Many countries have maintained the age of 16 as the border between childhood and adulthood.12 The effort to establish a fixed boundary aimed above all at presenting the child as a vulnerable figure, far removed from the image of the corrupted youth promoted in the first mass media from the mid-19th century onwards. Astonishingly, the notion of adolescence, which was fundamental to the establishment of the American juvenile courts, remained far less conspicuous in Europe.

Although the suggestion that adolescence was “the penultimate stage before the eradication of juvenile delinquency” was met with great enthusiasm, the American representative at the Paris congress was met with hostility by a section of the French lawyers.13 Albert Rivière, honorary secretary of the Société générale des prisons, condemned the scheme as “neglectful of all the most elementary principles of our public law and criminal law,” arguing that it ignored the guarantee of rights to a defense and would give too much power to the social worker, who in the case of secular France took the form of a monk or a nun.14 The debate extended to the contradictions between protection and rights, which were not as yet the rights of children, whose interests were subsumed within those of the community, but the rights of the family and more specifically the rights of the father, from whom this intrusive law would sap the “natural” authority. In this respect, it is interesting to note that the model of a dedicated juvenile court in the United States, specifically in Chicago, was actually opposed by the Democratic Party, owing to its discretionary nature. As explained by David Tanenhaus, in the legal battle that in 1913 nearly saw the court closed down, Judge Julian Mack defended his institution by invoking the “revolution” at work in America, Europe, and Australia.15 The institution’s legitimacy hinged on its proliferation around the world. Thus, through a circular legitimization process the new institutional models and mechanisms for managing social problems fueled the international transfer of ideas, which in turn reinforced their position within their own national borders.

In spite of a certain reticence and with the specific nuances of each national context, a hard core of countries crystallized in support of the reform of juvenile courts: the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The circulation of key figures and philanthropic sociability introduced a “contagion of reform,” to borrow the expression from contemporary observers.16 A shared doxa was created, albeit within a flexible framework. Indeed, despite the invocation of “models” and real legislative convergences (the 1908 laws in the United Kingdom and Canada, and the 1912 laws in France and Belgium), national variants of this reformatory ideal remained specific to each legal system, reflecting the local professional concurrences and national political tensions.17 French, Swiss, and Belgian reformers at the first International Congress for Child Welfare in Brussels in 1913 envisaged the establishment of an international organization that could generalize a certain number of norms in a transnational spirit of cooperation. Although a permanent international commission was indeed set up to organize child welfare congresses after the First World War, the arrival of the Second World War brought an end to any vague attempts at creating a permanent institutional body in Brussels.18

In this system, the role of the children’s judge was crucial. From the outset, he was the spokesperson of a new cause, the defense of the child who was a victim or in danger. We then see the appearance of media-friendly proselytizers: Judge Ben Lindsey in the United States and Judge Henri Rollet in France, soon followed by Judge Paul Wets in Belgium.19 Childhood then became a higher moral cause, requiring a certain number of social reforms and justifying the mobilization of society as a whole. In so doing, c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Juvenile Delinquency and Modernization Projects
• Part II: Policing and Punishing Youth Crime
• Acknowledgments
• About the Contributors
• Index