Gender, Justice and Welfare: Bad Girls in Britain, 1900-1950

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Gender, Justice and Welfare

Frontispiece: Fatherless and Out of Control (Our Waifs and Strays, December 1915, p. 268).

Gender, Justice and Welfare Bad Girls in Britain, 1900–1950 Pamela Cox Lecturer in Sociology University of Essex

© Pamela Cox 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–74434–9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cox, Pamela, 1970– Gender, justice and welfare : bad girls in Britain, 1900–1950 / Pamela Cox. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–74434–9 1. Female juvenile delinquents—Great Britain—History—20th century. 2. Female offenders—Great Britain—History—20th century. 3. Juvenile corrections—Great Britain—History—20th century. 4. Discrimination in juvenile justice administration—Great Britain—History—20th century. 5. Sex discrimination in justice administration—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Title: Bad girls in Britain, 1900–1950. II. Title. HV9145.A5 C69 2002 364.36′082′09410904—dc21 2002029249 10 12

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents

List of Photographs

vii

List of Figures

viii

Abbreviations

ix x

Acknowledgements 1 Defining Reforming the ‘modern’ girl Absences and presences Gender, justice and citizenship

1 3 8 12

2 Counting Girls and the juvenile justice system Theft Violence Sex, care and protection

17 18 26 33 37

3 Policing Statutory strategies Private justice

51 52 66

4 Reforming Domestic economy Disciplinary economy Defining reform

80 86 95 104

5 Writing Entering care Negotiating care Beyond care

107 109 120 129

6 Diagnosing Pathology, puberty and the sex-instinct Families, social relations and subcultures Consuming expert diagnoses

135 137 146 156

v

vi

Contents

7 Redefining

162

Notes

173

Bibliography

206

Subject Index

224

Name Index

227

List of Photographs Frontispiece: Fatherless and Out of Control (Our Waifs and Strays, December 1915, p. 268). 1 2

3

4 5 6

‘Our Society’s Homes for Waifs and Strays, 1907’ (Our Waifs and Strays, March 1907, p. 57). ‘Girls’ Reformatory at the beginning of the century’ (M. Simmons, Making Citizens: A Review of the Aims, Methods and Achievements of the Approved Schools of England and Wales, London: HMSO, 1945, facing p. 8). ‘Approved School girls of today’ (M. Simmons, Making Citizens: A Review of the Aims, Methods and Achievements of the Approved Schools of England and Wales, London: HMSO, 1945, facing p. 8). ‘St. Michael’s Home, Shipton-under-Wychwood’ (Our Waifs and Strays, December 1908, p. 465). ‘St. Mary’s Home, Cold Ash’ (Our Waifs and Strays, December 1908, p. 465). ‘Youthful Washerwomen – Cold Ash’ (Our Waifs and Strays, December 1914, p. 488).

Photographs reproduced by kind permission of the Children’s Society Archive and HMSO.

vii

ii

67

83

84 88 89 92

List of Figures 1 Total proceeded against in the juvenile courts, selected years, 1910–46 (Criminal Statistics, 1910, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930, 1935, 1946). 2 Juvenile court outcomes, selected years, 1910–46 (Criminal Statistics, 1910, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930, 1935, 1938, 1946). 3 Charges brought against females under 21 in Assizes and Quarter Sessions, 1905 (Criminal Statistics, 1905, broken down by age and gender). 4 Charges brought against females under 21 in Summary Courts, 1905 (Criminal Statistics, 1905). 5 Charges faced by girls aged 14–17 in Magistrates’ Courts, 1946 (Criminal Statistics, 1946). 6 Girls’ certified schools active in 1915–34, by closing date (Home Office Directories, 1915–34 and D.H. Thomas, Annotated List).

viii

20 23

26 27 28

82

Abbreviations Cmnd Ch Soc ERO LMA LRO Hartley HO JAPGW LCC MABYS MEPO OP PRO

Command Paper Children’s Society Essex Record Office London Metropolitan Archive Liverpool Record Office Hartley Library, University of Southampton Home Office Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women London County Council Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants Metropolitan Police Official Publications, University of Cambridge Public Record Office

ix

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people for their comments on all or parts of this book and on the thesis from which some of it was drawn: Lucy Bland, Jo Campling, Eamonn Carrabine, Loraine Gelsthorpe, Frances Heidensohn, Jane Hindley, David Pinder, Mike Roper, Heather Shore, Penny Summerfield, Gill Sutherland and Deborah Thom. I have also benefited from discussions with many colleagues, friends and graduate students at the University of Cambridge, University College Chichester and the University of Essex. Very special thanks to Bill Hayton for his patience, critical eye and good humour throughout this project, and to Tess for ensuring its completion. I was greatly helped by staff at the Public Record Office, the London Metropolitan Archive, Essex Record Office, Cambridge University Library and the University of Southampton’s Hartley Library. Particular thanks are due to Ian Wakeling, archivist at the Church of England Children’s Society (formerly the Waifs and Strays Society), who was very generous with his time and interest. I must also thank those who wrote to me in response to my appeal for personal stories. I sincerely hope that I have used their contributions as they would have wished. I dedicate this book to my parents, Allan and Maureen Cox, whose support for my work has been constant, and to my grandmothers, Hilda Cox and Ethel Mary Smith, whose stories gave me so many things, including a fascination for history.

x

1 Defining

In the late twentieth century, a panic broke out about girls. They were engaging in more crime, becoming more violent and joining more gangs. They were doing so because they had been allowed to become illdisciplined, because their role models had changed, because they wanted to behave more like boys, because, encouraged by the excesses of feminism, they had crossed the line between assertion and aggression. If left unchecked, rising young female crime threatened to destabilise further gender identities and family dynamics and to mother a new generation of even more disorderly children. These were the various conclusions of a small number of academic, government and media investigations, which, together with a small number of extreme criminal cases, provided the basis of a large amount of media coverage and public comment. There was some statistical support for these claims. The number of juvenile crimes recorded as committed by girls rose from 1 in 11 in the late 1950s to 1 in 4 in the late 1990s. During the 1990s, juvenile crime increased at a faster rate among girls than boys, with particular increases in drug-related and violent crime. The number of arrests of girls for violent offences more than doubled, a rise which matched the apparent general rise in adult women’s violent crime which was reported to have increased by 250 per cent in the last quarter of the century.1 Although these percentage increases appear rather less dramatic when viewed against their very low starting figures, they were certainly significant. That girl crime had become more visible is not in question here. However, their new statistical visibility was the product of a number of both long-term and more immediate historical factors, few of which featured in the coverage which worked to construct this ‘new’ breed of girl. At the political and policy level, changes in perceptions of children’s 1

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Gender, Justice and Welfare

civil rights and responsibilities offered children greater social protection, but also held them more closely accountable for their wrong-doings. Changes in the organisation of education exposed school standards and school scandals to new levels of public scrutiny. And changes in the political landscape created a Labour Party which believed that its electoral success required it to be seen to be tough on crime and its causes. Together, these changes produced a range of political and popular moves against minor public disorders, bullying in schools and antisocial behaviour in general, all of which opened a new window onto children’s experiences of violence, as both victims and perpetrators. They also resulted in the introduction of new disciplinary measures such as anti-social behaviour orders, school exclusion orders, child curfews and zero-tolerance tactics, which led to more young people being brought to official notice. At the cultural level, girl power, variously embodied by pop creations the Spice Girls, cartoon creation Tank Girl and digital creation Lara Croft, appeared to have pushed feminism too far. Girl power had ‘mutated into a vicious ideology of beatings’, which girls unleashed upon their classmates, their estate mates, the elderly and even on celebrities. 2 The high-profile mugging of model and actress Elizabeth Hurley in November 1994 did a great deal to fuel the fires of this particular moral panic. According to the newspapers, girls were using violence to assert themselves and to protect themselves. One researcher, quoted in the Guardian, said that ‘[i]f to prove their equality they have to punch someone, then so be it’, while the Daily Mail reported that Glasgow’s Possil Girls ‘claimed that banding together was the only way to protect themselves in an area plagued with drugs and crime’. 3 All these texts, popular, political and professional alike, are marked by a profound, if ill-judged, sense of history. They hold up the spectacle of girls behaving badly as a totem of wider cultural decline: ‘Forget the image of teenage girls as polite young ladies. They are turning into foul-mouthed bullies’; ‘Girls now swear in the most gutter-like way’; ‘In the vicious world of teenage gangs it used to be that boys did the fighting and girls stood by admiringly’; ‘The belief that violence does not compromise femininity has [led to the swapping] of hair-pulling [for] fists, boots and bottles’; ‘Parents are less likely to supervise daughters as they once did’. 4 And so on. This panic, however, owed its potency to the fact that it failed to engage with the longer history of female crime and disorder. As this book sets out to show, girl crime was not new in the 1990s; nor were concerns about girls’ ‘declining’ manners and morals or the devising of new

Defining 3

means to deal with them. The aim here is not to argue that nothing changed over this period, but to show, through a history of the period 1900–1950, how successive generations of girls in England and Wales have been cast as posing an ever-new threat to social order requiring ever-new restraints and to insist that future public discourses of deviance enter into a critical engagement with the past.

Reforming the ‘modern’ girl The ‘modern’ girl has registered a cultural presence and posed a social threat since at least the early nineteenth century. From the industrial revolution onwards, young single women with no domestic responsibilities to restrain their spending or their morals have been seen as irresponsible, sexually precocious pleasure-seekers who threaten the future of the family and the long-term stability of the state. Clearly, much has depended on efforts to reform the mythical and the material modern girl. The first half of the twentieth century saw the incarnation of a new modern girl, variously thought to have been the product of new employment patterns, war, poor parenting, state education, commercial leisure and cultural and racial ‘invasion’. She was constructed in and through a variety of media, from popular fiction, films and magazines to professional social science texts. Descriptions of her and complaints about her were, however, historically familiar. She was loud and lewd, bold and brassy. In the late 1940s, a Mass Observation researcher observed a group of teenage girls on a street corner: ‘Five girls walk by . . . and whistle to the boys who take no notice. They are all 14–15, heavily made up, two with dyed blonde hair. They are marching along arm-in-arm, spread out across the pavement, singing “Give Me Five Minutes More”.’5 Over a generation earlier, in 1918, an MP worried that girls ‘are getting better wages, they dress themselves rather more flashily . . . One can hardly go down a street without seeing girls of 13, 14 or 15 with powder on their faces and rouge on their lips.’6 And in the same year, a London County Council education inspector advised that ‘[t]he girl of the present is not the girl of ten or even five years ago, and is not always responsive to influences which have proved effective in the past.’7 Yet in the 1880s, the Oxford Times had asked: ‘what would our grandmothers have thought of girls, sixteen or eighteen, parading the fair alone, dressed in jockey-caps . . . [with] imitation open jackets and waistcoats, and smoking cigars or cigarettes?’8 And in the 1860s commentators had warned the public about ‘the girl of the period’, ‘a creature who dyes her hair and

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Gender, Justice and Welfare

paints her face . . . a creature whose sole idea of life is fun; whose sole aim is unbounded luxury.’9 These texts are linked by their common emphasis on the ‘growing’ independence of working-class girls, which was constantly reinscribed as both a novelty and a social danger. Girls’ emancipation, broadly defined in economic, social and sexual terms, was continually identified as a primary source of their moral deterioration, a cause of legally defined crime and of more loosely defined waywardness. In this way, questions of poverty and propriety, of class and conduct, were closely linked. Early twentieth-century society allowed a degree of sexual and social permissiveness, but in doing so created greater possibilities for female deviance. New freedoms were thus accompanied by new restrictions. While modernity’s greater anonymity and individualism proved liberating for women and girls, new lifestyles were accompanied by new forms of regulation. The twentieth-century modern girl was policed in a variety of sites: the school, the workplace, the cinema, the café, the shop, the street and the family. So, whilst definitions of socially acceptable behaviour for girls did change dramatically in the first half of the century, they did not change without a price. The question of how to deal with the modern girl was central to debates about juvenile delinquency and welfare reform. Reformers were not, however, simply responding to new kinds of girls who had been ‘created’ by new kinds of modern living. 10 Rather, child welfare policies over the years had themselves contributed to the construction of new kinds of girls by redefining vulnerability, rediagnosing waywardness and reifying adolescence as a period of dependence. Young women who confounded these redefinitions were transformed into a new kind of problem. The modern girl needed to be rescued in modern ways. If respectable fears continually fixed on young people’s worsening behaviour, then respectable hopes continually fixed on the possibilities for their reform. Child welfare reform was also, of course, shaped by clear concerns to address deprivation and by obvious desires to rescue children from violence, abuse and neglect. Child poverty, as well as adolescent affluence, was seen very much as a continuing cause of juvenile delinquency. Indeed, the majority of girls passing through the juvenile courts in the first half of the twentieth century came from poor families, many of whom had had prior contact with authorities of some sort for some reason. Legal and institutional records show that they were the daughters and stepdaughters of mothers who were charwomen, cleaners, servants, lavatory attendants, shop workers and housewives, and of fathers who

Defining 5

were miners, roadsweepers, bricklayers, labourers, milkmen, carters, cowmen, soldiers, waiters and stevedores, and that they were brought before police officers and magistrates for a range of largely petty offences, from low-value theft to waywardness to running away. They rarely exhibited the glamour of the ‘modern girls’ projected within various public panics. Thus, if welfare discourses were constituted through concerns to manage girls’ emancipation, they were also constituted through concerns to contain their deprivation. But these concerns should not be seen as separate. Reform strategies, in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond, aimed to curb the social dangers presented both by extremes of poverty and by the uncontrolled excesses of relative affluence. For girls, deprivation and emancipation were two sides of the same coin. Both could be read as emblems of waywardness. Both could lead to the road to ruin. This book examines the gendered development of the British juvenile justice system during the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses on the experiences of girls in England and Wales, analysing the circumstances of their designation as delinquent and the possibilities for reform available to them. It is based on a range of historical sources, many from within the criminal justice system, but also, crucially, many from outside it. It seeks to show how the study of girls’ delinquency in this period can usefully draw on a combination of historical, sociological and criminological approaches. The modern juvenile justice system dates, in many ways, from the 1908 Children Act, which established new judicial procedures, punishments and reform programmes for children. The Act created Britain’s first juvenile courts to deal with children and young persons under the age of 16. The courts, shaped in the short term by Illinois’ pioneering youth court set up in 1899 and in the long term by the increasing domestic use of summary jurisdiction, retained key elements of traditional summary court procedure.11 However, children’s cases were supposed to be heard at specific times in order to separate them from adult cases and where possible in a separate court room. The case was to be heard by a panel of three magistrates, one of whom was to be a woman. There was no jury and no formal defence or prosecution counsel. Persons under the age of 16 were no longer, apart from in exceptional circumstances, to be sent to prison. Those requiring institutional care or correction were to be sent to industrial or reformatory schools (known collectively as Home Office certified schools from the 1850s to 1930s and as Home Office approved schools from the 1930s), while a proportion of those over 16 were to be sent to the newly established

6

Gender, Justice and Welfare

borstals. Where possible, both children and young persons were to be put on probation, a new option created by the 1907 Probation of Offenders Act. The 1908 Children Act codified a consensus built up over the previous century as to how best to deal with children in trouble and children in danger. At the very least, they should not be allowed to remain unsupervised in bad families and those at most risk should be removed from the family altogether and either boarded out to foster parents or sent to a children’s home of some kind or to a juvenile justice facility of some kind. They should not, however, be sent to an adult prison. Children’s reform was to be carried out in children’s spaces which, as far as possible, should divide children by type. Those removed from their homes should be engaged in constructive activities and not subjected simply to punishment. Indeed, the dominant discourse within juvenile justice from the early nineteenth century had been one of correction to be achieved through treatment, transformation and training, and never a discourse of punishment for its own sake. Whilst attempts to treat, transform and train could certainly be viewed as punitive, it is more fruitful to see such measures as part of a disciplinary continuum, rather than attempting to distinguish ‘true’ treatment from ‘true’ punishment. The 1908 Children Act also signified a broader reconfiguration of the child as a distinct political body. As well as creating distinct judicial procedures and correctional spaces for children, it also helped to create specific statutory strategies to address child poverty and to harness children’s social potential for community, nation and empire. In this sense, the 1908 Act was very much part of the politics of new liberalism, a politics born out of the grand if often conflicting social processes and philosophies of the late nineteenth century: democratisation, high imperialism, secondary industrialisation, national efficiency, Social Darwinism, labourism, maternalism; and a politics resulting in the renegotiation of the relationship between state, citizen and economy, the rethinking of distributive welfare practices and the proliferation of ever-more specialised techniques for creating and keeping social order. The figure of the child as citizen-in-waiting therefore represented a new space in the politics of possibility. The modern juvenile justice system brought together two groups of children – the ‘neglected’ and the ‘delinquent’. Its ideologies and practices were derived from two distinct discourses: first, care and protection, and second, control and punishment. Its services, staff and institutions were drawn from three main resources: the emerging

Defining 7

welfare state, the criminal justice system and the voluntary sector. The interrelationships between these three greatly shaped the policing of girls, which historically has been rooted as deeply in philanthropic projects as in statutory policy. The significant expansion of state-based child welfare and juvenile justice services in the first half of the twentieth century was not based upon the decline of voluntary services in these fields. Charities remained very prominent players in child welfare and youth work and their expansive practical services – including, among many other things, outreach projects, youth clubs, probation hostels, children’s homes and girls’ training homes – were very much part of the modern face of juvenile justice. These kinds of charitable activities did become increasingly subject to statutory regulation, especially after the 1948 Children Act which created a national framework of local authority children’s departments staffed by professional workers. However, as with so much of the post-war New Jerusalem, this Act did not, and never aimed to, eradicate the extensive public–private partnerships upon which so many British social welfare programmes depended. Without voluntary workers, facilities and funding, the twentieth-century juvenile justice system would have looked quite different. The survival and renewal of private philanthropy within public justice programmes had important implications for the regulation of certain kinds of girls who were, for various reasons, considered better suited to private than to public reform. Girls made up a minority of cases in the new juvenile courts, accounting for around 5 per cent of annual cases in the period 1910–1950. Their court experiences followed distinct patterns and were often generated by distinct circumstances. Girls committed the same broad range of offences as boys, with petty theft the most common offence for both sexes, but they were brought to court by a wider range of agencies and were much more likely to be seen to be facing moral danger of some kind. In particular, their small numbers meant that girls were always seen as an anomaly within the justice system and help to explain why they were more readily defined as a problem group. Significantly, however, as this book shows, thousands of girls who could have been dealt with by the public juvenile justice system were instead policed privately in rescue homes, preventive homes, VD hostels and lock hospitals. The history of the (in)visible policing of girls must therefore raise new questions about the connections between rescue, reform and rights and about the very nature of justice in twentieth-century Britain.

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Gender, Justice and Welfare

Absences and presences Girls have been under-represented in both histories of childhood and youth, which have primarily focused on boys, and histories of femininity, which have primarily focused on adult women. However, recent work has helped to establish a history of modern girlhood, with studies focusing on girls’ education, poverty, literature, leisure and moral guidance. 12 However, with the important exception of the work of Mahood, Davies and Cale (which mainly focuses on the nineteenth century), there has been very little research on girls and delinquency in pre-1945 Britain. 13 Recent work by Jackson and Bartley on child sexual abuse and the reform of prostitutes respectively has begun to open up this subject in very valuable ways, but does not extend beyond the first world war. 14 In general, histories of modern British youth crime tend to focus on the nineteenth century or on the post-1945 period. 15 Apart from a small number of key studies, girls have featured only peripherally in this body of work, which has tended to present delinquency as a young male phenomenon without making explicit its total conceptual dependence on constructions of masculinity. Pearson’s history of respectable fears traces moral panics around youth culture from the 1840s to the 1980s. Yet his (and others’) folk-devils – from street arabs, garotters, hooligans, motor-bandits, bag-snatchers, to teds, mods and rockers – have been overwhelmingly male.16 Similarly, Bailey’s study of juvenile justice policy between 1914 and 1948 centres on the attempts of (male) reformers to establish a more liberal programme for young (male) offenders.17 Finally, classic socio-criminological studies of post-war delinquency have tended to read (male) youths’ actions as rituals of resistance to the social strains of capitalism. 18 Early American and British feminist criminological writing from the 1970s onwards made reference to earlier studies of delinquent girls as a means of demonstrating the androcentricity and biologism of criminological discourse.19 Here, Lombroso and Ferrero’s late nineteenth-century text, The Female Offender, is generally taken as a starting point to illustrate the historical misrepresentation of women and to justify calls for a feminist criminology.20 These early feminist accounts show how, from its emergence as a distinct discipline in Britain in the 1930s, criminology has represented the criminal experiences of women and girls as anomalous.21 Some discuss early twentieth-century psycho-criminological studies of girls in detail, although most use them as epistemological benchmarks and comment only briefly on their rarity, inaccuracies and methodological shortcomings, or on their occasional insights. More

Defining 9

recent (feminist and other) criminological work has examined issues of gender and delinquency in depth, although these studies focus mainly on the experiences of those growing up since the 1970s. 22 Feminist historians’ studies of prostitution and sexual violence have also focused, in places, on girls and on the practical policing carried out by social purity campaigners and child-savers from the late nineteenth century onwards.23 A problem with this genre is that it can overemphasise girls’ sexual delinquency while underplaying their involvement in other kinds of crime. However, this literature is important because it emphasises that girls’ deviance was neither defined nor contained simply within formal penal frameworks. Rather, the regulation of girls in the public judicial sector was intimately connected to their regulation in the private philanthropic sector. Some have combined a long-standing feminist interest in the social regulation of women with Foucauldian approaches to the micropolitics of power and have shown how feminine identities have been produced and contained within a number of disciplinary networks.24 Recent studies have looked beyond formal control systems to the effects of schooling, family life, welfare provision, friendships and media images upon girls’ own policing of their sexuality, their social life, their ambition, their appetite and their body shape.25 Such work has helped to release penality from a simple crime–punishment trajectory. It has also demonstrated the value of new approaches to regulation. Sociologies of censure and feminist and transgressive criminologies have rightly challenged traditional criminological enquiry by enlarging visions of regulatory practice and by examining the connections between the policing of everyday life and policing effected through more formal mechanisms.26 If applied historically, this approach opens up exciting possibilities. While this book does not claim to present an historical sociology of girls’ everyday lives, it does address the question of the diverse nature of girls’ regulation by examining the links between certified schools, borstals, remand homes, elementary schools, domestic service, private rescue homes and mental deficiency institutions. It also shows how the delinquent girl was defined within a number of spaces, by a number of agencies and through a number of texts. The organisation of this book is intended to reflect that plurality. Chapter 2 examines the ways in which girls’ delinquency was (selectively) recorded within formal criminal statistics. Chapter 3 considers the views of those public and private agencies closely involved in policing girls in the sense of referring them to various authorities and sending some to a range of reform institutions. Chapter 4 follows some of these girls into Home Office certified

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schools and analyses institutional constructions of delinquency. Chapter 5 continues this theme by using letters, life-stories and case files to explore the institutional experience from the point of view of those directly subject to it. Chapter 6 shows how expert diagnoses of delinquency produced by doctors, psychologists, sociologists and others presented a particular profile of ‘the problem girl’ and how these professional diagnoses had to compete with more populist rivals. Chapter 7 demonstrates how different constructions of delinquency recurred and resurfaced at different points across the century and explores the extent to which definitions of girls’ disorder and its proper remedies altered after the second world war. Indeed, apprehensions of time and senses of history are central to this book. Cultural conceptions of progress and decline, tradition and modernity were, and remain, absolutely central to popular, professional and political debates about delinquency. Efforts to police girls were also efforts to police time, in that they were attempts to achieve acceptable articulations between perceived forces of tradition and modernity. ‘Modern’ boys, in any given period, have threatened to upset ‘traditional’ generational orders with their ‘worsening’ behaviour. But modern girls have threatened to upset not only traditional generational orders, but also traditional gender and family orders. These more circular senses of time mean that the history of delinquency is difficult to contain within conventional periodisations. Given this, some of the discussion in this book looks back to the period before 1900 and some to that beyond 1950. The differences between the treatment of girls and the treatment of boys form only part of this investigation. The experiences of girls in the juvenile justice system were shaped not only by gender difference, but also by differences of class, ethnicity, religion and sexuality, all of which demonstrate the instability of the category ‘girl’. In class terms, the girls appearing before the juvenile courts were overwhelmingly from poor families and the reform process was geared to the production of respectable working women. However, within this broad group of working-class girls, differences were drawn between the rough and the respectable, between the Catholic, the Anglican and the Jew, between the sexually innocent and the sexually precocious, between black, white and ‘mixed race’ girls. At any one time, a number of different, if closely linked, definitions of delinquency and neglect were in operation. Moreover, these definitions, together with definitions of ‘girlhood’, changed over time. The term ‘girl’ was popularly used in reference to children and unmarried adolescents, but was also widely used to refer to older single women and to married women of all ages. Legal definitions of

Defining 11

girlhood were also contradictory throughout this period. A girl was legally a child until 14 and a young person until 16 (and after 1933, until 17). These age-based legal constructions of competent identities were rooted in traditional perceptions of children’s capacity for moral judgement and were often at odds with wider social definitions of individual independence and responsibility. The legal age at which a ‘girl’ could, for example, leave school, start work, have sex, marry, or vote varied.27 The adolescent girl was a composite of multiple and often contradictory legal states. Particular cases heard within the juvenile justice system therefore represented the wider contestation of rigid definitions of what constituted proper girlhood and its transgressions. Clearly, then, the social categories ‘delinquent girl’ or ‘neglected girl’ are just as unstable as the categories ‘girl’ or ‘woman’. Much feminist criminology has relied upon a certain unified notion of the category ‘woman’, which ironically has undermined its criticism of traditional criminology’s reliance on ‘distorted’ ideas about women’s nature and the factors that shape their experiences as victims and offenders. Contrary to this, Cousins rightly concludes that there is no singular, interior or essential relation between the law and women and that neither the category ‘law’ nor the category ‘woman’ can be homogenised into unitary entities, capable of supporting a necessary and singular relation.28 However, as this book shows, there were many people in the first half of the twentieth century (and beyond) – from psychologists, to magistrates, to rescue workers, to parents – who believed that there was such a singular relation and who therefore designed reforming strategies specifically for girls. Identities that were not biologically or socially fixed were nevertheless fitted or forced into social reform strategies that assumed they were. The juvenile justice system did not deal with ‘the juvenile’, but with gendered juveniles. Judicial institutions were strictly segregated, operated according to gendered rules, received different levels of funding and performed gendered training which was intended to produce gendered citizens. The idea that boys and girls required different methods of punishment and rehabilitation has proved to be very enduring. Arguing for the abolition of girls’ detention centres in 1968, the Advisory Council on the Penal System concluded that ‘the needs of delinquent boys and delinquent girls are so dissimilar that there is no reason why the disposals open to the courts should be the same for both sexes’. 29 Examining the ways in which dominant constructions of girlhood were produced, experienced, contested and subject to change involves an attention to discourse, to the lived effects of discourse and to history. As Daly and Maher argue, such an approach

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Gender, Justice and Welfare

to the study of gender and disorder demands new ways of ‘working across discursive and disciplinary boundaries’ and new ways of combining understandings of ‘“real people” and “texts”’.30

Gender, justice and citizenship Viewing ‘the juvenile offender’ as a social identity constituted through gender and other differences presents a serious challenge to existing histories of youth justice. Many have read the post-1908 changes in juvenile justice as evidence of the emergence of new forms of punishment and regulation. Garland argues that a new penality was built between the 1890s and the 1910s which signalled a shift away from a calibrated, hierarchical structure of punishment to one that was more diverse and differentiated. New techniques of sentencing claimed to treat the offender according to their specific characteristics and not simply according to the seriousness of their offence.31 This modern penality thus required an intimate knowledge of the offender, which only the human sciences could provide. Specific criminal characteristics were identified and pathologised by the emerging human sciences, in particular by psychology and criminology, which undermined the traditional claims of the law to be the chief arbiter of social deviance. Similarly for Rose, the juvenile courts were central to the growth, from the late nineteenth century onwards, of ‘the psychological complex’. As a new site for social enquiry, the courts helped to establish a ‘new psychological jurisdiction’, in which legal adjudication was increasingly based upon ‘behavioural disorders’.32 Bailey’s account of juvenile justice development emphasises the temporary triumph of rehabilitation over punishment. Reiner argues that in this period, offenders, ‘especially juvenile ones, were hopefully to be reclaimed by rehabilitative interventions shaped by scientific research and advice’ sponsored by an increasingly interventionist state with a commitment to reducing the ‘criminogenic features of the social structure by a panoply of social and welfare policies’. 33 Concluding his study of nineteenth-century criminality, Wiener writes that by the late 1930s, cumulative ‘decarcerative and therapeutic impulses’ had transformed the symbolic role of the English penal system. 34 This approach is certainly valuable. The post-1908 juvenile justice system clearly contributed to a policy shift away from prohibition and punishment and towards techniques of normalisation and positive intervention. However, there are a number of problems with the ‘new penality’ framework. The drawing of differences between groups and

Defining 13

the shaping of policies appropriate to these groups was certainly a key feature of the new governmentality; the pauper lunatic, the habitual inebriate, the delinquent child and so on were to be separately treated. But while the new juvenile justice system was created in the singular name of the child, it depended for its day-to-day operation upon the drawing of differences between children. Delinquent children were to be distinguished from neglected children, older children from younger children, vicious children from innocent children and – necessarily – girl children from boy children. As this book shows, perceived gender difference was one of the first factors to be taken into account when a child’s case and a child’s needs were being assessed. Girls’ needs were assumed to be very distinct from those of boys. They were, for example, thought to be differently endangered by poor housing and poor parenting and to run very different risks through sexual experimentation. Their reform, or preparation for citizenship, was thought best effected not in penal-style institutions but domestic-style homes, which, in addition, need not be part of the juvenile justice system, but could be located outside it and at the margins of it, in the realm of private rescue. But gender differences were not the only ones which were significant here.35 New techniques of social regulation were heavily reliant on old philanthropic resources, which meant that, for example, they had to accept the divisions which charities had traditionally drawn between their ‘client’ groups. In the first half of the twentieth century, the vast majority of Home Office certified schools and auxiliary homes were run by (mainly religious) charities which also managed hundreds of noncertified children’s homes.36 As a result, the post-1908 juvenile justice apparatus included certified schools for ‘girls with knowledge of evil’, Jewish probation officers serving Jewish children, auxiliary homes for Protestant boys, and so on. Although most commonly read in terms of the secular, the rational, the professional and the technical, the modern penal-welfare state was just as closely constructed upon the religious, the charitable, the moral, the melodramatic and the sensational. Certainly, differences were drawn between children, but these differences drew on old social divisions as well as new taxonomic projects. Children’s individual needs were perceived through lenses of class, gender, ethnicity, religion and sexuality in ways which are eclipsed in historical accounts which generalise the experience of the juvenile delinquent, the neglected child, the young offender and the young citizen. Justice, punishment and protection for ‘the child’, while conceptually based on the principle of a common right to common provision, was practically based on the negotiation of a number of observed differences.

14

Gender, Justice and Welfare

The necessarily simultaneous emergence of ‘the social’ and the interventionist state created new relationships between those in authority and those subject to it and created new possibilities for social management on a macro scale.37 But the new politics of governmentality had a clear gender dimension. In short, one of the key ways of managing the population and maximising the potential of that population was to regulate those who were to literally reproduce it – to give birth to it, to mother it, to nurture it. Levels of (in)direct state regulation of girls increased throughout the nineteenth century. From the 1830s onwards, legislation which was ostensibly designed to reduce Poor Law expenditure, to improve working conditions, to safeguard the sexual health of the armed forces, to minimise the reproduction of the feebleminded, to reduce infant mortality and to raise standards of working-class parenting had a direct effect upon the sexual and social life of girls and young women. In addition, specific child welfare legislation constructed new norms of childhood and girlhood and also served as a foundation for later welfare state development by positioning all children as potential wards of the state and by authorising intervention in failing families. This legislation accorded children certain rights within a new framework of minimum standards of care – the right to be free from exploitation in certain workplaces from the 1830s onwards, the right to be educated from the 1870s, the right to be protected from sexual abuse and neglect from the 1880s, the right to be judged in a juvenile court from the 1910s, the right to formally defined care and protection from the 1930s. 38 The rise of new ways of envisioning and governing the social therefore policed girls in three ways: as children, as future workers and as future mothers. The encoding of these rights was viewed by many as a civilising triumph, the mark of a regulated and responsible state. Sir George Newman, doctor and social commentator, spoke for many when he wrote in 1928 that the care of children was ‘the highest index and criterion of citizenship’, and that just as the ‘treatment of the insane’ had become ‘more humane’, so ‘the nurture of the child’ had assumed ‘new meaning’. The restriction of child labour and the introduction of new judicial, educational and welfare services for children meant that ‘a better example of the growth of a sense of humanity could scarcely be chosen than this question of the care of the needy child’.39 In many ways, of course, Newman was right. And the dramatic improvements in working-class children’s life expectancy, quality and opportunity achieved through early twentieth-century welfare measures are a testament to his vision. In other ways, however, his model of citizenship depended upon and

Defining 15

perpetuated distinct power relations. It constructed children and adolescents as objects of social action, rather than as subjects with choices. It also defined children’s ‘needs’ in very gendered ways. Re-evaluations of the risks facing children promoted the social value of safety, but, as this book shows, did so in ways which opened up new possibilities for policing girls, in particular by policing their sexual lives. 40 In the 1946 Home Office film Children on Trial, the ‘typical’ delinquent boy and girl were represented through the characters of 14-year-old Fred Watson and 15-year-old Shirley Reynolds. Both appeared before a juvenile court and both were sent to Home Office approved schools, Fred for house-breaking and Shirley for ‘running away from home and associating with men’.41 Clearly, the expansion of the interventionist state was predicated upon gendered notions of risk, safety and vulnerability. The achievements of twentieth-century child and youth welfare reform deserve to be celebrated. But the ‘right to be rescued’ also needs to be questioned in ways which will illuminate the intricacies of girls’ reform and further feminist critiques of citizenship. Women and girls certainly suffered as a result of their exclusion from political and social rights. But they also suffered when certain rights – based on problematic constructions of femininity – were extended to them. Adult women’s rights to early twentieth-century welfare benefits and services such as pensions, sickness benefit and unemployment benefit were shaped by heavily gendered perceptions of female economic dependence which proved very difficult to dislodge. 42 Similarly, girls’ new statutory right to be rescued defined their social freedoms in narrow and often highly illiberal terms. This argument – that girls tend to be policed through welfare mechanisms rather than through criminal justice mechanisms – is common to many criminological studies of more contemporary girls’ delinquency.43 This book asks how these gendered practices came to be established and how they were resisted in the early twentieth century. In many ways, to state this is to restate a familiar argument about the limitations of what T.H. Marshall famously named ‘social citizenship’. For Marshall, the twentieth-century development of the right to social welfare and social protection marked a further (and arguably final) stage in the evolution of modern citizens by adding social rights to their existing political and civil rights. 44 Yet these developments also marked the rise of new possibilities for social regulation via their introduction of new techniques of surveillance, their fixing of gender identities and their assumptions about the nature of ‘need’. Recent work on child welfare and juvenile justice has argued that, ultimately, children’s rights have been radically reduced because these have been framed principally

16

Gender, Justice and Welfare

in terms of children’s need for protection and inability to exercise autonomous judgements. 45 This erosion of children’s autonomy in some areas of life seems to stand in very stark contrast to a highlighting of children’s responsibility for their actions in other areas of life. Certain developments in the 1990s, such as the trial and treatment of the young killers of James Bulger, the placing of children on sex offenders’ registers, the introduction of child curfews and the removal of doli incapax (the legal mechanism under which children could, historically, be judged whether or not to have understood definitions of criminal behaviour), seemed to reveal a new and dramatic tension between a view of the child as a subject in need of protection and a view of the child as a subject responsible for itself. However, as this book shows, this tension is not new. Although certainly accentuated in recent times, it has long been part of juvenile justice and its often uneasy attempt to incorporate children into a model of social citizenship based on rights and responsibilities. This book draws on familiar critiques of social citizenship and children’s citizenship, but takes these further by asking what happens when this dilemma is considered in relation to gender. How far and in what ways have girl children and boy children been viewed as having distinct rights to protection and as bearing distinct responsibilities for their delinquencies? How were these distinctions constructed as real and how were they enacted and enforced? An aim of this book, then, is to explore the ways in which justice was gendered. It also sets out to show how the juvenile justice system itself contributed to the construction of gender identities and did a great deal to shape understandings of the social organisation of sexual and other differences. The fact that older concepts of ‘patriarchy’ have been properly criticised for their rigidity, reductionism and collapsing of differences does not and should not signal the abandonment of attempts to explain the continuities and concentrations of certain kinds of power and the survival of certain kinds of hierarchies. 46 The experiences of the girls and women documented here show that it is not possible or desirable to force any oversimplified choice between Foucauldian notions of pluralised power and earlier feminist notions of patriarchal power. Those concerned to discipline and punish girls, to rescue and reform them, to seek and save them, to diagnose and cure them, certainly favoured different methods, tactics and technologies, but they also drew upon deeply embedded and commonly held notions of proper gender relations, proper sexual relations and proper girlhood.

2 Counting

From the early nineteenth century, investigators of social problems have grounded their claims to truth through social statistics. Government criminal statistics, published annually from 1805, helped to map topologies of deviance in new ways, simultaneously generating and apparently confirming public fears and policy priorities. Historians of crime have long recognised the limitations of these figures and the partiality of the picture they paint. Frequent changes in law, court organisation and methods of categorising and recording offences frustrate statistical continuities. Official figures reveal more about policing and prosecuting practices than they do about ‘real’ patterns of crime because they inevitably record only those cases which came to official attention, rather than the ‘dark figure’ of undetected crime. Police forces, among the most powerful organisers of statistical knowledge of crime, had clear interests in presenting figures in certain ways.1 A further limitation of government criminal statistics, however, is that, historically, they have divided offenders in ways which emphasise certain differences over others. Typically organised by the seriousness of the offence, they did not routinely or consistently divide offenders by age or gender. National annual juvenile court statistics, published from 1910, were recorded in ways which make it hard to identify, for example, the number of girls convicted of assault, or the number of eight year olds found to be ‘beyond parental control’ in any given year. 2 This makes it difficult to track long-term trends within young female offending and prosecution. These difficulties notwithstanding, this chapter outlines the changing pattern of girls’ prosecution in the first half of the twentieth century as this is presented by available government juvenile justice statistics and by other sources including reports of the Home Office’s Children’s Branch, police records, certified school and borstal admission records, 17

18

Gender, Justice and Welfare

contemporary studies of youth crime and personal writings. These sources show that although girls were prosecuted for a broad range of offences, including car crime, vandalism and assault, minor property crime predominated across the period. They also show that girls involved in sexual improprieties were brought into court under a number of guises, notably as victims of child abuse and as children deemed to be ‘in need of care or protection’. The introduction of these kinds of ‘status’ offences, where a child appeared in court not because they had broken the law but for their own protection, in many ways epitomised the new juvenile justice project: the way they were deployed in the everyday dealings of the courts points to the deeply gendered nature of that project. The question of how to police and protect those young people who had not committed an offence was not a straightforward one, however. Many wayward and neglected girls who came to some kind of public attention were actively diverted away from the courts, sometimes by the police themselves, and dealt with instead by a vast network of charities and private rescue homes, a network which pre-dated the new courts by over a century. Others were admitted to certified industrial schools, and thereby entered the formal institutional infrastructure of the juvenile justice system, yet because they were admitted on a ‘voluntary’ basis, they never appeared in a juvenile court. All this confirms a common-place criticism of formal criminal statistics: that they present a very partial picture of crime, policing and punishment. The flow of girls through the juvenile justice system and its marginal spaces is certainly not captured in all its variety by formal sets of figures. This is not to follow the implications of Otto Pollak’s mid-twentiethcentury claim and to argue that the huge gap between the numbers of girls and boys appearing in the courts would have closed to any substantial degree had all these additional cases involving girls been included in formal figures. 3 Indeed, any study of the policing of boys at the margins of the law in the same period would doubtless reveal similar anomalies and generate its own ‘additional’ cases, if not quite on the same scale. However, the fact that very many more girls were subject to (in)formal policing than is suggested by formal judicial returns should question the statistical insignificance so often accorded to them.

Girls and the juvenile justice system The 1938 Home Office Children’s Branch report on juvenile court cases offered the short sharp conclusion that ‘the number of girl offenders is

Counting 19

so small as to call for no comment’. 4 In fairness, this remark was made in relation to the genuinely low number of girls found guilty of more serious indictable offences, but it nevertheless typifies the tendency of official reports on generic young offenders simply to gloss over girls. Girls did account for a minority of juvenile court cases but still appeared in larger numbers than might be expected. The creation of the juvenile courts in 1908 led to an immediate rise in the number of prosecutions of girls aged 16 and under. In 1905, only 830 such girls seem to have faced prosecution; by 1910, this figure had doubled to 1,900, suggesting that the long-term decline, from the eighteenth century onwards, in adult female prosecutions may not extend to younger women and girls. 5 Thereafter, annual numbers of prosecutions fluctuated between 1,000 and 5,000 between the 1910s and the 1940s, with significant peaks in the wake of the Children Acts of 1908, 1933 and 1948 and during the two world wars, and a significant trough in the mid-1920s. Boys’ juvenile court appearances followed a broadly similar pattern, although they made up at least 90 per cent of total cases which ranged between 25,000 and 60,000 per year in the first half of the twentieth century (see Figure 1, ‘Total proceeded against in the juvenile courts, selected years, 1910–46’). Most girls appearing in the juvenile courts tended, like boys, to be older teenagers. The legal age of criminal responsibility (set at 7 years in 1908, 8 years in 1933 and 10 in 1963) kept younger children out of the courts, although they continued to appear where they themselves were the victims of offences such as cruelty, neglect and abuse. In 1910, 49 per cent of female cases involved girls under the age of 14 and 51 per cent involved those over the age of 14 (including a number who were over 16). By 1935, these proportions had dramatically altered to 35 per cent and 65 per cent respectively. This increase (actual and proportional) in the number of older girls appearing in court was caused principally by the 1933 Children Act’s extension of the age of a young person from 16 to 17 and by the broadening of definitions of what it meant to be ‘in need of care or protection’. Although the age profiles of boys appearing in court showed a similar shift (the percentage of appearances by boys over the age of 14 rose from 51 per cent in 1910 to 57 per cent in 1935) this was less pronounced and, as will be shown, did not generate the same concern. 6 Again, like most boys’ cases, girls’ court appearances were geographically concentrated in the large urban areas, with the capital, the midlands, the north-west, the north-east and south Wales generating the largest

20

Gender, Justice and Welfare

Total girls Girls as % of total Total boys Boys as % of total Total proceeded against*

1910 1,899 5.65 31,699 94.35 33,598

1915 2,570 5.60 43,321 94.40 45,891

1920 1,889 4.95 36,254 95.05 38,143

1925 1,388 4.65 28,472 95.35 29,860

1930 1,243 4.69 25,285 95.31 26,528

1935 2,546 4.74 51,157 95.26 53,703

1946 4,838 7.43 60,319 92.57 65,157

*Totals differ from the official Criminal Statistics because they include over-sixteens appearing in the juvenile courts. Totals without over-sixteens

33,598

43,981

36,064

27,801

24,662

53,358

65,157

Boys and girls proceeded against 70000 60000 Total boys Total girls

50000 40000 30000 20000 10000 0 1910

Figure 1:

1915

1920

1925

1930

1935

1946

Total proceeded against in the juvenile courts, selected years, 1910–46

Source: Criminal Statistics, 1910, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930, 1935, 1946.

numbers.7 This pattern was shaped both by levels of urban poverty and by levels of philanthropic child-saving activity. Consequently, national discussions of delinquency were dominated by commentators from London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and Cardiff. Elsewhere, juvenile court cases were comparatively rare and the proportion of girls among them was even lower than the 5 per cent national average, as samples from Essex and Middlesex show. Although Southend was Essex’s fastest growing town, a seaside resort and within 40 miles of London, it recorded a relatively low number of juvenile court cases in the interwar period. The total number of juvenile court appearances over 15 selected months between 1918 and 1930 was 148 and involved just 16 girls. 8 The Halstead petty sessional division, covering 16 rural parishes in north Essex, recorded an even lower number of juvenile appearances in court in the early part of the century. A similar study of petty sessional cases for the whole of six selected years between 1906 and 1928, including two years of the first world war, shows that only five girls (aged 11–15) and only 40 boys (aged 9–16) appeared.9 Generally,

Counting 21

then, Essex juvenile benches saw very few, if any, girls during a given year. In 1908, the County Council was maintaining just 22 local girls in certified schools around the country. They had been sent there by seven of the 21 Essex benches. Over half had been committed by the Beacontree bench alone, a district bordering the east end of London. Decisions to commit the 147 Essex boys resident in Home Office schools during 1908 were more evenly distributed. Each of the 21 benches had sent at least one boy to a certified school, although again, almost half of these committals were made by the Beacontree bench. This evidence suggests that to the limited extent that juvenile delinquency was viewed as a serious social problem in Essex, this problem was constructed as a ‘boy problem’, and as a ‘Beacontree boy problem’ in particular. Similar patterns of urban concentration can be seen in Middlesex. Over one third of the 1,648 juvenile cases heard in the Willesden area in 1911–12 were heard in Edmonton, one of its nine courts. 10 Girls accounted for 6 per cent (96) of all cases, although two of the courts recorded no girl appearances, and in four others, girls made up less than 5 per cent of annual cases. 11 Evidence from Essex and Middlesex therefore suggests that the juvenile benches outside large towns and cities became heavily identified as young male spaces, only occasionally to be entered by ‘very bad’ girls, which doubtless enhanced their exceptional status. With such small numbers of girls it is difficult to draw any meaningful comparisons between rural and urban policing. However, rural girls certainly seem to have committed fewer offences than urban girls or rural boys, and local conventions of youth policing seem also to have kept them out of the new juvenile courts. The routine absence of girls from the courts must have confirmed ideas that the new juvenile justice system, like the old summary jurisdiction system on which it was modelled, dealt principally with male offenders. Such conclusions can be offered only with caution, however, in light of the criminal statistics’ failure to record all court appearances of those under 16 years of age. Firstly, some juvenile court cases were conducted informally and therefore not recorded. Some police forces used to hold their own informal hearings, such as that outlined by the Chief Constable of Hull, who, in a report for the Home Office during the first world war, referred to ‘a sort of weekly Court where I dealt, without prosecution, with young offenders [in the presence of their parents] who I thought could best be dealt with in that way’.12 The way in which these ‘court appearances’ were recorded, if at all, is not clear. Second, thousands of juvenile cases continued to be formally heard outside the juvenile

22

Gender, Justice and Welfare

courts after 1908. Young people who were thought to be over 16 years old (17 after 1933), or who were charged jointly with an adult, or who were committed for trial, continued to be charged before the ordinary summary courts as well as before the higher courts. From 1915 to 1930 between 3,000 and 4,000 of these ‘extra’ cases were heard in the summary courts each year, rising to 7,000 in 1938. Girls consistently accounted for between 4 and 6 per cent of these figures. 13 Quite what happened to these young people is not clear, though it is likely that some of them were among the ‘exceptional’ cases still legally sent to prison under the Children Act. Finally, children appearing in court as a result of charges brought against their parents or guardians were not always recorded in juvenile criminal statistics. Children whose parents had divorced or died, or who had been prosecuted for neglect, committed to prison, or certified as insane or mentally defective were often involved in court proceedings, and often sent to private children’s homes or to industrial schools, which admitted children thought to be in danger of becoming delinquent alongside those who had committed recorded offences. Given that girls seem to have been more readily identified as being ‘at risk’ in such family circumstances, they are likely to have made up a high proportion of these hidden cases, although more work is needed on the treatment of boys in this respect. Certainly, many girls were admitted to industrial schools as voluntary cases. To give just two examples, in 1908, 19 of the 33 girls resident in St Mary’s industrial school in Cold Ash had been admitted voluntarily rather than committed by the courts. In 1918, only eight of 37 girls in another school, the County Industrial Home in Stafford, had been committed.14 The significant statistical point here, though, is that only committed cases were formally counted: there is no reliable record of these large numbers of voluntary admissions. Official figures are far too low to be at all credible. For example, according to published criminal statistics, only three girls were voluntarily admitted to industrial schools in 1916 and only two in 1920.15 Significantly, Home Office staff tended to base their published reports and their analysis of the national juvenile delinquency situation on court committal figures.16 This meant that the circumstances which conveyed hundreds of voluntary cases – very many of them girls – into the system each year were not consistently incorporated into official constructions of neglect and delinquency. Clearly, then, the early and mid-twentieth-century juvenile courts heard a fraction of the cases that might have been brought before them, a fact that frustrated many contemporary reformers who wanted these courts to become the central clearing houses of child welfare.17

Counting 23

1910

1915

1920

1925

1930

1935

1938

1946

Total proceeded against

33,598

43,981

36,064

27,801

24,662

53,358

58,744

65,157

Not dealt with in juv courts*

5,385

4,817

3,960

3,515

2,643

3,980

3,474

3,534

Fine

10,124

14,990

15,591

7,578

5,177

12,285

15,744

20,002

Dismissed

7,912

8,417

6,355

6,715

6,666

16,867

17,198

17,483

Probation

3,568

5,719

4,691

6,357

7,042

14,297

15,800

16,539

Recognizances

2,653

3,097

2,425

1,980

1,734

2,839

2,836

2,613

Whipping

1,562

3,297

1,285

452

130

192

43

9

Reformatory

1,143

1,508

824

578

618

0

0

0

Industrial School

1,044

2,003

812

552

586

2,518

2,915

3,551

Imprisonment

90

4

12

5

1

0

0

0

Other

47

75

75

32

20

130

323

574

Custody of relatives, etc.

35

24

16

6

3

113

211

255

Place of detention

35

16

2

0

3

24

110

518

Instit for defectives, etc.

na

14

16

31

39

113

90

79

NB. The following changes were introduced by the 1933 Children Act: Some recognizances were issued with a probation order attached. Industrial and reformatory schools amalgamated; approved school committals are entered into 'industrial school' column from 1935 onwards. 'Custody of relatives' became known as 'Care of a fit person' 'Place of detention' became known as 'remand home' *Cases not dealt with in the juvenile court include the following: 1) charges withdrawn or dismissed (constitutes the vast majority of these cases); 2) committed for trial.

70000

60000

Other 50000

Industrial School Reformatory

40000

Whipping Recognizances Probation

30000

Dismissed Fine 20000

10000

0

1910 1915 1920 1925 1930 1935 1938 1946

Figure 2:

Juvenile court outcomes, selected years, 1910–46

Source: Criminal Statistics, 1910, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930, 1935, 1938, 1946.

If a child did appear in court and charges against them were upheld, magistrates could deal with them in a number of ways (see Figure 2, ‘Juvenile court outcomes, selected years, 1910–46’). In the first half of the twentieth century, the majority of juvenile cases were fined,

24

Gender, Justice and Welfare

dismissed or given probation or recognisances. A substantial if declining number of boys were whipped, until this was banned in 1948, and a small proportion were committed to the custody of relatives, to an institution for defectives, or to prison. Between 5 and 10 per cent were committed to Home Office certified schools. These institutions, based on Scottish and European models, were founded in England and Wales in the 1850s and extended to Ireland in 1868 (and thereafter to many areas of the empire) and were intended principally to keep children out of prison. There were two kinds of certified school: industrial schools admitted vulnerable children in need of ‘rescue’ as well as younger offenders up to the age of 14; while reformatories took more ‘hardened’ adolescent criminals up to the age of 16. The two institutions were amalgamated by the 1933 Children and Young Persons Act, and renamed ‘approved schools’. In the postwar period they became known as ‘community homes with education’. 18 As Chapter 4 shows, certified schools’ reforming philosophy remained substantially unchanged in the first half of the twentieth century and was only really shaken by wider postwar changes in youth employment, by the expansion of local authority influence and by the broader rejection of lengthy custodial measures for young offenders in the 1970s and 1980s. Those aged between 16 and 21 were too old to appear before the juvenile court, but not too old, in a proportion of cases, to be sent to borstal rather than prison if committed to custody. Borstals were set up by the 1908 Prevention of Crimes Act, and admitted those who ‘by reason of criminal habits or tendencies, or association with persons of bad character’ would benefit from a longer and more structured custodial committal. Youths deemed not likely to benefit from or not requiring such training, either because their offence was too serious or too trivial, continued to be sent to prison. Up to the 1940s, Aylesbury borstal in Buckinghamshire was the only borstal for young women in England and Wales. 19 Sharing the site variously with a women’s convict prison, a women’s inebriate reformatory, a women’s internment camp in the first world war and women prisoners evacuated from Holloway in the second, Aylesbury admitted a growing proportion of the declining number of young women committed to custody. In the 1910s, less than 10 per cent of this group were admitted, but this grew to between 20 per cent and 50 per cent from the early 1920s to the late 1940s.20 Although formally operating outside the juvenile justice system, the borstals were a key part of its institutional hierarchy, not least because quite substantial numbers of those sent to reformatory schools (and later approved

Counting 25

schools) were regularly removed to them for misbehaviour either on site or whilst out on licence. Early twentieth-century juvenile justice disposal options were broadly retained in the postwar period, although much greater use was made of police cautions, local authority care orders, supervision orders and intermediate treatment (a form of structured probation), and a number of new custodial institutions were introduced, including remand centres, attendance centres, detention centres, ‘punishment’ borstals and secure units.21 Of these, the non-custodial options were most significant for girls, although many of them served out their care orders and supervision orders in community homes (the successors to approved schools) and local authority children’s homes, which must undermine the myth that postwar girls’ reform moved beyond the institutional. But what kinds of behaviour led girls into the juvenile courts and, in some cases, into correctional institutions? The rest of this chapter considers the offences that generated most prosecutions (theft and status offences) as well as those that, although more rare, generated much comment (violent offences). To separate out these activities is not to forget that life was rarely so neat for many of the girls discussed here. For a significant minority, juvenile offences were just the beginning of a longer and more varied involvement with crime. Joyce’s record exemplifies this. A researcher investigating prostitution interviewed her in the early 1950s and summarised her early life: Joyce (b. 1928, British) . . . in convent [aged] 5–11, evacuated and in hospital for difficult children 11–14 . . . at 15 began living with U.S. soldiers, baby at 15.6; . . . Beyond control at 15, bound over; twice ‘sleeping out’ at 19, first time bound over, second time fourteen days; . . . had a second baby at 19 and was deserted by the father, so then began wandering around in the East End; . . . commenced soliciting in late teens, no convictions; prostitute in East London and Piccadilly; . . . also trespass on dock and assault on P.C., bound over; larceny at 20, probation; stowing away aboard, 20, one month; and breach of recognizances, Borstal; Borstal licence revoked, 22; drunk and disorderly, 24, fined. 22 The fact that, in the course of nine years, Joyce had been ‘beyond control’ and drunk and disorderly, had stolen, slept out, solicited, trespassed, stowed away, committed assault and given birth to two illegitimate children, is not easily captured in annual criminal statistics.

26

Gender, Justice and Welfare

Theft As Frances Heidensohn has rightly observed, ‘it is clearly not true that girl delinquents are only or mainly sexually delinquent’ and that they ‘like their brothers, are predominantly involved in property offences’.23 Property-related crime remained the most common offence committed by girls as well as boys in the first half of the twentieth century. Various categories of theft accounted for 90 per cent of prosecutions of girls under 16 in 1905, and 48 per cent of those of girls aged 14–17 in 1946 (see Figure 3, ‘Charges brought against females under 21 in Assizes and Quarter Sessions, 1905’, Figure 4, ‘Charges brought against females under 21 in Summary Courts, 1905’, Figure 5, ‘Charges faced by girls aged 14–17 in Magistrates’ Courts, 1946’).24 This does not represent a fall in the actual number of prosecutions for theft, which numbered 748 in 1905 and 1,382 in 1946, but in part signals the emergence of new kinds of juvenile crime, notably contraventions of the Highways Act involving obstruction, vandalism and motoring and bicycling offences. In 1946, a further 27 per cent of charges against girls involved contravention of

under 12 12 to 16 16 to 21

Class of offence 1. Offences against the person

1

Manslaughter Felonious wounding

1

Malicious wounding

3 1

Assault

1

Concealment of birth

1

Bigamy 2. Offences against property with violence 3. Offences against property without violence

Burglary

1

Larceny from the person

3

Larceny in house

5

Larceny by a servant

3 2

Simple/minor larceny

4. Malicious injury to property

5. Offences against the currency

6. Offences not included in the above

12

27

Obtaining by false pretences

2

Receiving stolen goods

5 2

Arson Other

1

Forging and uttering

2

Uttering counterfeit coin

2

Perjury

1

Other offences

1

Attempted suicide

12

Total

0

5

84

Figure 3: Charges brought against females under 21 in Assizes and Quarter Sessions, 1905 Source: Criminal Statistics, 1905, broken down by age and gender.

Counting 27

A. Indictable offences tried summarily

under 12

12 to 16

16 to 21

Simple larceny

85

552

767

Larceny from the person

4

33

38

43

201

Larceny by a servant

2

7

2

19

63

5

11

4

13

0

95

667

1,087

On constable

1

72

Common

3

Embezzlement Obtaining by false pretences Receiving stolen goods Others Total A B. Other offences tried summarily Aggravated

Assault

1

Brothel keeping

Intoxicating liquor laws

Malicious damage

Cruelty to animals

5

Cruelty to children

6

Highway Acts – obstruction

5

Indecent exposure

11

Simple drunkenness

1

196

Drunkenness with aggravations

5

566

Habitual drunkard obtaining drink

1

To fences

2 1

To trees etc Other malicious damage

1

Merchant shipping Acts

1 14

Unlawful possession

4 1

5

15 195

Metropolitan Police Acts

12

Town Police Causes Acts

1

58

Borough byelaws

1

33

4

205

County byelaws Local Acts and byelaws Poor law

12 1

Neglecting to maintain family

7

Misbehaviour by pauper

29

Steal/destroy workhouse clothes

10 1

Other offences Prostitution

1

655

1

4

Railway offences

Vagrancy Acts

8

Stealing fruit etc

2

Begging

3

8

28

Sleeping out

4

75

Found in inclosed premises

1

2

Frequenting

2

15

3

18

9

Other offences Other offences Total Section B Total sections A & B

Figure 4:

19

Parks, commons, open spaces Pawnbrokers' Acts Police regulations

45 23

1 8

54

2,351

103

721

3,438

Charges brought against females under 21 in Summary Courts, 1905

Source: Criminal Statistics, 1905 (categories as in original).

28

Gender, Justice and Welfare

the Highways Act. Girls convicted of property crime made up a large segment of the certified school and borstal populations, although girls under the age of 16 were also likely to have been formally committed to custodial institutions as being ‘in need of care or protection’, despite being guilty of theft.25 Property crime came in a number of judicial guises, depending on what was taken, its value, and from where or whom it was taken. In 1905, the most common property crime for which girls up to the age of 16 were prosecuted was simple larceny (824 cases, or 77 per cent of their total prosecutions). In 1946, the most common charges faced by girls aged 14–17 were simple and minor larcenies (590, or 21 per cent of

A. Indictable offences

Male

Female

Woundings

109

1

Indecent assaults on females

250

1

90

4

Burglary Housebreaking

768

60

Shop breaking

2,929

24

Attempt to break into house, shops

170

1

Entering with intent to commit a felony

262

2

Embezzlement

29

9

Larceny from the person

83

6

Larceny in a house

403

142

Larceny by a servant

639

233 4

Larceny of Post Letters

18

Other aggravated larcenies

118

2

Larceny of pedal cycles

777

51

Larceny from unattended vehicles

557

11

Larceny from shops and stalls

496

208

Larceny from automatic machines

168

7

Thefts of motor vehicles

134

2

Other simple and minor larcenies

5,387

590 16

Obtaining by false pretences

34

Frauds by agents, trustees, directors etc

5

2

Receiving stolen goods

379

39 3

Arson

43

Malicious injuries

239

6

Forgery and uttering

30

16

Perjury

0

2

Attempted suicide

6

6

Other offences not committed by girls Total Section A

211

0

14,334

1,448

Counting 29

B. Summary offences

Assault on constable

24

3

Common assault

165

26

Betting and gaming

58

5

Cruelty to animals

47

3

Dogs, offences in relation to

8

2

Firearms Acts

133 1,041

34 6

Obstruction & nuisance (not vehicles) Other offences

291

Driving private cars dangerously

11

1

Other offences

273

9 7

Other offences

566

Handcarts and barrows

22

2

Pedal cycles

5,412

768

Taking motor without consent

684

5

Indecent exposure

70

1

Drunkenness, simple

13

3

Drunkenness with aggravations

18

4

Other offences

100

16

Malicious damage

1,653

57

Army Act

30

9

Parks, commons and open spaces

63

2

0

1

Unlawful pledging

G. Defence Regulations

Pedlars Act

4

1

Disorderly behaviour

289

25

Playing games in the street

757

2

Other offences

240

10

Railway offences

976

243

Dog licences

46

16

Stealing trees

50

3

Stealing fruit

486

23

Unlawful possession

84

4

Sleeping out

4

8

Gaming etc

298

4

Found in inclosed premises

257

4

Frequenting

88

4

Other offences

3

1

All other offences

284

71

All offences

Total sections B+G Other sections Total A+B+G+other

Figure 5:

2

Other offences not committed by girls

101

25

14,649

1,410

653

0

29,636

2,858

Charges faced by girls aged 14–17 in Magistrates’ Courts, 1946

(Note that these figures do not include offences committed by children under 14 or any ‘status’ cases. Note also that many ‘other offences’ are unspecified in the original.) Source: Criminal Statistics, 1946.

30

Gender, Justice and Welfare

their total prosecutions excluding ‘care or protection cases’), larceny by a servant (233), larceny from shops and stalls (208), larceny in a house (142), house breaking (60) and larceny of pedal cycles (51). However, a small number were also charged with burglary, shopbreaking, embezzlement, receiving stolen goods, forgery, and larceny from the person, unattended vehicles and automatic vending machines. A number of those girls sent to certified schools (whether by the courts or as voluntary admissions) had committed some kind of theft, although usually in conjunction with some other offence. Some continued, or started, to steal after their period of detention had ended. School records and case files suggest that, in either case, this was minor property crime. Ivy, 12, was charged by a Southampton court in 1908 with stealing clothes, most probably from the workhouse where she was then living. She was sent to an industrial school in Oxfordshire, but was later transferred to the Devon and Exeter Girls’ Reformatory for stealing clothes and money to aid her escape attempt.26 Ada, 13, was also charged in 1908 with larceny by Nottingham juvenile court. Four years after her release from industrial school, aged 20, she was put on probation for stealing a pair of sheets and a chemise from the National Laundry (also in Nottingham) where she then worked.27 Winifred, 11, was charged in 1912 by a London juvenile court with stealing two purses from her school, each containing a few shillings. She continued to steal for the next few years, allegedly taking candles, sweets and other goods from her industrial school (for which she too was transferred to a reformatory), and later jewellery from friends’ families and employers.28 In 1915, 12-year-old Agnes appeared in court in Ryde on the Isle of Wight having stolen two pounds of grapes from a shop, although she apparently had a longer history of theft. At 19, three years after her release from her industrial school, she was sent to Portsmouth’s Kingston Prison for three months for stealing two cheques amongst other unspecified items. 29 In all these cases, the initial acts of petty theft were rarely the sole or formally stated reason for the girls’ committal to a certified school. As chapter 5 shows, their case files detail the often complex circumstances preceding such a significant move. Later studies confirm the prevalence of this petty theft. Of John Bowlby’s Forty-four Juvenile Thieves (1946), 13 were girls aged between five and 16. Lily, 11, stole ‘8s 6d . . . from the teacher’s desk’. Winnie, 13, ‘stole principally from the cloak-room at school’ and Kathleen, 7, ‘pilfered at school and misappropriated money given to her by her mother’. Few of the 13 were charged in court, but instead referred by teachers and parents to John Bowlby at the Tavistock child guidance unit. 30 Mannheim’s

Counting 31

analysis of delinquency in Cambridge in the 1940s reached a conclusion typical of many accounts: that girls were most likely to steal clothes, cosmetics and cheap jewellery, either for their own use or to resell. 31 Of all girls’ property crime, shoplifting attracted most contemporary comment. Police records and writings from 1930s London to 1950s Liverpool tell the same story: where boys were arrested for theft in a wider range of circumstances, girls seemed to specialise in stealing from shops. A Metropolitan Police report analysing arrests of those under 21 for indictable crimes during 1935 suggests that girl and boy thieves operated very differently. Boys were most commonly arrested for larceny from automatic machines, larceny from vehicles, shopbreaking and larceny of bicycles, and girls for shoplifting. Girls made up 6 per cent of these indictable arrests (328 of 5,359), yet within that accounted for over 20 per cent of arrests for ‘shoplifting and stealing from stalls’ (135 of 637).32 A similar analysis of encounters between Liverpool police and juveniles during a 1955 ‘juvenile liaison’ experiment painted a similar picture. Most of the 175 girls investigated were involved in shoplifting, with 65 per cent of their offences taking place in a shop, and the remainder at home (14 per cent), school (10 per cent) and in the street (6 per cent). The sites of boys’ offences were much more varied. Only 23 per cent of their 630 offences had taken place in shops. 33 By the late 1950s, shoplifting accounted for well over a third of female juvenile prosecutions. Boys still outnumbered girls here: in 1959, for example, for every girl aged 8–14 charged with larceny from shops and stalls over 4 boys were similarly charged, although this gap narrowed to nearer 2:1 for the 14–17 age group and to almost 1:1 for the 17–21 age group.34 Shoplifting was, none the less, one of the few juvenile crimes where the gap between younger girls and boys was significantly narrow. Prominent juvenile psychiatrist T.C.N. Gibbens would later write that the ‘crime wave by females’ in the 1960s and 1970s ‘turns out to be a remarkable growth in petty theft by schoolgirls’, although in earlier work he had noted the importance of shopowners’ increasing efforts to detect and pursue this offence.35 Writings on shoplifting often took a certain pleasure in the girls’ ingenuity and daring. The offence took place in public and in daylight, unlike much boys’ theft, which was often committed in relative privacy after dark and often accompanied by other offences, such as breaking and entering and criminal damage. Although seen as a crime made easier by the open-plan design of new department stores, it nevertheless required a certain amount of risk and skill. 36 In Women of the Underworld, an account of her covert investigations of life in London lodging

32

Gender, Justice and Welfare

houses in the early 1920s, Ada Chesterton describes the ingenious methods used by girls adept at lifting wallets, snatching bags, stealing coins from gas meters and taking tips from tea-shops, but reserves her greatest admiration for a young professional shoplifter named Blue Eyes. This ‘pretty faired haired creature with soft big blue eyes, a dimpled baby face and the whitest little hands imaginable’, had ‘a well-cut coat of black cloth with a fashionable fur collar and cuffs’ which she had adapted for her trade. Chesterton reports that ‘just above the waistline’ she saw ‘embedded in the fur three or four hooks, from one of which was suspended a small and very valuable stone marten skin, fresh from the furrier’. ‘Blue Eyes’, it turned out, ‘was one of the smartest fur thieves in London’.37 As this story suggests, respectable girls were often competent thieves, though were far less likely to be suspected, and if caught, far less likely to face the juvenile court. Cyril Burt, London County Council’s first educational psychologist and author of the ground-breaking 1925 book, The Young Delinquent, counselled a number of such girls. Rose, a 14-year-old scholarship girl, turned to theft when her family’s business failed in the postwar depression and her weekly remittance was ‘[at] a single stroke . . . cut down to a few coppers’. She started stealing money from her more affluent schoolmates, which she spent first on ‘school requisites’ and then on ‘her former little luxuries’. In a very similar case, Edith, 13, stole as a means of keeping up with her richer school friends, ‘desperately desirous to make as fine a show as they did, in matters of dress, pocket-money, and out-of-school amusement’. Her ‘natural astuteness soon taught her to pilfer, without discovery or suspicion, and with increasing profit and success’: She first took a pair of gloves and several lace handkerchiefs – all the property of other girls; then, boxes of sweetmeats and confectionery from shops – dividing the contents with her unsuspecting friends; and, finally, half-crowns and ten-shilling notes from home – spending the money, for the most part on cheap brooches and bangles, and on various forms of childish recreation.38 Other contemporary accounts suggest that a number of young women were involved in sophisticated urban criminal networks. Chesterton described many incidents where girls acted with others, including forging and passing banknotes and cheques, receiving stolen goods and blackmailing.39 Domestic servants, in particular, were able to exploit their positions in this respect and were apparently among the most notorious blackmailers in early twentieth-century England. Chesterton’s observations

Counting 33

would seem to be borne out by popular novels of the time. 40 Shoplifting was carried out by girls acting alone, but also by girls acting in organised groups that were difficult to detect. Homer Lane, founder of the radical reformatory, the Little Commonwealth, witnessed the 1913 court appearances of three ‘systematic shoplifters’ aged 13, 14 and 15 who had ‘conducted their operations over a wide area’ for a period of months, and who, although known to the police, were ‘so clever in their operations that evidence to secure conviction was difficult to obtain’. 41 Cyril Burt observed similar levels of female criminal organisation in which older women ‘tutored’ younger women in the arts of prostitution and pilfering: A presentable maid from the provinces, tired of domestic service, can find all too easily an older woman, who will initiate her into various malpractices, who will point out West-End streets or Soho restaurants safe for such uses, who will tell her (with much inexactitude) how to avoid the three great plagues of an irregular life, and from what shops and markets she can most safely pilfer when ‘business’ is bad; and such a woman, after a little initial liberality – the loan of a fur or the offer of smart shoes – will look more or less for some material return. Significantly, Burt claimed that ‘among youths and boys’ he had ‘found no similar instance of cold and calculated training’.42 Up to a point, then, girls’ property crime was presented as gender-specific. Girls were thought by the police, the public and investigators, to target certain goods, to have certain ways of stealing, concealing and forwarding those goods and certain motives for engaging in crime in the first place. They were seen to trade on presumptions of their innocence, to make the most of their ‘feminine’ charm and their ‘feminine’ ability to deceive. When caught, they were certainly punished, but, as the texts discussed here show, their crimes clearly inspired amusement as well as admiration.

Violence Very few girls were prosecuted in the juvenile courts for violent crime. In both 1905 and 1946, only a handful were charged with offences such as assault, wounding, arson, malicious damage or cruelty to children or animals. In general, prosecutions for violent crime were slightly more common among those aged between 16 and 21, although accounted for between just 1 and 3 per cent of pre-1945 admissions to Aylesbury borstal. In 1905, 124 young women in this age group were charged with assault (and 72 of these cases involved assault upon a police constable).

34

Gender, Justice and Welfare

A further 763 were charged with drunkenness in that year, a charge often connected with disorderly behaviour of some kind. Notably, there were just twelve prosecutions for infanticide (or concealment of birth) in 1905, a much lower figure than might be expected, and just two recorded Aylesbury admissions linked to infanticide between 1910 and 1947.43 According to the criminal statistics, then, girls were rarely violent. Yet other sources point to the existence of both a public physical culture and private violent culture among girls. Anne Campbell’s pioneering studies of late twentieth-century girls and gangs in the United States and Britain showed that violence was part of many girls’ lives. 44 Since then, historical investigations of juvenile crime in Britain and France have shown that this is not a recent phenomenon. Andrew Davies’ study of gang violence in late nineteenth-century Manchester and Salford reveals a ‘vigorous street life’ in which young women were actively involved – in ways that sometimes led them to court. Of the 717 young people facing criminal charges arising out of 250 cases of ‘scuttling’ (affrays between rival gangs) identified by Davies between 1870 and 1900, 45 (or 6 per cent) were female.45 Many of these cases involved young mill workers, who spent their free time with their girlfriends or with groups of young men in beerhouses, dancing saloons, music halls, cheap theatres or on the streets. Davies stresses that although their violence sometimes broke out in situations first initiated by young men, they also fought on their own terms and were involved in collective assaults upon local people and the police. They also fought between themselves, often provoked by a sexual insult and quite often using weapons such as clogs and boots (and, less frequently, bottles, belts and knives). Girls’ capacity for collective violence, resistance and bullying is also evidenced by accounts of life inside children’s homes, certified schools and borstals, as chapter 5 shows. Girls played a key role in more targeted violent crime, too. Writing his memoirs in the 1950s, former Metropolitan police officer Robert Fabian remembered that every London gang had ‘its team’ of ‘brides or chicks’, girls of 13–17, who were ‘painted like Jezebels’, ‘captivated by the “glamour” of belonging to a boy gang’, and often displaying ‘their “boy’s” initials carved with a knife-blade on arm or leg’. The girls were prepared to pass through initiations that varied ‘according to the particular sadism or prurience of the gang leaders’. Few of them, according to Fabian, had ‘much virtue left to [them]’.46 Fifteen-year-old Deborah was one such girl who apparently took part in regular robberies and assaults. She and two boys would ‘hang around a late-night milk bar until they [saw] a drunk’. The girl would ‘play her part by pestering him’, then the

Counting 35

boys would ‘jump him with knives and coshes on the pretence that he’d insulted their girlfriend’.47 Mannheim wrote of two other 15-year-old girls who stood trial for attempted murder in 1938 following their attack on an 80-year-old retired schoolmistress. One of the girls was reported to have stated that a boy had asked her to send him money and that she had promised to try and ‘get it out’ of this woman, ‘even if I have to do her in’. 48 Like Fabian, Mannheim assumes here that girls’ violence was prompted by boys. Other cases, however, suggest that girls also acted alone, often performing violence upon family members, younger children and animals. Mary Size, the niece of Aylesbury governor Lilian Barker, remembered Jenny, an ‘innocent-looking’ orphan girl below borstal age, but sent there none the less for the ‘premeditated’ killing of her aunt. According to Size, she had ‘brutally attacked her aunt with a chopper at night, while the woman was asleep’ and ‘having committed her crime . . . put the chopper back in the wood shed and returned to bed’.49 Cyril Burt was struck by the levels of violence displayed by some of the girls referred to him by the London County Council Education Department in the 1920s. Seven-year-old Grace was referred to him by a teacher ‘with complaints of repeated theft, and of continual spitefulness towards her tiny playmates’: She had stabbed a neighbour’s baby with an inky pen. She had twice bitten the child sitting next to her in class, until she had drawn blood. She had flung, in a spasm of rage, her own pet kitten on the fire. She had waylaid younger children on errands for their mothers, and had terrified them till they handed over the coins intended for the shopman. 50 Burt describes encounters with at least four further cases: a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old convicted of common assault, ‘the first having made a fierce attack upon a lad of her own age and size, the second upon her mother’; nine-year-old May, who wrote a series of threatening letters to her father and stepmother, one of which promised to ‘put that damn kid [her 11-month-old half-brother] on the fire or out the winder’; and 13-yearold Irene, memorably described by Burt as a ‘big, burly, fierce-looking maiden, with a puckered scowl on her forehead and a square, under-shot, resolute jaw’ who ‘shouldered’ into his room ‘with a policeman’s blood literally moist upon her knuckles’.51 Irene had a violent history: In the infants’ department she was known for a little spitfire; and tales were still remembered, telling how she had pinched, and

36

Gender, Justice and Welfare

pushed about, and on occasion even stabbed, the other children. Similar scenes were renewed in every class-room of the upper school. As she grew older and stronger, so her quarrelsome habits became more formidable. Her crowning outrage was a vicious tussle with her mother, which she terminated by knocking out, with a single blow, two of the woman’s incisor teeth. 52 These few examples suggest that girls’ violence was much more widespread than the criminal statistics would indicate, which in turn suggests that it was both under-reported and less likely to be prosecuted. Where girls were prosecuted, they often seemed to receive lower penalties than their male counterparts. As Davies shows, although fighting female scuttlers were loudly condemned in the Manchester media, described as ‘vixens’, ‘viragoes’, ‘Amazons’, ‘female roughs’ and even ‘girl rippers’, magistrates tended to treat them with relative leniency, preferring to fine them or release them on recognizance. He suggests that this leniency might be explained by a number of related beliefs: first, that young women were marginal and therefore less threatening figures within gangs; second, that they were better disciplined by their parents rather than by the state; and third, that female offenders were more malleable than male, and would more quickly learn the errors of their ways.53 However, judicial masculinities were also at stake here. Male police officers and male magistrates seemed to find it difficult to deal with violent girls. For these men to arrest, charge or sentence a violent girl was perhaps to compromise their own manliness. To treat such girls seriously rather than dismissing them as a joke or indulging them as a sexual spectacle was perhaps to admit that they and the polity at large found such girls truly threatening. In cases where this line was crossed, and where this admission was made, however, girls could be treated very harshly indeed. The case of Mary Bell, one of the twentieth century’s most infamous violent girls, exemplifies this. In 1968, at the age of 11, she faced trial, with her 13-year-old friend Norma, for the manslaughter of fouryear-old Martin Brown and three-year-old Brian Howe. Prior to being detained and prior to the second killing, the two girls had made many attempts to link themselves to the death of Martin Brown, but these were not taken seriously. Within two days of Martin’s death, Mary Bell had drawn a picture at school of the scene where his body was found, which included details that had not been made public and therefore might have been used to link her to the incident. Around the same time, the two girls broke into a local nursery school, where they caused

Counting 37

damage and left a series of notes reading, ‘I murder SO That I may come back’, ‘fuch of we murder watch out Fanny and FAggot’, ‘WE did murder Martin brown, fuckof you BAstArd’ and ‘YOU ArE micey y BecuaSe we murderd Martain GO Brown you BEttER Look out THErE Murders aBout By FANNYAND and auld Faggot you screws’. 54 Police and community reluctance to believe that two girls could be responsible for these deaths was overtaken, however, by angry horror when this was proved to be the case. Mary Bell, considered to have forced her older friend to take part in these events, bore the brunt of public and judicial hostility. In the absence of a suitable girls’ custodial facility, she was admitted to a boys’ secure unit and later transferred to women’s prisons where she stayed until she was in her mid-twenties. The hostile publicity surrounding the publication in 1998 of her story as told to Gitta Sereny proved that the public had neither forgotten nor forgiven her. Bell’s case, although highly unusual, encapsulates deep-seated reactions to girls’ violence – reactions which explain both its general under-reporting and its occasionally extreme punishment. When they ceased to thrill and amuse, such girls became, in Lombroso’s century-old phrase, ‘doubly monstrous’.

Sex, care and protection Discourses from the judicial to the popular looked for a sexual element within practically all kinds of girls’ crime. When girls stole, they stole clothes, make-up and fashion accessories to enhance their looks. When they fought, they were amazons and viragos. When they hung out in the streets, they were hanging out for sexual encounters. Yet the sexual representation of girls’ crime belies the fact that very few girls appeared in court explicitly or formally charged with sexual offences. ‘Waywardness’ per se was not against the law, but it could bring girls to court if, for example, it constituted a breach of the peace, contravened a by-law or placed them in moral danger. Ada Chesterton described how this might happen on inter-war London street corners: You will find them talking loudly, laughing shrilly on the pavement, lining up with boys of the district equally at a loose end, and together, for sheer lack of anything else to do, they will vent their energy and get rid of their depression by that form of skylarking which so often ends with a fracas with the police and a subsequent charge at the courts.55

38

Gender, Justice and Welfare

‘Waywardness’, one of the most common terms in early twentieth-century discourses of girls’ delinquency, was an elastic concept, a catch-all whose power to detain lay in its imprecision. ‘Offences against decency’, another contemporary policing phrase, could be equally indeterminate. Advice for police officers here was delivered by systematic euphemism. ‘Offences against decency’ could be committed ‘by language or behaviour, by the giving of some display or exhibition, by exposure of the person, or by making public any indecent matter’. ‘Indecent language’ was that which was ‘unbecoming, not decent, contrary to propriety, or offensive to modesty’, while ‘obscene language’ conveyed the idea ‘of something disgusting, filthy, repulsive, or offensive to chastity or delicacy’, and ‘profane language’ indicated ‘something unclean, polluted, disrespectful, irreverent, impious or blasphemous’. 56 Girls could easily fall foul of such broad codes. However, more clearly codified sexual offences, such as indecent exposure, defilement, indecent assault, incest and rape, were so closely defined in relation to the penis and to the act of penetration that they were presented by the police as ‘offences against females’ committed exclusively by men and occasionally by boys. 57 The exception here was, of course, prostitution. Child prostitution was common in urban areas from at least the nineteenth century onwards, but the numbers of girls under 16 facing actual charges clearly linked to soliciting in the juvenile courts after 1908 were minimal. There were seven recorded cases in 1910, eight in 1915, one in 1920, two in 1925, none in 1930 and one in 1935. 58 Prosecutions of young women aged between 16 and 21 were much more common, and these young prostitutes made up a large proportion of the female prison population and of the borstal population after 1914. 59 The low figures can be explained in part by the general decline in prosecutions for prostitution-related offences in the early twentieth century, 60 but more specifically by legal changes which meant that criminal responsibility in child prostitution passed from the young sellers of sex to the older procurers, brothel owners and buyers. The 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, passed in the wake of the infamous child prostitution scandal publicised by popular journalist W.T. Stead, raised the age of consent from 12 to 16. This meant that ‘under-age’ girls engaging in sexual activity could not be held legally responsible for their actions (which makes it difficult to explain the handful of recorded prosecutions that did appear to take place), and that those men or boys who did have sexual relations with them could be variously charged with defilement, indecency, unlawful carnal knowledge or rape.61 The Children Acts of 1908 and 1933 made it a misdemeanour for ‘any persons

Counting 39

having custody, charge or care of a girl under the age of 16 years to cause or encourage her to prostitution’, and an offence for ‘a person having custody of a child to allow it to reside in or frequent a brothel’.62 Child prostitution was therefore essentially recast as child abuse. However, girl children involved in such cases and other cases involving under-age sex continued to appear in the juvenile courts as being ‘in need of care or protection’, as discussed below. Inevitably, girls under the ages of 16 and 17 continued to be involved in prostitution. From the turn of the century to the late 1930s, numerous campaigners worked against the international sex trade (known in the early days as ‘the white slave trade’) much of which involved adolescent girls. The matter was investigated by, among others, international Penitentiary Congresses, Ladies’ Associations for the Care of Friendless Girls, the League of Nations and the International Bureau for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children. 63 Much of this activity aimed to secure the welfare, or prevent the arrival, of migrant girls mainly from eastern and southern Europe (and is discussed further in chapter 3). However, despite the fact that it was barely mentioned in two key government investigations into street and sex offences in 1928 and 1957, ‘home-grown’ child prostitution continued to operate throughout this period and beyond. 64 In 1918 the Home Office attempted to close down a number of Liverpool ‘children’s homes’ which it and local welfare agencies believed in fact to be brothels.65 Gladys Hall argued in her 1933 study that the ‘use of sex for payment may occur at a very early age’ and reported having found ‘evidence of its practice in England for pennies or small sums by children as young as seven’.66 Cecil Bishop, a former Metropolitan CID officer, alleged in his 1931 book on female crime that the habit of ‘making pocket money by consorting in an immoral manner with boy friends’ was ‘now quite common amongst girls in many London districts’ and that ‘[w]hen young girls living in certain localities wish to go to the picture theatre, they earn the money in the easiest way they know how’. 67 Metropolitan policewoman Lilian Wyles suggested that a number of the sexual abuse cases she dealt with in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s were bound up with child prostitution. She describes one war-time case involving a ‘pretty, well-built’ ten-year-old girl who ‘had discovered that she should earn money by hanging around the back doors of public-houses and accosting half-drunk men as they came out’ and ‘had marked down a disused air-raid shelter to which she would take these men who she had invited to assault her’. The ‘small procuress’ then gathered together and ‘coached’ a small group of young girls to do

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the same, taking a substantial cut of their two shilling fee. Wyles was eventually called in by local mothers suspicious of their daughters’ sudden access to ready cash. 68 In her 1950s investigation of the ‘common prostitute’, C.H. Rolph identified three London districts – Hyde Park, Paddington and Stepney – that attracted young, working-class girls because of the facilities they offered to those ‘unable or unprepared to organize themselves with flats for business’. In short, selling sex in open spaces, cars and hotel rooms paid for by the clients reduced overheads and thus allowed young women without capital to operate as cheaply as possible and to avoid the ‘hard commercial competition’ in areas like Soho and Victoria. Stepney, in particular, was viewed by Rolph and other commentators as a magnet for young runaways. Its mixed and migrant population made it ‘one of the most popular resorts for absconders from [approved] schools, and girls, who, having left their home towns, have come to London not knowing where to go’. Many of these girls were ‘ready to sleep with a man for nothing, or at least only for a bed’; a fact that meant that more seasoned prostitutes ‘frequently had blank evenings’. 69 Ex-vice officer Robert Fabian admitted that the Metropolitan police in effect disguised the real extent of such activities. He described a typical encounter between an officer and a young prostitute: There are a dozen charges he can pick her up on, none of them important, but enough to get her into the police station, where relatives or other responsible authorities can be contacted. He will do this without hesitation when he sees a girl soliciting, who appears to have any shreds of innocence left upon her soul. This is normal routine.70 Some of the girls encountered by these different writers may have ended up in the juvenile justice system. Under-age girls who had lost, or who were thought to be at risk of losing, their virginity, made up a very substantial proportion of young female court appearances. Some of these girls had chosen to become sexually active, some as part of a commercial relationship, others as part of an emotional relationship. Other girls had more clearly been abused – by male relatives, by family friends, by boyfriends, by strangers. The juvenile justice system had many ways of dealing with these girls if they came to public attention, which by no means all of them did. Action taken in these cases arguably epitomised the juvenile court project and its fundamental problems. These girls had not committed an offence. Court intervention was intended to protect them, not punish them. Yet by being drawn into judicial space they

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became judicial subjects and their guilt or innocence in the matter was inevitably held up to scrutiny. The innocence of the sexually experienced, or even sexually vulnerable, girl was compromised in many ways. Girls leading ‘wayward’ lives and who ‘chose’ to be sexually active were thought to bear much, if not all, of the responsibility for this choice. But even in abuse cases, the very fact that a girl was able to articulate her experience often worked against her. A child possessing the vocabulary to describe a sexual act was no ‘innocent’ child. She was the sort of child who might have ‘encouraged’ the abuse in the first place. 71 Worse still, unless checked, she could ‘contaminate’ other children with this ‘knowledge of evil’. The juvenile courts therefore trod a very fine line between protecting and punishing girls. These cases were generally brought to the juvenile court under certain sections of the Children Acts of 1908 and 1933 which outlined ways of dealing with children who had not committed a criminal offence but who required protection. The forerunner of the late twentieth-century ‘care order’, the 1908 Act set down seven categories of ‘vulnerability’ derived from nineteenth-century vagrancy and poor law legislation and applicable across age groups. Children could be brought to court (and were liable to be sent to an industrial school) if they were found to be: begging, wandering, destitute, in the care of an unfit parent or guardian, or frequenting the company of reputed thieves or prostitutes. A seventh category was sex-specific: girls whose fathers had been convicted of sexual offences against them or any sisters they might have could also be required to appear in court and removed from their families for their own safety. The 1933 Children and Young Persons Act replaced these seven categories with two new wider categories: ‘being beyond control’ and ‘being in need of care or protection’.72 How many girls were dealt with by the juvenile courts in this way? Precise numbers are difficult to find because the formal criminal statistics tended to record court appearances linked to conventional offences, rather than what might be termed ‘status offences’ (situations where a child was judged to be in danger of becoming a victim of crime or a potential criminal). Nevertheless, evidence from individual juvenile courts and police forces shows just how prominent ‘protection’ was within the policing of girls. Of the 213 girls (of 2,471 cases) appearing before Manchester’s juvenile courts between 1911 and 1915, more than half had been found wandering, begging or living in brothels.73 Similarly, 32 of the 51 cases involving girls heard by Leeds’ juvenile courts in 1915 were applications for industrial school committal due to parental neglect, 31 of which were successful.74 Although 34 Leeds boys appeared for

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similar reasons that year, these constituted a very low proportion of overall boys’ cases. And in Liverpool, a quarter (41 of 175) of the girls detained by the police within their 1955 juvenile liaison experiment had not committed any offence, but were detained as ‘potential delinquents’. Only 12 per cent (or 80) of boys drawn into the scheme came under this category.75 Approved school admission statistics show further that a high proportion of girl inmates were admitted because of status offences of some kind. Just over half the admissions to girls’ approved schools in 1936 (292 of 571) were made up of those found to be ‘beyond control’ or ‘in need of care or protection’. In 1964, almost two-thirds of girls admitted (475 of 772) were ‘non-offenders’. In all cases, status offences accounted for a much higher proportion of girls’ admissions than boys’. In 1936, these accounted for 10 per cent of boys’ admissions (311 of 3,188), and in 1964, just 5 per cent (224 of 4,589).76 The steady numbers of children appearing in the twentieth-century juvenile courts for status offences is particularly significant given the expansion of child welfare services and the early twentieth-century decline in the kinds of adult prosecutions (such as drunkenness, prostitution, child neglect and offences against the Education Acts) that often led to dependent children being seen to require state protection in the first place. At one level, this apparent paradox points to the fact that a general rise in living standards over the century was accompanied by a continual reinvention of concerns around child poverty and neglect. At another level, it points both to the dramatic expansion of modern child protection practices, with the creation of the juvenile justice system, the institution of statutory social workers and the survival of child-saving charities; and to the dramatic failure (or, better, inability) of these agencies to effect a lasting reduction in the numbers of ‘vulnerable’ children. This much expanded policing of poor families was intended by various generations of twentieth-century reformers to break cycles of child deprivation, neglect and waywardness, but may also have contributed to the perpetuation of those cycles, not least by creating new vocabulary to define dangerous and endangered children, new professionals to police them, and new spaces in which to judge and care for them. ‘Care or protection’ cases were brought for a variety of reasons. It is important to note here that girls’ sexual waywardness alone was rarely the only stated reason why these cases arose. Rather, other deviant or defiant acts associated with that sexual waywardness, whether committed by the girl herself and/or by her parents or carers, tended to be the

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key to such cases.77 The wayward girl was the girl who disobeyed her parents more generally by ignoring their warnings and threats about where she might go, when she might return, whom she might meet, what she might wear, how much she might spend, and so on. She might also be a thief, a truant or a runaway. The wayward parent was the parent who failed their child by failing to define or enforce rules around these kinds of issues or by otherwise encouraging them to lead an immoral life. A cautious distinction could be drawn here between ‘respectable’ parents who invited outside agencies to intervene in their family lives, and parents already defined as ‘disreputable’ because they were ‘known’ to outside agencies and who did not themselves seek assistance in dealing with their daughters. Up to a point, this was a distinction that operated on class lines, although clearly ‘respectability’ was not simply defined by economic status (as discussed in chapter 5). As the examples below show, ‘protection’ cases thus offered a way of correcting both multiply deviant girls and/or multiply deviant families. Sexual impropriety, whether actual, alleged, anticipated or forced, was of course very much a part of this, but invariably involved a range of other ‘undesirable’ actions. Julia, 11, was committed to an industrial school in 1915 after her mother proved to the Old Street juvenile court that she was ‘uncontrollable’. The mother’s evidence had been supported by a London County Council officer, who claimed that Julia ‘stays out late, sometimes all night . . . is a truant and has stolen money from home . . . is said to have been tampered with by men [though] has been examined and has not “fallen”.’78 In a second case, 15-year-old Marie was detained by a woman police officer in central London in June 1944 initially because of ‘her youthful and unkempt appearance’ and subsequently because she could not give a London address or show that she had any money. She had run away from her grandfather’s home in Wisbech and, together with another girl, had ‘accompanied two American soldiers to Peterborough and had later travelled to London by lorry’. When contacted, her grandfather told the police that she was illegitimate and that he had looked after her since she was a young child. She had ‘recently been a source of trouble to him owing to her association with American soldiers’, one of whom he had once found under her bed. Marie had already been ‘cautioned by the Military Authorities for writing to an Italian prisoner of war’ and ‘the Vicar, Welfare Officers and Police had spoken to the girl concerning her behaviour with soldiers, which included her absence from home all night’. Chelsea juvenile court placed her on probation under the supervision of a local officer in Wisbech. 79

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In a third case, Joan, 15, from Dorset was reported to police early in 1952 by staff at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson hospital having been taken there during a visit to London by her boyfriend who suspected she was pregnant. In her statement to a woman officer, Joan described how she had ‘hated school’ and had ‘never been happy at home’ as ‘Daddy hits me and he and Mummie say they don’t want me at home because I won’t help with housework’. She had had a series of live-in domestic jobs, mostly in hotels and from which she had been sacked because her work was ‘too slow’. Since leaving school she had ‘been out with quite a lot of young men’ who ‘spoke to [her] in the streets or in cafés, invited [her] out with them’. She knew ‘what is meant by the word intimate and [had] been like this with three men’, two of whom she encountered whilst working in the hotels. Joan stressed that, although she had ‘kissed and cuddled’ these young men, she had not wanted to have sex with them. The third man was her own father, described as a labourer, who had ‘interfered’ with her since she was 13.80 The outcome in this case is not clear but, given her pregnancy, seems unlikely to have ended in committal to an approved school. Boys were also brought to court on sexually-linked care and protection charges, albeit in much smaller numbers. Matt Houlbrook’s study of male sexualities in early twentieth-century London argues that significant numbers of boys engaged in sexual trade with older men which was both casual and systematic. A number of them appeared in court as protection cases, and some were sent to certified schools as a result. In one 1918 case, a 12-year-old Hoxton schoolboy and a 51-year-old Bethnal Green dock labourer were both charged with ‘outraging public decency’ having been found together on Hampstead Heath. The boy was found not guilty but subsequently appeared before Hampstead juvenile court where he was charged with ‘wandering and having a parent who does not exercise proper guardianship’. The charge was proved and he was sent to an industrial school in York until he was 16.81 The sexual policing and protection of boys requires further investigation. As Mahood and Jackson have shown, this clearly occurred, yet concerns for boys seem to have been expressed in distinct ways that are not easily or simply mapped onto the concerns expressed around girls.82 An obvious yet crucial difference here is that a number of the boys in these cases seem to have been detained because of their engagement, both willing and forced, in various forms of same-sex sexual activity with older men. The longer-term consequences of such activity, for the boys themselves and for society as a whole, were perhaps less easy to predict than the assumed consequences of heterosexual ‘waywardness’

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among girls. This kind of behaviour among boys, although an object of concern, did not generate the same generalised fears: the prospect of boys losing their virginity, risking their sexual (and therefore social) reputations and becoming prostitutes or bad fathers was simply not greeted with the same horror. This was perhaps especially the case in a period when there were so many constructions of what it meant to engage in same-sex sexual activity: when, for example, to masturbate a man for a few shillings was, for some boys, a commercial as much as a sexual transaction which was legitimate because it fell well within the bounds of conventional masculinity. As Jackson argues, boys involved in abuse trials were often cast as ‘financially scheming’. 83 Another difference was that boys’ need for protection, even protection from their immoral families, was not so rigidly defined in sexual terms and was more likely to have been linked to material and physical neglect. This was also true for girls, but for them, material deprivation was much more closely linked to moral deterioration. For the Home Office’s Children’s Branch, one of the main reasons why the 1933 Children Act had needed to broaden ‘care or protection’ categories was ‘to meet the need of the young girl whose manner of living was almost certain to end in moral disaster’. ‘Neglected boys’, though an object of concern, would ‘generally find an outlet for their energies in adventure . . . and sooner or later are charged with an offence’, while girls tended to ‘drift into indecent or immoral habits’.84 The social threats posed by sexually wayward boys in this period seem to have been much more shifting and diverse than the threats posed by sexually wayward girls. Protection proceedings were also widely initiated in cases where allegations of sexual impropriety, together with other complaints, were made against parents rather than the children themselves. Again, more research is needed with regard to the experiences of boys here. Case files of girls sent to industrial schools prior to the 1933 Children Act show this very clearly (as later files almost certainly would were they to be more readily accessible). In 1905, 11-year-old Elsie was charged by Lichfield Police Court with ‘being in the street and begging or receiving alms’ after she had been found singing in public with ‘a man who was not her father’, but who lived ‘in adultery’ with her mother ‘in a common lodging house’. The man was sent to prison for two weeks for begging, but Elsie was sent to an industrial school for her own protection for a full five years.85 The children of parents who had themselves, for whatever reason, come to the attention of the authorities were prominent among care and protection cases. In 1910, Emily, 12, was adopted by the Guildford Poor Law guardians (and later sent to an industrial

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school) after her parents, ‘addicted to drink and immoral habits’, had been given further prison sentences for unspecified crimes.86 In February 1916, two sisters aged 8 and 10, born in Liverpool ‘of alien parentage’, were admitted to London’s Montefiore House, the country’s only Jewish girls’ industrial school, after their father had been interned under the Defence of the Realm Acts and their mother deported for ‘being a bad character’. 87 In 1921, another Jewish girl was admitted because her mother was to be deported (probably to Russia) upon completion of her three-month prison sentence for prostitution and neglect.88 This particular use of juvenile justice institutions – housing younger children removed from poor parental care – declined in the 1930s with the merging of industrial schools and reformatories and with the expansion of local authority facilities for this purpose, namely fostering, boarding out and children’s homes. As a result of these changes, together with the 1933 Children Act’s inclusion of 16-year-olds within the category ‘young person’, protection cases came to be more firmly and more visibly associated with the older (sexually) delinquent girl in the middle years of the century. Again, though, girls’ sexual delinquencies continued to be connected to other offences, even if these other offences continued to be treated less seriously by commentators and the courts. Looking back on 30 years’ work with 15- and 16-year-old girls on remand in London, Gibbens wrote: They tended to be runaways from home, promiscuous, caught in cars their boyfriends had stolen, sharing in the proceeds of burglaries their boyfriends had committed, and perhaps, stealing on their own. They were charged with being ‘beyond control’ of their parents, or ‘in need of care and protection’ . . . their offences being regarded as only one of many elements, together with truancy and absconding, in care proceedings. 89 Despite a general willingness on the part of police, parents and courts to define girls’ deviance in terms of their need for care and protection, the numbers of cases brought remained low relative to the numbers appearing in the juvenile courts as a whole and extremely low relative to the total numbers that might have been investigated. One reason for this was that the use of welfare mechanisms to police girls was impeded by certain procedural, practical and ethical problems. Care or protection cases could be difficult to bring, if, for example, parents refused to co-operate, or if it was thought difficult to impose

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national standards of child welfare on certain communities. The Gipsy and travelling communities were a case in point here, despite the fact that their lifestyles breached many aspects of the Children Acts, notably those governing school attendance, street performances and street trading, and despite the periodic efforts of MPs and campaigners to alter this.90 These cases could also be very difficult to prove. When faced with a runaway girl, for example, the police or education authorities had to prove that, in addition to being beyond control, exposed to moral danger or at risk of falling into bad associations, she also lacked proper parental control.91 While they often got around this by simply assuming that a runaway girl must, by definition, have come from an unstable family home, they sometimes had difficulty in persuading magistrates in the courtroom. In the mid-1930s, London juvenile court magistrates complained about police handling of ‘care or protection’ cases. They felt that often they were presented with insufficient evidence to make a decision. One Islington magistrate insisted on such a ‘strict proof of fact’ that very few cases were brought to his court because the police and local authorities believed that they were so unlikely to succeed. Other magistrates were reluctant to ‘drag the salient points from the witness’. 92 Dorothy Peto, one of the Metropolitan Police’s key juvenile justice strategists, herself believed it was often better to refer runaway girls to the Public Assistance Authorities or to charge them under the Vagrancy Act, rather than to charge them under the Children Act and risk the collapse of the case because of lack of proof. 93 As chapter 3 shows, the police often preferred to divert vulnerable girls to private rescue homes rather than direct them to the courts. One of the factors that weakened proof in these cases was that girls’ ability to give evidence was severely constrained. They were positively discouraged from telling their own story in court because officials wanted to spare the innocent the trauma of repeating their ordeals and wanted to deny the wayward a platform to air their depravities. This silencing of girls meant that their written statements became vital pieces of evidence in these particular cases. But their statements were often treated as problematic in court because they had often not been given under oath ( because the girls had not been formally arrested), or had not been taken down by a warranted police officer, or because they sometimes named the men or boys who had ‘assaulted’ them. This last factor complicated these cases even further. Statements, especially informal statements, which accused others of crimes could not be freely circulated in court and could not be freely passed to others connected with the case, even the girls’ own probation officers.94

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Parental exaggeration was another factor that weakened these cases when they reached court, and sometimes prevented them from getting that far. Parents’ complaints about their errant daughters could be closely questioned and were sometimes dismissed. The Home Office Children’s Branch itself recognised that what it actually meant to be ‘in need of care or protection’ was often far from clear, and that it was ‘no easy matter for the courts in such cases to decide where the balance lies between parental autocracy and filial autonomy’.95 It also recognised that ‘older girls with anxious mothers’ made up a large number of these cases, and warned magistrates to tread carefully. ‘Care or protection’ cases also created problems beyond the courtroom, notably for approved school staff. They were ‘difficult’ to handle. The Children’s Branch again: Included amongst the girls who come within the innocent description of being ‘in need of care or protection’ are some of the most difficult cases with which the juvenile courts and the approved schools have to deal, girls who are in a state of emotional, adolescent disturbance, impatient of control and used to a large measure of liberty and licence.96 They were also exceedingly difficult to accommodate. Within a year of the 1933 Children Act, the Home Office held a specialist conference to discuss the difficulties of dealing with older girls who had been brought to court, but who were unsuitable for approved schools because of their age and temperament but also because they were pregnant, had given birth or had ‘venereal disease’.97 Some girls with ‘VD’ were sent to special ‘treatment’ approved schools, where they remained until their infection had cleared, but many others, as the next chapter shows, were diverted out of the juvenile justice system altogether. Significantly, but not surprisingly, pregnant girls and young unmarried mothers (and their babies) presented even bigger problems. The Children Act had no clear method of dealing with them, a position which some actively supported. One London education officer reporting to this specialist conference believed that when ‘looked upon as a social problem’ there was ‘no difference between these girls and similar girls aged 17 who appear before the adult courts’. His inference was clear: young teenage single mothers should not be treated as children and should not be subject to care and protection proceedings. The conference considered three cases which the juvenile justice system and its protection mechanisms had been ‘unable’ to resolve. ‘AB’, aged 15 and ‘in regular work’, was placed

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by police in a remand home having been ‘reported missing by parents’ and ‘found living with a youth as man and wife’. Proceedings were dropped when she was found to be pregnant. In the second case, 16-year-old ‘CD’ presented herself at Brixton police station saying that she was homeless, destitute and pregnant. Unlike AB, she was given a two-year probation order, but sent to serve this in a voluntary home. Similarly, ‘EF’, aged 16, was referred to a voluntary hostel having been involved with a ‘youth of 18’ and ‘living in circumstances likely to cause her moral ruin’. Certainly, such girls were not easily remanded, boarded out or placed in approved schools, even if – as was common – they gave up the care of their baby to relatives, a charitable children’s home or adoptive parents. Of those that did come to official attention (and only a minority did), many seem to have been diverted from public justice institutions to public assistance services and mental health services, and, as the above examples show, to private rescue facilities. All these factors meant that many ‘care or protection’ cases, which in so many ways epitomised the spirit of the new juvenile justice system, were brought with some trepidation by police, handled with some reluctance by magistrates, and accommodated with some difficulty within approved schools. However, this situation did not raise serious questions about the shortcomings of juvenile justice welfare agenda, namely the difficulty of policing children who had not committed an offence and the difficulty of protecting children without punishing them. Rather, it was allowed to reinforce the idea that girls in general, and older girls in particular, were especially ‘difficult’ to deal with. Profound questions about state intervention in private life, about adolescent civil rights and about the uneasy relationship between criminal offences and status offences were hidden behind the figure of the ‘problem’ girl. As this chapter has shown, girls appeared in the juvenile courts in the first half of the twentieth century for many reasons, but chiefly for petty property offences and status offences. Yet despite the high incidence of property-linked prosecutions, contemporary discussions of girls’ delinquency remained dominated by strongly sexualised discussions of their need for care and protection. This sexualisation was not, however, based on an essentialised view of girls and girlhood in general. Rather, it was more selective than might first appear. The welfare sanction was not used ‘against’ all girls in the same way and was often reserved for those girls and those families who were considered multiply deviant. If it is important to stress that care and protection cases were also brought against boys, it is equally important to note that these cases were difficult to bring against many girls.

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This chapter has also shown that the variety and complexity of the experiences of girls in the juvenile justice system were but partially presented by formal criminal statistics. This is true of most judicial experiences, yet is perhaps particularly significant here given some of the assumptions that often seem to be made about girls’ delinquency and its history. Reading criminal statistics alongside other contemporary sources helps to draw a richer picture of girls’ experiences. If a girl was charged with an offence, this was most likely to be petty theft. However, many girls who had committed theft and other formal offences were dealt with under protection proceedings. Protection proceedings involving girls were closely linked with sexual improprieties of various kinds but very often with other kinds of associated deviance as well. Girls very rarely faced charges of violence, yet a number of them engaged in violent acts. Likewise, juvenile prostitution disappeared from the criminal statistics but continued to be widely practised. Finally, significant numbers of girls were diverted away from the juvenile justice system altogether and therefore out of the criminal statistics too. Their diversion reveals much about prevailing views as to the purpose of that system and the kind of juvenile most suited to its particular brand of care and correction.

3 Policing

The low numbers of girls appearing in the twentieth-century juvenile courts might be read as evidence that the policing of girls was but a minor social concern. To do so would be a great mistake, however, not least because it would overlook the enormous efforts made by a great many public and private agencies to save, rescue and divert, to treat, train and punish wayward girls. As outlined in chapter 1, the simultaneous rise of ‘the social’ and the new politics of governmentality created new relationships between girls (framed as young women and as children) and the state by sanctioning new ways of monitoring their bodies, their schooling, their work, their leisure, their homes and their sexual relationships. Such fact-finding was undertaken by various state-sponsored inspectors (of public health, child labour, education, housing, poor relief, and so on), but was also conducted by private individuals and organisations, including journalists, social investigators, religious groups and feminist associations. Together, these agencies created formidable bodies of knowledge about the wayward girl and similarly formidable networks through which to police her. This chapter explores the policing of girls as practised by a number of agencies in the first half of the twentieth century. It shows how the police force itself developed particular tactics in this regard, and how its work was both complemented and frustrated by that of other statutory organisations, most notably local education authorities. It shows, too, how vital voluntary organisations were in defining and detaining delinquent girls up to and well beyond the second world war, and how vital perceptions of self and space were within these definitions. It also points, where possible, to the importance of the family as both an agent and an object of social policing. 51

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In detailing the widespread regulation of girls, this chapter offers valuable historical evidence to support feminist, Foucauldian and postmodern criminological claims that the study of deviance is best conceptualised as the study of often competing networks of power, many of which operate outside formal criminal justice systems. It also demonstrates that the regulation of girls was deliberately located at the margins of the law, enacted in the liminal spaces of the juvenile justice system – spaces where girls were hidden from view, spaces which survived modernising reform, spaces which have been overlooked within criminological and historical accounts of the development of youth justice.

Statutory strategies In the late 1940s a new juvenile liaison scheme was launched by Liverpool police to national and international acclaim. Seven officers, one for each of the city’s police divisions, were appointed to the specific task of preventing juvenile crime. They did not wear uniform and took no part in the normal police routine of arresting offenders and taking them before the courts. Instead, they targeted two groups of young people who were felt to be falling through the juvenile justice net: ‘the incipient and the petty offender’. 1 The scheme was welcomed as highly innovative. Yet arguably all that was happening was that, for the first time, boys, the scheme’s main targets, were becoming subject to the kinds of informal policing traditionally experienced by girls. Up to this point, the idea of policing children, and the idea of preventive policing more generally, had sat uneasily within police forces which had positioned themselves as the public’s primary defenders against serious crimes and protectors of privacy. Day-to-day police work seems to have been little affected by the 1908 Children Act and the creation of the new juvenile courts. The police were, of course, concerned with youth crime, which they chiefly sought to prevent by enforcing by-laws that protected public space from a range of disorders: street games, gambling, defacing walls, damaging gardens, dropping litter, making ice-slides, lighting bonfires, throwing stones at trains, hitching rides on trams and carts, and later, carol singing, roller-skating and collecting for the guy.2 But the police preferred to warn and caution, as well as to shout and cuff, rather than to arrest and prosecute. Station officers had ‘considerable latitude in dealing with children’, which meant that those juveniles who were brought to the police station were often not formally charged.3 Reformers encouraged the police to take a more proactive stance. With the 1933 Children Bill about to be implemented, London juvenile court

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magistrates, for example, asked the Metropolitan Police to make more positive use of their contacts with young people. However, the police seemed to find it difficult to comply for a number of reasons. First, other statutory agencies were in many ways more active than the police within the juvenile justice system. In interwar London, charges against girls were more likely to be made by education agencies than any other body, including the police, private persons and parents, whereas boys were more likely to be charged by the police, and then by private persons.4 Education agencies owed their prominence here to the simple fact that they had regular and sustained contact with children. Teachers reported truancy and bad behaviour in and around schools, and, along with school medical officers, were alert to signs of neglect. More importantly, school attendance officers had, from the 1870s, had unprecedented access to thousands of private houses and families, and their investigations into truancy revealed a host of broader social problems around the ill-treatment, abuse and illegal employment of children.5 Further, local education authorities had a statutory duty to ensure that all local children were properly educated, including those excluded from mainstream elementary schools, whether they were delinquent or neglected children sent into care or into certified schools, or disabled or ‘defective’ children sent to special schools of varying kinds. In many areas, the excluded cases were handled by ‘special education’ committees, whose members gained a knowledge of ‘the problem child’ which was often very much deeper than that of almost any other child welfare agency of the time, as chapter 6 outlines. However, other state agencies could and did play a significant role in the social policing of juveniles and brought numerous cases to the attention of the courts. Education officials, poor law guardians, public assistance assessors, ministry of pensions inspectors, mental deficiency workers, infant welfare officers and others had a much more direct access than the police to workingclass homes and were much more willing to cross the family doorstep, that crucial threshold between public and private. The police themselves, therefore, had a rather reduced role in the regulation of school-age children. The Metropolitan Police acknowledged that enquiries relating to offenders under the age of 14 and to cases of neglect were ‘largely in the hands of the Education Department’. Only serious offences committed by those aged between 14 and 16 years were handled by CID officers. New specialist juvenile officers were eventually appointed in London from the early 1930s, although doubts were voiced as to whether ‘there was enough work left to the Police to justify [their] appointment’, given that the Education Authority took ‘so large a share

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of the work in connection with Juveniles’. 6 By the mid-1930s, more steps had been taken to coordinate the work of these special officers (many of whom were women) across the city. 7 However, new recruits’ training still placed special emphasis on ‘instruction on dealing with children and young persons’ to counter the fact that the police apparently still had ‘little opportunities of knowing the principles which underlie modern practices in regard to delinquent children or of understanding the methods practised by the juvenile courts’. 8 Second, and despite these developments, the issue of juvenile policing continued to raise searching questions about the very nature of police work itself. In 1937 the Metropolitan Police refused a request from a Surrey head-teacher for officers to visit local schools: a senior officer strongly disapproved of the police being used to ‘lecture children on the “immorality” of petty pilfering’, arguing that there did ‘not appear to be any record that Police Officers have ever been so employed’, that it was not ‘desirable that moral behaviour of children should be obtained by the threats of a “man in uniform”’ or that the police should relieve teachers of their responsibilities under the ‘School Code’.9 Juvenile preventive work stretched the boundaries of ‘proper’ policing and also threatened to emasculate male officers by linking them so closely to children and child care. Indeed, in order to present it as a part of ‘proper’ policing, organisers of the Liverpool juvenile liaison scheme stressed the risks and dangers it might entail. These dangers were taken up and further exaggerated in Violent Playground, an early 1950s feature film based on the scheme. The film’s hero, a Bogartesque detective sergeant called Jack Truman, is at first reluctant to be transferred to juvenile liaison work, but soon changes his mind when his first assignment leads him to troubled Johnny Murphy, ‘the sensitive and unsettled leader of a teenage gang’, and to Cathie, his beautiful older sister who keeps house for her parentless siblings. After together persuading Johnny to abandon his armed siege of a school, in which a young girl is shot and injured, Truman and Cathie fall in love. In the process, the two younger Murphy children, a boy and a girl, whose petty shoplifting had triggered Truman’s initial involvement in the family, are fully persuaded of the error of their ways, but their reformation is eclipsed by the greater drama surrounding the three principal characters. The overall message was clear: although the rewards were significant, only certain kinds of youth work were worthy of real (police)men. 10 Liverpool’s juvenile liaison scheme was presented as a novel innovation, which it may well have been in the sense that it represented a new departure in the formal policing of boys. Yet the policing of girls had

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long been conducted on these lines, although it more commonly involved women – as voluntary patrols during the first world war, as police officers after 1918, and as rescue workers throughout the first half of the century. In the early years of the first world war, a number of women’s organisations set up patrols which expressly aimed to police immoral, if not unlawful, girls and young women. Two of these organisations were licensed to carry out official war duties, which set them apart from the vast number of existing rescue groups. The Women’s Police Service, commanded by anti-white slave trade activist Margaret Damer Dawson and later by Mary Allen, was contracted by the Ministry of Munitions to police women munition workers. 11 The Voluntary Women Patrols was established by the National Union of Women Workers and took on the broader task of policing young women’s contacts with the military, work authorised by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.12 Both were initially established in London, although both expanded their activities beyond the capital. The Voluntary Women Patrols trained organisers to establish similar patrols under local committees in various parts of England. The volunteers were assigned a range of duties by local police chiefs. Dorothy Peto, who served with these early patrols and later became a high-ranking officer in the Metropolitan Women Police, recalled that these duties included: ‘maintaining standards of order and decency in public places’; dealing with ‘stray and stranded girls who were found in considerable numbers around camps, barracks, and soldiers’ clubs’; providing counter attractions ‘in the form of clubs for the roughest girls, and mixed clubs for soldiers and girls’; assisting at railway stations when leave trains were arriving and departing by ‘protecting drunken soldiers and sailors from the prostitutes waiting for them [and] removing agitated friends from the footboards of moving trains’; and reducing the opportunities for sexual encounters by advising on, for example, ‘the better placing of a lamp, the earlier closing of a park, the placing of a house out of bounds’ and so on. 13 In London, women patrols also scoured certain pubs for signs of excessive drinking as well as certain parks and commons for signs of illicit sexual activity. The first world war, then, saw new degrees of gendered policing sponsored by the state, although new measures did echo older ones, notably the infamous Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s and their regulation of women in military towns. This policing of girls and young women aimed to moralise rather than criminalise, however. The number of girls appearing in the juvenile courts did increase during the war (from 1,899 in 1910 to 2,570 in 1915), a fact noted by various inquiries into the war-time rise in delinquency.14

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However, numbers remained remarkably stable given the intensive surveillance operated by the women’s patrols and others. There are at least four reasons for this. First, the patrols had few independent powers of arrest and, unless accompanied by a warranted officer, could merely make reports to the regular police. For their part, the police were often hostile to what they saw as over-zealous moral vigilantism which threatened to compromise their own reputation, not least because it seemed to lend their name to a challenge to heterosocial space and to conventions of privacy. Male officers seemed wary of policing public sexual encounters, unless these were engaged in by men with other men.15 One senior officer, for example, complained that the patrols in Hyde Park had ‘made mistakes which might have caused us infinite embarrassment’. 16 And, rejecting a women’s patrol proposal that a police officer should accompany them on their night-time forays, a south London Chief Superintendent complained that although ‘these ladies are earnest workers, and their supervision over young girls is beneficial’, it was . . . evidently their intention to interfere with couples if they consider their conduct suspicious . . . In Norwood, as in other suburban districts, courting couples can be found in nearly every street at night. Many of them have not the least idea of behaving improperly and the Police would not think of interfering with them. 17 Second, rather than arresting girls, the patrols aimed to divert them from potentially immoral lifestyles by offering words of warning and alternative recreation facilities, such as single-sex and mixed youth clubs. This was partly because the patrols did not actually have the power to arrest but also because, up to a point, they saw their work as distinct from that of the regular police. One volunteer rightly identified this as a feature of their work which set them apart from the police, writing that the patrols could ‘check exuberant spirits and give a word of advice when it would be quite unjustifiable on the part of the Police to interfere’.18 Third, the moral panic around immoral young women was exactly that, a panic fuelled by war-time fears for national security, military strength and domestic stability, and founded on reports of drunkenness and debauchery that were greatly exaggerated. Investigations revealed that there was actually little to investigate. A Commission of Enquiry set up in 1918 to examine women war workers’ conduct, and which focused on the WAAC, found ‘no justification of any kind for the vague accusations of immoral conduct on a large scale which have circulated about the WAAC’. 19 A women’s patrol month-long survey into the

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apparent increase in women’s drinking in Woolwich admittedly found ‘a great many smartly dressed Woolwich girls’ in pubs, but also noted that ‘very few of [the munitions girls] call at any of the public houses, and then only get a glass of stout’. 20 Similar conclusions were reached by an NUWW patrol committee in 1917. Four nights’ observation of one area yielded only ‘one actual case of indecency’ on an Eltham footpath, and surveillance of the Woolwich Arsenal proved similarly disappointing, or encouraging. At the end of the working day, ‘nearly all the female workers hurried away with little loitering . . . There were some prostitutes at this hour walking about, but the majority we noted were not very young girls.’ As a result, they concluded that the area did not warrant the work of the patrols. 21 Finally, a number of those detained in this moral panic were directed into the mental health system, rather than the criminal justice system. New measures set down by the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act to seek out and contain mental and moral defectives were rigorously applied during the war. Local authorities were required to find ways of identifying such people and to minimise any public risk they might pose by making sure that they were either properly supervised in the community or removed to institutions. Although the category ‘moral defective’ was rarely applied, a number of young women were certified as defective on moral grounds. Admissions to the Royal Eastern Counties Institution near the garrison town of Colchester in 1918, for example, included one girl who was ‘at risk from the soldiers billeted in her home’, and another who ‘persisted in staying out at night in bad company’.22 In 1919, 17 of 68 new admissions were described by the institution’s Medical Superintendent as ‘girls and young women of just that type which it is so important to get into the safekeeping of an institution to prevent moral contamination’.23 As chapters 4 and 6 show, there was a close and continuing relationship between mental defect and juvenile delinquency. While the impact of the women patrols upon short-term patterns of girls’ court appearances was slight, their impact upon long-term patterns of gendered policing was much greater. At the end of the first world war, 100 members of the Voluntary Women’s Patrols were incorporated into the broader Metropolitan Police.24 By late 1919, over 300 women were serving in police forces across the country. They continued to be employed under different conditions of service to their male colleagues and also continued to be directed to distinct duties. According to the Police Chronicle in 1918, the new women officers were chiefly involved in ‘cautioning girls for behaving in an unseemly manner with male companions’, ‘warning girls of evil consequences’ and ‘sending girls

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home when found loitering late at night in undesirable localities’.25 By 1939, little had changed. A recruitment leaflet of that year explained that although women police officers dealt with ‘actual crime’ this was mostly where ‘children are the offenders or the victims’. Their work was ‘more usually of the protective or helpful kind’, and involved tracing missing girls, assisting girls ‘stranded in dangerous surroundings’, protecting children playing in streets and public parks, and escorting women prisoners.26 This sounds straightforward enough. But the effectiveness of these women officers, whose numbers remained very low up to the second world war, rested on a complex network of community intelligence, a careful targeting of their slim resources and the assistance (albeit irregular) of male colleagues.27 In short, a small force of women was able to police wayward girls in large cities only because they knew where to look and who to look for. In 1945, the British Council asked the Metropolitan women police to help in the training of women social workers from Allied Eastern Europe countries. They agreed and were able to provide an instant illustration of their street work among girls by taking the Czech and Polish trainees to certain key sites in the city: ‘low class cafés’, fun fairs, air raid shelters, and ‘places frequented by women and young girls who habitually associate with men of colour’. In these places, they duly found girls ‘of the type generally noticed by Women Police’, who they then proceeded to advise, question and, in some cases, detain.28 These strategies are confirmed in different police memoirs written in the 1950s but recalling earlier experiences. Lilian Wyles, who served with the Metropolitan Police from 1919 to 1949, wrote that, The larger part of policewomen’s duty in those early days was dealing with the many young girls frequenting certain parts of the Metropolis. Every night or two, sometimes as many as five or six, of these young creatures might be stopped by the policewomen and questioned about themselves. They were invariably homeless, mostly from the provinces or country, attracted to London by a genuine desire to work. Without the necessary qualifications, and with no idea of where to find employment, they drifted about the streets, sleeping in parks and open spaces, ready prey, indeed for those waiting to pounce on such unwary victims. 29 Former chief of the Metropolitan Police vice squad Robert Fabian described women officers’ search of ‘the railway stations, the longdistance bus terminals, the all-night cafés, milk bars, public parks and

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the prostitute-ridden districts of the West End and W2’, where they sought out ‘young girls who have escaped from remand homes, detention institutions, or who answer to descriptions that are circulated through London from every police force in the country, of girls missing from home for various reasons’. Once found, Fabian claimed that some were driven into custody by the ‘Children’s Wagon’, a large blue police van, which by night patrolled the outskirts of the ‘bigger public parks’.30 The women police clearly patrolled particular and predictable territory within this modern city of dreadful delight. Certain railway stations, shopping streets, lodging houses, parks, cafés, fairs, pubs and clubs were prominent sites within the topography of urban girls’ deviance, attracting runaways, prostitutes and petty thieves alike. Officers looked for certain kinds of girls in certain kinds of spaces, girls whose waywardness and vulnerability was apparently confirmed by their very presence in such spaces. Police success in dealing with these girls depended on their close knowledge of their beat and on their ability to differentiate between vulnerable newcomers and experienced old-timers in these sites. Young women, it seems, were more easily identified as being ‘out of place’ than young men. To cite Fabian again: ‘[a] girl walking slowly, alone, through London, even in the daytime, attracts immediate attention. After dark, she becomes increasingly conspicuous.’ He claimed that many girls were approached by the police simply because they presented an unfamiliar face among a familiar underworld crowd, and especially if they looked as though they were on the slippery slope to soliciting: Every policeman on his beat knows, by sight and name, the habitual prostitutes. If he sees a new face he will stop and talk to her – ask her where she is from, what is her name, and so on.31 Appearance and self-presentation was clearly just as crucial as space here. Girls could be identified as wayward by appearing too innocent or too trashy: either look could push them out of place. Trashiness, as the more spectacular of the two, was more often commented on. Like the boys who gathered in gangs or on street corners, girls were readily defined as delinquent by their style. But unlike boys, whose dress, hair and posture were often read as evidence of a new adolescent subculture, girls’ appearance was read as evidence of lost youth, of womanhood gone bad. They were sexually precocious. Their hair was badly dyed. Their make-up was badly applied. Their clothes and shoes were badly chosen. They were older than their years, having literally done too much, much too young. One of Wyles’ first cases made a clear impression on her. She had been

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sent to a north London police station towards the end of the first world war to interview a girl, aged 14 or 15, who had been detained in a nearby troop camp: In the most comfortable chair the office possessed lounged a girl. Her small face was smothered in powder, rouge, mascara and lipstick. Her hair, which had been bleached, showed dark at the roots. In a very dirty hand she flourished a cigarette, waving it about a great deal to show the most scarlet of fingernails, which she had bitten down to the quick. Wyles’ reaction to the girl is most telling: she asked another woman officer to ‘take her into the matron’s room and see she washes her face thoroughly. When she is clean I’ll talk to her.’32 To remove her make-up was to return the young woman to the appearance and status of a child. It was also to disarm her and to restore proper relations of authority between the two women. Fabian described 15-year-old Deborah in almost identical terms. Waiting in the women’s charge room at a police station having been detained for her part in a street robbery, she was lolling insolently in a chair, her nylon legs crossed . . . Her pancake make-up tide-marked abruptly at her chin. Her shoes were ankle-strap, and her nail-ends black under red varnish. In the revealing light of the police station she looked unwholesome. Her front teeth were yellow-stained with nicotine.33 Mass Observation’s H.D. Willcock reacted similarly to the street-corner girls he watched in the late 1940s, conjuring up an image that was echoed within popular films of the time, such as Good Time Girl, starring Diana Dors as the girl in question. Willcock’s Report on Juvenile Delinquency described a group of 3 girls and 2 boys, ages about 14–16 . . . sitting on the chains which separate the pavement from the road. The girls are all extremely heavily made up, with extra thick lipstick applied carelessly. Two of them are wearing slacks, the other a short length dress. 34 If wayward girls in the wrong place with the wrong look were easily identified as such by the police, then they were also visible to others.

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Fabian was quite right to suggest that there were ‘two highly experienced organisations that constantly scour and survey the streets and cafés of London, night and day, looking for any girl who appears to be uncertain of her future’. The first of these was the Metropolitan Police, and the second was ‘the underworld itself’, which applied itself ‘to the job of gleaning any stray that might have chanced to miss the official eye’. Pimps, ponces and ‘Johnsons’ were equally able to map girls’ movements in the capital. They knew where to look for girls who were ‘desperate’, ‘unprotected’ or ‘on the run’. They ‘scurried in and out of cheap “kaffs”, loafed around likely places, and had a hundred ways of knowing about girls who are heading for the streets’. Fabian’s view that, ‘[w]hen a girl escapes from Borstal, or from a remand home, the odds are that she has the address of some Johnson ready in her purse, or of some “kaff” where she will be sure to meet one within five minutes’, is well supported by stories from other quarters detailed below.35 Absent from this view, however, is any sense of the very significant part played by women in these underworld networks, or the part played by girls themselves in defining and maintaining these moral maps of the city. When Eileen, for example, was expelled from the Southern Railway Servants’ Orphanage at the age of 14 in 1944 for being ‘beyond control’, she was glad of the help of a woman working as a prostitute, having been rejected by her father and new stepmother: I knew no-one in London had no money and nowhere to stay. I went into a café, a prostitute took me in, she was good to me, the nearest thing to a mother. She found me work and got me a room in a lodging house. I worked in Selfridges and even did some modelling.36 As Ada Chesterton’s undercover investigations of the female networks of London’s underworld in the 1920s and 1930s show, this experience was not uncommon.37 Besides the assistance given to them by prostitutes, girls like Eileen were given food, work and accommodation by waitresses, shop workers, department store assistants, domestic servants and lodging house landladies. According to early reports on British race relations, girls could more readily access this kind of support in immigrant and mixed-race communities. The cosmopolitan counter-cultural world of cafés, clubs, lodging houses and shops run by black, Chinese, Italian, Maltese, Asian and mixed-race groups in the metropolitan and port areas provided protection and pleasure for many young ‘wayward’ white girls. Such places, with their ‘foreign’ drugs, dancing and music, played an important part in the

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creation (and condemnation) of new white British youth cultures from at least the 1920s onwards. 38 In her investigation of Liverpool’s ‘colour problem’ in the early 1930s, Muriel Fletcher described four kinds of white girls to be found in the ‘coloured’ areas, ‘consorting’ with the men there: those who already had an illegitimate child, those who were mentally weak, those already working as prostitutes and younger women who ‘make contacts in a spirit of adventure and find themselves unable to break away’.39 The spaces where these encounters occurred were equally undesirable. Popular meeting places included pubs, ‘cocoa rooms where [the girls were] employed as waitresses’, ‘concerts for coloured men’, and ‘coloured men’s dances’, which were ‘held fairly frequently in the cellars of the houses occupied by coloured men’ and which sometimes were used to raise money to support illegitimate, mixed-race babies born to some of these women.40 Writing twenty-five years after Fletcher, Michael Banton nevertheless wrote in similar terms about the ‘coloured quarter’ of 1950s Stepney, an area in east London. When a white woman had ‘lost all status with her own people she [could] still go to a coloured man and receive a certain amount of attention’. 41 Most of the ‘United Kingdom-born women in Stepney suffer[ed] from personal instability’. 42 One of his ‘more perceptive’ informants among the ‘coloured men’ listed the kinds of women in the area. At the bottom of the list were young women known as ‘utilities’, described as follows: women usually in their late teens or twenties who have almost always a family background of deprivation and rejection, who are personally unstable and have no settled residence. They arrive in Stepney and hang around the cafés for two or three weeks, staying perhaps for a time with a coloured man, and then run off to Cardiff or somewhere similar. Sally was presented as a typical case. A former approved school girl, and ‘the daughter of a prostitute in a Welsh seaport’, she found a job as a waitress in a Stepney café ‘near to the coloured quarter’. Tiring of the job ‘after about nine days’, she ‘met a coloured man in the street who had been one of her mother’s clients’ and accepted his invitation to live with him. 43 Rolph described similar Stepney-based liaisons between young white girls and older ‘coloured’, Irish and Maltese men in her 1955 study of prostitution: ‘Flossie (b.1928) . . . on first arriving in London her associates were coloured men in Stepney’; ‘Lena (b.1927) . . . nothing known of associates until she was living in Stepney with a Maltese’;

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‘Marjorie (b.1933) . . . at 16 pregnant by a nice, but irresolute, coloured man’. 44 This disorderly world represented both a challenge and an opportunity to London’s women police. One of their first orchestrated campaigns after the first world war was to expose the prostitution rings that lay behind the East End’s ‘lascar-run’ lodging houses and cafés. Lilian Wyles and fellow officers were ‘disgusted’ at every level – by the trashy white girls involved, by the exploitation of these girls by non-white men, by the use of drugs and by the spectre of miscegenation. Launching a long surveillance operation in the area, they were determined that they would not be ‘done down by lascars flagrant in their contempt of English law, and by girls wearing the briefest of skirts’. 45 The arrests that they finally made here were highly significant. They demonstrated women officers’ ability to deal with more ‘testing’ cases and suggested that if their work with women and children brought them into contact with other crimes and criminals, they should be allowed to pursue both. Women, as well as men, then, viewed ‘soft’ police work as a route into ‘harder’ territory. Wyles certainly viewed this ‘victory’ over the East End lascars as an opportunity: shortly afterwards she became the first woman to join the CID, and later wrote that cases like this ‘created for the women police of 1951 a place within the Metropolitan Police unassailable and secure’. 46 The marginal world of urban Others, miscreants and misfits reported by social investigators and police officers was also represented in influential fictional accounts of young wayward women. The ‘L-shaped room’ in Lynne Reid Banks’ famous 1960 novel of the same name was a room rented by Jane Graham, a young, unmarried, pregnant woman, in a Fulham lodging house shared by, amongst others, a black jazz musician, a struggling Jewish writer and two prostitutes. 47 Throughout the novel, the camaraderie of the lodging house (albeit conveyed via extreme stereotyping) is contrasted with the coldness of Jane’s smart family home. All these examples strongly suggest that the ‘exotic’ spaces identified by the police as places of danger were, at the same time, identified by many girls themselves as places of pleasure, and also as places of safety where they could tap into a tolerant underworld network that allowed them to survive in the city. Of course, such support often came at a material and emotional price, but for many girls, living independently of their own families for a whole host of reasons, it was a price worth paying. Once a girl was apprehended by the police for whatever reason, a number of outcomes could follow. On the one hand, she could be cautioned, either formally or informally, and allowed to go. If allowed to go, she could be left to her own devices, escorted to parents or relatives, or

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referred to one of the many girls’ rescue organisations which operated in most urban areas. On the other hand, she could be charged, statemented and taken to the local police station where she could be either released or remanded in custody pending her appearance at the local juvenile court. If remanded, girls were sent to local authority remand homes, though a certain number were sent to women’s prisons if they proved to be ‘unruly’ or difficult to manage, in line with the Children Acts. Those found to be infected with sexually transmitted diseases were prominent among this group. Juvenile imprisonment was thus sanctioned by the very legislation that had been designed to end it, in cases where often no offence had been committed. 48 The remand period could last between a few days and a few months, depending on how quickly a girl’s case was processed. Delays were caused by a number of factors: if she was required to appear in court a number of times; if the court ordered medical or psychological tests to be carried out, or ordered reports from other agencies such as schools; if a place was not immediately available for her in a probation hostel or certified school, if so committed by the court; and finally and rather more idiosyncratically, if she continued to suffer from a sexually transmitted disease. In some instances, and in a serious infringement of their civil rights, girls were not allowed to appear in court until they had been pronounced clear of infection. 49 The experiences of those girls who were remanded in custody were more routinely documented than those who were not and are therefore more visible. Most juveniles detained by the police were probably well treated in the interim between being charged and hearing the court’s final judgment. However, there is clear evidence that a number were ill-treated by the police and others. Many were subject to gynaecological examinations, regardless of the circumstances of their detention. These aimed to establish whether a girl was a virgin, or pregnant, or had a sexually transmitted disease and thereby to construct a crude sexual history which would be used in court. Criticisms of this practice made by a woman doctor employed by the London juvenile courts in 1945 were met with confusion by magistrates and education officers, who apparently failed to understand her objection that ‘where there was no suggestion of sex offence, it was an infringement of the individual’s liberty to have to submit to such an examination’. 50 Girls with a venereal disease were treated almost as a distinct caste. In late 1930s London, they travelled between their remand home and court in cars with seats protected by special plastic covers. Where possible their cases were heard early in the day, one after another, so that other juveniles did not have to come into

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contact with them. Once in the court building, they were not allowed to visit the toilet unattended, and toilet seats had to be especially cleaned after they had sat on them. At one point it was even suggested that, in order to spare the women police this task and to reduce risk to other female staff and officials, the court should employ a ‘woman of the right type’ to clean the toilets used by these girls. 51 Ill-treatment also took the form of physical abuse. Eileen, the 16-year-old Selfridges assistant mentioned above, was arrested in 1946 following a car accident, having falsely admitted to the police that she, rather than her boyfriend, had been driving. She writes that she confessed to the charge in order to protect him as he already had a criminal record. Her description of subsequent events raises serious questions about ‘progressive’ youth justice practices: I was arrested and charged with stealing the car driving without insurance etc., but all the time that night they [the police] tried to get me to say it was him in the car. I was in Brixton 2 days and spent 2 nights in cells. The first day I had nothing to eat or drink, they said when I admitted it was him in the car then I’d be fed. The following day I was questioned until early evening, when I was told I was being given bail. I didn’t even know what bail meant, then the matron from the SRSO [Southern Railway Servants Orphanage] came in. I was told I’d go back with her until I went to the South Western Magistrates court the following Monday. I was sick and tried to run out. I did fight like a tiger. I was caught and held down and placed in a straight jacket [sic] and thrown into a cell, a woman came in with a tin mug which was dirty, with cocoa in it, she tried pouring it into my mouth. I didn’t want the dirty cup near me, plus the cocoa was red hot, she still held me up pouring it into my mouth I was still in the jacket so couldn’t hit out and all the time she kept saying ‘Who was in the car [?]’52 These claims of ill-treatment are supported by other documented incidents. In May 1928 officers from Scotland Yard were heavily criticised in the House of Commons for their handling of a case in which a mother and her young children were interrogated for 13 hours at Coleford police station, the children apparently having been taken from their beds, not fed throughout, and questioned separately.53 Earlier that month, the Yard had been attacked for the suggestive way in which its officers had questioned 22-year-old Irene Savidge in connection with her part in a Hyde Park indecency case involving former MP Sir Leo Money.54 In the third example, former delinquent Steven Slater described the violent

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interrogation he underwent at London’s Harrow Road police station prior to his committal to approved school in the 1960s.55 The ill-treatment of adult women, notably suffragettes, by police and prison staff has been discussed elsewhere. 56 Three Children Acts notwithstanding, police methods of dealing with minors, although increasingly specialised, could clearly be extremely harsh in ways that were largely hidden from public view. Another similarly hidden aspect of twentieth-century youth justice was the private policing of girls in the rescue sector.

Private justice The 1917 annual report of the London Female Preventive and Reformatory Institution offered some ‘facts for the thoughtful’: since 1857, 45,169 girls had been admitted (an average of 750 annual admissions over 60 years), 2,490 ‘midnight meetings’ had been held and attended by 127,226 girls, 250,000 meals had been served, and seven large residential homes established.57 The following year, the Charity Organisation Society, a leading national voluntary agency, conducted a survey into ‘rescue work’ in London. It found five organisations involved in policing women and girls in Piccadilly alone: the Female Mission to the Fallen, the West London Mission, the Women Police, the Charing Cross Association and the Female Aid Society; and a further four covering Marylebone: the Church Army, the Ladies Association, the Workhouse Girls’ Aid Association and the Society for Protection of Females.58 Voluntary rescue work, or moral welfare work as it was also referred to, was a major enterprise involving thousands of girls – girls who rarely featured in twentiethcentury criminal statistics. As such, it needs to be examined as an important and hitherto unremarked modern form of informal justice, a justice that depended upon the continuing power of shame and that was enacted by and within the community, but often with the full knowledge and collusion of the state. 59 Voluntary work, rooted in traditions of secular self-help and religious philanthropy, pre-dated statutory social work. It operated independently of the state, raising its own funds, employing its own workers and establishing its own specialised services. The voluntary sector was unified yet disparate. It worked towards a universal goal – the promotion of the self-supporting, self-respecting citizen – by working with particular client groups: the unemployed man, the elderly poor, the fallen woman, the endangered child, and so on. By the late nineteenth century, this sector had established a vast network of homes, hostels, clubs, associations

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Photo 1:

‘Our Society’s Homes for Waifs and Strays, 1907’

Source: Our Waifs and Strays, March 1907, p. 57.

and other services for many disadvantaged groups. Some of the organisations involved were very large. The Church of England’s Waifs and Strays Society and the Church Penitentiary Association managed children’s homes around the country (see photograph 1). Others were tiny, with few resources, and were often linked to a single local church. Many groups set themselves the task of saving the wayward girl from herself, from her family and from the temptations of modern life. Efforts to

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rescue such (largely urban) girls varied widely, from organising night patrols to running clubs and homes.60 The homes themselves could vary equally widely, from VD hostels to baby homes, from laundry homes to homes for young prostitutes and victims of abuse, from homes for older ‘knowing’ girls to homes for younger ‘innocent’ girls. Some were large, housing numbers of girls in institutional settings, and others were small, housing a handful in ordinary family houses. Girls could spend anything from a few weeks to a few years in these places. Some were able to keep contact with their families, others not; some locked in, others free to move in the community. Some homes offered girls a real degree of social freedom: in one Highbury VD hostel, girls were allowed to smoke, wear their own clothes and go out in the evenings, while Ada Chesterton’s pioneering Cecil Homes were run more like commercial hostels for working girls as well as runaway girls. Others, however, were punitive and repressive, with rigid rules and tight disciplinary regimes. 61 Rescue work was divided along religious and ethnic lines. Organisations dealing with girls from various migrant communities sat alongside myriad organisations dealing with native British girls. Anglo-Catholic missions to the Irish were established in large numbers from the midnineteenth century, and included particular efforts to police, protect and provide for the very many young women migrant workers among them. 62 The Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul and the Catholic Crusade of Rescue were just two of the many Catholic and convent groups that worked with girls in trouble. 63 Jewish welfare organisations were also well established in British cities by the late nineteenth century. 64 The Jewish Association for the Care and Protection of Girls and Women, set up in 1885, was one of many organisations founded by prominent Anglo-Jewish families as a way of managing the threat that the arrival of large numbers of Eastern European Jews appeared to pose both to the stability of Britishness and to the good name of AngloJewry. Migrant Jewish girls were thought to rank among the principal victims of the so-called ‘white slave trade’, or international trade in prostitution. European girls were encouraged to travel abroad with the promise of work only to find that the work in question was in the sex industry. As a response to this and to the broader London scandal of child prostitution exposed in that year, the JAPGW appointed rescue workers to monitor the movement of young women disembarking from ships in the London docks, and set up at least two residential hostels in the East End. 65 Other groups set up youth clubs which aimed simul-

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taneously to entice girls into suitable romantic relationships and, later in the period, to divert them away from the radical socialist and communist clubs growing up in the area.66 From the early twentieth century, similar organisations were set up by black British communities. These ranged from the small and local, such as the African Churches Mission based in Liverpool, to the large and national, such as the League of Coloured Peoples and the more radical Negro Welfare Association.67 Other groups, such as Sir John Harris’s Committee for the Welfare of Africans in Europe, Liverpool’s Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children and Muriel Fletcher’s Liverpoolbased Club for Coloured Girls, were set up by white researchers, university settlement workers, ex-missionaries and others who were anxious to manage the ‘problems’ posed by black migration, not least the problem of ‘mixed-race’ children. With the high-profile growth in the number of ‘brown babies’ or ‘unwanted coloured children’ born during the second world war (many the product of often short-term affairs between white women and African-American GIs) and the postwar increase in the numbers of West Indian women migrants, this kind of racial rescue work became all the more significant. 68 In the 1950s, for example, a number of urban church-based voluntary groups met with government officials in a series of conferences designed to contain the ‘new’ problem of young West Indian single motherhood. 69 Voluntary organisations dealing with Irish, Jewish and black groups differed in many respects, but were united on the question of how and why girls across these minority communities needed to be policed. They shared common aims: to divert their girls from dangerous pleasures (which could range from dangerous dancing to dangerous politics) by substituting these with various wholesome alternatives (namely, youth clubs); to encourage their girls to keep to their particular religious faith; and to provide, in some cases, basic skills training to allow girls to support themselves economically and to learn the lessons of regular work (and thereby also to save them from earning money through prostitution). These common aims were derived from other factors common to these different groups. Like native British rescue organisations, they tended to be managed and operated by similar people with similar values, that is to say, by those men and women who occupied elite positions within their respective communities’ economic and religious networks. Above all, and, again, like their native British counterparts, they believed that the purity or impurity of ‘their’ girls’ sexual encounters were crucial to the future strength of ‘their’ community. To police girls in this sense was

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to preserve community name, pride and honour, and, up to a point, cross-cultural notions of patriarchy. It is impossible to be precise about the overall numbers of homes and girls involved here but both were in the thousands. By 1938, over 1,000 voluntary children’s homes had complied with the 1933 Children Act’s request and submitted reports of their activities to the Home Secretary. Not all of these were girls’ rescue homes, but in the same year the Home Office Children’s Branch wrote that rescue homes supported ‘many thousands of young people who otherwise might have drifted and become the problems of the juvenile courts’.70 Certainly, there were enough facilities in the capital to make it worth the while of the Central Council for the Social Welfare of Girls in London to publish a handbook listing them all, although many of these would have been catering for ‘respectable’ girls. 71 A study of girls and probation completed in the late 1950s acknowledged that ‘large numbers’ of girls who had been ‘diverted’ by local authorities and moral welfare agencies had been excluded from the research.72 Surviving information about these private organisations is more difficult to find than information on statutory justice services. However, it is clear that they played a major part in the modern policing of girls and young women, sometimes working alongside the juvenile justice system and sometimes independently of it. Of those that found themselves in rescue and training homes, most were aged between 13 and 25, and most were ‘guilty’ of a range of sexual, status and petty offences. Some had appeared before the courts, many others had not, but had often been referred directly to these organisations by the police, magistrates, poor law guardians and doctors. Still others were referred by relatives, neighbours and rescue workers engaged in community work. In a rare study of this phenomenon, Grace Pailthorpe investigated the cases of 100 young women resident in various English rescue homes in the early 1920s and found that 25 had been sent for ‘pilfering’ and 29 for ‘sexual irregularities’, which included ‘prostitution, promiscuity and obscene conversation’. The remaining 46 were sent for ‘various causes such as running away from home, staying out late at night, insubordination to any restraint or violent temper’. Others had ‘so feeble a personality or intellect that they were not able to cope with the work of a situation, and therefore sent in for training’ or had been ‘rescued from unsatisfactory homes and bad companions’. 73 Other sources confirm this broad profile of rescue home residents, many of whom were ‘difficult’ to place in juvenile justice facilities, because of their age, sexual delinquency or religion. The hostels run by the

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Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women admitted ‘respectable friendless girls’ and unmarried mothers alongside girls serving residential probation orders and girls waiting for places in, and those who had been discharged from, certified schools. 74 The hostels’ latter function was crucial to the juvenile justice system, given that there was only one certified school for Jewish girls (Montefiore House in north London, which operated from 1905 to at least 1946) and only a handful of Christian girls’ certified schools willing to accept Jewish cases. Again, it is difficult to be precise as to the numbers of girls involved in Jewish welfare initiatives (which also included case-work, clubs and employment training), but available evidence suggests that these were substantial: in the year 1935–6, the JAPGW case committee dealt with 1,872 individuals, a figure which included 620 ‘new’ cases, 179 girls ‘bordering on immorality’ and ‘regularly visited’, 40 mentally defective girls, and 18 girls ‘missing from home’, as well as 31 probation cases, 36 Holloway cases, 24 summary court cases and 78 unmarried mothers. 75 The Church Penitentiary Association dealt with girls who had been sexually abused and girls suspected of, or found to have been, soliciting. Between 1905 and 1907 it admitted 138 girls aged between 10 and 16 to those of its homes ‘where special arrangements are made for young cases’.76 The Association noted that these cases were ‘uncommitted’, implying that they had not been formally committed into care by a court. Admission records of the London Female Preventive and Reformatory Institution provide further examples. Among the 975 applications for admission it received in 1916 were KM, whose mother had died and who ‘could not be kept in moral restraint’, having socialised with soldiers and ‘run away from home on several occasions’, and CL, ‘a young girl’ raised by ‘an aged grandmother said to be an undesirable woman’ who ‘was in grave moral danger’ and who, when found to have stolen a watch, ‘was charged by the police in order to get her away from her undesirable surroundings’ and bound over by a magistrate to the home. 77 As this shows, the police themselves actively encouraged such referrals. Lilian Wyles and her colleagues used routinely to refer the girls they intercepted on the streets to the ‘many places that offer[ed] shelter’ in such cases and wrote that ‘every police officer, man and woman, carried in the uniform pocket a list of these shelters and hostels’ and was ‘able to direct any questioning wanderer to the most suitable temporary home for their need’.78 For a brief period in the early 1920s the Metropolitan Police covered the costs incurred by homes and hostels for this purpose via their own girls’ welfare department, although this ended with Geddes’ public spending cuts. Similarly, the chief constable of Luton

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preferred to take any girl ‘found wandering in the streets’ to the ‘exceedingly helpful’ woman supervisor of the local Anglican shelter for girls, whose ‘ready and willing co-operation has on many occasions caused me to hand girls over to her care knowing full well that better results would be obtained by adopting that course than by bringing the girls before the Court, and on no occasion have I ever had cause to regret such action.’ 79 Although wary of taking on a welfare role, some police forces seem to have run their own rescue homes supported by their own charitable resources. The Metropolitan Police Home for Women and Girls housed three groups of girls between the 1910s and mid-1930s: runaways; foreign girls awaiting repatriation; and cases ‘where Police officers find a difficulty in providing a respectable lodging for girls who may be necessary as witnesses’, such as sexual assault and procurement cases.80 After these sexual cases had been heard in court, the police helped to arrange for the girls involved to be sent away to further voluntary homes, sometimes for a period of years. Over just three months in 1934, 19 girls were dealt with in this way. Violet A, a 12-year-old incest victim ‘badly infected’ (presumably with a sexually transmitted disease), was sent to a home for one year, followed by a convalescent home. Lilian C, aged 15, who had appeared in a ‘carnal knowledge’ case, was sent to a maternity home until six months after the birth of her child, when a ‘situation’ (probably in respectable domestic service) was to be found for her. Lilian D, a 14-year-old incest victim whose baby had died, was sent to a training home in Cornwall for two years.81 Such private provision was practically necessary, given that the juvenile justice system simply could not, or would not, easily accommodate such cases. Girls who were pregnant, or who had been sexually abused, or who had a sexually transmitted disease, as well as those who were considered incapable of being trained as domestic servants were all unlikely to be admitted to ordinary girls’ certified schools. The few ‘special’ certified schools, set up after 1908 for girls who were ‘immoral’, ‘morally contaminated’ or displayed ‘knowledge of evil’, could house only a small proportion of total cases, and none accepted pregnant girls or young mothers.82 Indeed, much more research is needed to shed light on the judicial treatment of pregnant teenagers and teenage mothers and to expose the institutional relationships between homes for unmarried mothers, private girls’ homes, the juvenile justice system, the care system and the adoption system. 83 As outlined above, concern for girls’ sexual vulnerability was shared across ethnic and religious communities but was arguably more pronounced in relation to certain groups of girls at certain times. In the 1920s and 1930s, mixed-race girls, for example, were singled out for

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particular attention in the port cities. Muriel Fletcher believed that ‘Anglo-Negroid’ girls faced particular difficulties. Excluded from established young female labour markets by racism, lacking stable families and apparently damned by a hyper-sexual heredity derived from their ‘loose’ white mothers and their ‘over-sexed’ black fathers, these girls seemed especially prone to prostitution and, worse, likely to produce another generation of racial degenerates. Indeed, Fletcher’s initial appeals for research funding had successfully played on these projected problems. The majority of Anglo-Negroid girls seem to drift inevitably into undesirable surroundings, since it is impossible for them to secure work either in domestic service or in factories . . . [this] undoubtedly increases the number of prostitutes and the number of illegitimate children, born with a definitely bad heredity, and exposed to a definitely bad environment. The problem regarding boys is not so acute, but even they are only too likely to complicate the situation by their actions later on in life.84 Fletcher tried to tackle this problem by setting up a training home and club for coloured girls in premises arranged by the city’s African and West Indian Mission. Her aim was to see whether they were ‘capable’ of being trained in handicrafts, and if so to investigate the possibility of the scheme ‘being developed along similar lines to those of the Schools for the Blind, thus providing an avenue of employment for half-caste children’. This initiative, which paid girls a piece rate for embroidery, failed. 85 Fletcher put this down to the low numbers of girls involved, but also to the fact that they were generally unsuited to the task, being ‘slow workers, lacking in initiative and need[ing] constant supervision’.86 Sexual cases dominate these examples. But they were not the only cases sent to rescue homes rather than to be processed through the courts. Girls guilty of theft were sometimes treated in a similar way. Rather than being prosecuted for repeatedly stealing from her employer whilst on licence from Shipton industrial school in 1911, Elsie was simply transferred by the school managers to a Royal Philanthropic Society ‘preventive home’ in Hammersmith.87 This transfer flouted the juvenile justice procedure in that those who seriously breached industrial school rules or licensing conditions were supposed to be referred to a magistrate who would decide whether or not to send them to a certified reformatory for the remainder of their training. In a second example, a former resident of the Battersea Home for Girls run by the Southwark Diocesan Association

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for Preventive and Rescue Work was readmitted to the institution, a full two years after she had been allowed to leave. She had been caught cheating the employer she had worked for since leaving the Home, by ‘filling in a blank cheque for £4 and cashing it’. The grocer concerned did not want to bring the matter to court and ‘advised leniency’. Rather than reporting the matter to the police, he alerted the Battersea Home committee, who agreed that, in the circumstances (the girl wanted to send more money home to her mother, but had not been given a promised pay rise), charges should not be brought. However this was only on the condition that she agreed to enter another of their homes for a further two years and within a month she had been duly sent to one in Stoke Newington.88 Boys, too, were sent to private homes and probation hostels. Some, like girls, bypassed the courts in this respect and were ‘assisted’ directly by voluntary organisations such as the Church Army. These cases were also, like those of girls, connected with sexual risk and prostitution. As Houlbrook notes, in the 1930s the Church Army encountered significant numbers of youths and young men both before and after their conviction for sexual offences with other men. 89 According to one social survey, ‘those concerned with social work among men and boys’ believed that young male prostitution had either increased or ‘become more open’ since the first world war.90 One such worker, the Church Army’s Captain Hanmore, documented this in his 1935 book, The Curse of the Embankment, in which he linked male prostitution to the economic hardships of the period and called for another training home to be opened to aid these young men’s ‘rescue, redemption and restoration’.91 Other boys were referred to such homes by the courts or statutory child welfare agencies. For example, the Padcroft Home in Middlesex housed up to 40 boys aged 14 to 17, most of whom had been placed on probation by London courts and some of whom ‘had failed’ in approved schools. The home had been opened by the London Police Court Mission in 1902 and operated until at least 1946, training boys in carpentry and gardening.92 The Church of England Moral Welfare Society also placed boys in farm and other training homes, a facility used by Liverpool juvenile liaison officers in the early 1950s for a small number of their cases. These included a 15-year-old boy reported for stealing tools from his employers, who had a poor relationship with his family (and with his stepmother in particular) and who apparently wanted to work on a farm.93 In this case, as in the Padcroft House cases, the boy reached the voluntary home via official channels which were part of defined juvenile justice diversionary schemes rather than through

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more informal channels. Although more research needs to be done into the ways in which definitions of neglect were framed in relation to young masculinities, it certainly seems that material deprivation was much more readily linked to moral deterioration in girls than in boys. What lay behind the drive to keep girls, above all, out of the juvenile courts and certified schools, which had, after all, been envisaged by many as radical new means of delivering child welfare? Why, when the new juvenile justice system set out to differentiate between different types of children with different kinds of needs, were some differences simply beyond the pale? The answer lies in a combination of factors that reveal much about the workings of gendered justice. First, rescue homes and moral welfare organisations represented but one part of the extensive voluntary effort upon which the state judicial system had long relied. In terms of personnel, the modern judicial system relied on members of the public to serve as jury members, non-stipendiary magistrates, police court missionaries (and later probation officers), prison visitors, child welfare workers, after-care workers and more. In terms of institutions, the juvenile justice system relied heavily on the voluntary sector’s formal provision of certified schools, probation hostels, remand homes and auxiliary homes. Such community involvement conferred a wider legitimacy on the judicial system, as well as allowing substantial fiscal savings to be made and provision to be made for different religious groups. It also symbolised the health of an advanced liberal society that disciplined its citizens, but did so within a mixed economy of welfare policing and drew on the strengths of civil society and private initiative. Second, for many, the regulation of girls was simply better effected in a private domestic setting than in a public judicial setting. This view was held by a variety of disparate groups, from those who wanted to protect girls from engaging in public sexual talk (even where this aimed to secure the conviction of male abusers) and to silence any open discussion of girls’ sexual lives, to those who wished to extend older ideas of chivalry into new judicial forms, to those who sought more radical reform of the justice system, in particular, the removal of women from prisons and girls from state custody of any kind. Reformers here included Alexander Paterson, prominent juvenile justice activist and official, who believed that women’s prisons were ‘an anomaly’, and praised American cottage reformatories, where women and girls lived in groups of between ten and 20 and knew ‘neither walls nor wire’. 94 His view was shared by the many women’s groups and rescue organisations that supported an amendment to the 1917 Criminal Law Amendment Bill advocating that women charged with soliciting should be placed by the

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courts into rescue homes rather than prison. The Church Penitentiary Association identified ten charities willing to receive cases outlined in the amendment.95 Thus, the diversion of girls from juvenile justice to moral rescue was supported by traditionalists and progressives alike. That such support continued into the 1940s and beyond, is shown by Hermann Mannheim’s research into the work of the Cambridge Associations for the Care of Girls. The Associations’ caseload, which had grown from 96 in 1940 to 169 in 1942, included ‘cases which might have been brought before the Juvenile Court as in need of care and protection or beyond parental control but could be satisfactorily dealt with by voluntary effort without official intervention’ and ‘cases where the main problem lies outside the competence of the Juvenile Court, such as finding a job . . . or advice in cases of illegitimate pregnancy or in questions of marriage’.96 Third, however, the exclusion of girls from judicial processes and institutions was linked to a deep but rarely articulated fear of the sexually knowing girl and her ability to disrupt the certainties of new judicial categories. The creation of separate juvenile correctional spaces for children from the mid-nineteenth century onwards was, ironically, one of the factors that meant that those spaces could not then deal with those who, for various reasons, compromised their status as children. The sexually knowing girl could not be easily treated as a child, yet – because of her age – the law stated that she could not be treated as a woman. Her very presence was problematic at almost every level. The infected girl threatened to contaminate every public toilet she sat on and every public sector vehicle she travelled in. The assaulted girl threatened to disrupt the juvenile court room by disturbing its procedures for presenting evidence and its assumptions of sexual innocence. The pregnant girl threatened to disrupt the certified school by disturbing its attempt to re-create the figure of the innocent child within the framework of the idealised family. All these factors kept this parallel system of private justice firmly in place throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Significant attempts were made to rein in and regulate some of these activities, however, and the state did take steps to move children from private to public care and to address the inescapable fact that regulation at the margins of the law was regulation without rights. While the Home Office Children’s Branch was happy to make use of reputable voluntary homes, it also tried to close down disreputable ones which it felt compromised children’s safety. Powers of inspection had existed from 1908 but were little used. 97 The 1933 Children Act extended these,

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requiring annual reports by the managers of all voluntary homes to be submitted to the Home Secretary, who assumed full responsibility for all children ‘deprived of a normal home life’ in 1948 after a series of damning investigations into statutory and voluntary child care. These were prompted in the first instance by the trauma of mass evacuation and by the death of Dennis O’Neill in a foster home in 1945, but later gained a momentum of their own. Lady Allen’s report, Whose Children?, revealed a catalogue of abuses in children’s homes, which were further investigated by the Care of Children Committee, appointed in 1945 under Myra Curtis, which called for extensive reforms of residential child care.98 Private girls’ homes were singled out for comment within these reforming efforts. In 1918, the Home Office worked with the Liverpool Council for Voluntary Aid to close two girls’ homes which they implied were using bogus Christian credentials to raise money to support girls who were in fact employed by the owners as domestic servants or even as prostitutes. 99 In 1928, the Home Office urged an end to the ‘abominable practice of sending girls convicted of theft and such offences to Rescue Homes under the supervision of Rescue Workers’ instead of sending them to ‘approved probation homes’.100 In 1938 it criticised those private homes which required ‘an almost complete seclusion of adolescent girls from the world and its ways for an exact period of two years with much exercise of religion’ arguing that this was not ‘the best training to fit girls to face the difficulties of modern life’. In one such place inspectors found that girls slept in cubicles which, while ‘comfortable, well lit and ventilated’, were ‘quite impossible to leave during the night’ because of ‘a system of bars and locks’ operated by ‘a large wheel’. Although such examples were rare and there had been ‘a marked improvement in this class of home’, with ‘the old system of repression, locked doors, silence at work, at meals and even in the mid-morning break’ being ‘much less frequently found’, a number of homes remained, in their view, extremely unsatisfactory. 101 The police, too, although cooperating with elements of the rescue sector, were critical of others. In the late 1930s, senior Metropolitan policewomen refused to comply with a request from the Islington and Finsbury Committee for the Moral Welfare of Children (working with the LCC on this occasion) to supply them with information on all reported child sexual abuse cases so that they might intervene in these cases themselves. The police’s refusal was grounded in part in professional rivalry and in part in the belief that not all girls needed rescuing in the same way, and that ‘spells in the country’ ordered by ‘one of these female busybodies’ were not in such girls’ best interests.102

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Up to a point, these challenges to the rescue sector by statutory agencies represented a new departure in the policing of girls. More than anything, they pointed to a desire to extend state authority over girls whose regulation had historically been the preserve of private groups. This desire was rooted in the wider expansion of what might be termed the whole ‘child welfare project’ which, by the 1940s, aimed to bring all ‘children in trouble’ into networks of care in which standards were governed by statutory minimums, even if services were not directly provided by statutory agencies. These challenges also perhaps represented something of a relaxation of moral fears about wayward girls, although this relaxation should not be exaggerated. Broad definitions of girls’ delinquency had not fundamentally changed here. Rather, the policing of girls was moving much more markedly from the private to the public, through the growing use of care and protection charges and later care orders, and the expansion of specialised juvenile policing schemes and local authority social services, children’s homes and girls’ borstals. Where did this leave the rescue sector? Some groups welcomed these changes, having long campaigned for greater state intervention in these areas and having long sought professional status for themselves. Others simply continued their work, though focused their efforts on young women over the age of 17, as the survival into the 1960s of large numbers of homes for young unmarried mothers and hostels for homeless girls testifies. 103 Although many facilities closed down (especially after being evacuated during the second world war), many continued working and many new ones opened. Writing in the 1950s, Lilian Wyles thought that ‘[t]oday there are many more shelters than there were thirty years ago’. 104 The differences between early and late twentieth-century voluntary homes for girls are a subject for further research. Some doubtless aimed to empower girls, some to punish them. However, the fact that they continued to operate in what appear to be large numbers is in itself significant, suggesting that the postwar expansion of the statutory welfare sector was accompanied by the renewal of the voluntary welfare sector, and that shame and censure sat alongside the postwar sexual and social liberation of young women. The policing of girls was a complex process involving a wide range of agencies operating inside, outside and on the margins of the juvenile justice system. At one level, it became more state-based and more specialised in the early twentieth century with the establishment of the new women police and the refinement of care proceedings in the new juvenile courts as well as the expansion of the investigative powers of local authorities via the work of their education, child welfare and mental

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deficiency officers. At another level, it remained rooted in the (primarily religious) charitable sector with its vast national network of rescue workers, homes and hostels. This is not to imply any absolute contrast between the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ or the ‘public’ and the ‘private’. As this chapter has shown, the two networks evolved alongside each other throughout the period discussed here and, despite periodic clashes, shared information, facilities and expertise. They also seemed to share a view of girls’ delinquency based on the sexual threats they faced and posed. However, the ‘sexual’ here comprised many things and was not invoked in the same way in relation to all girls. The girls most likely to experience policing (broadly defined) by an outside agency seem to have been those who wore a particular look (too innocent or too trashy), who behaved in particular ways in particular spaces (too vulnerable or too brazen), who had been brought to that agency’s attention by their families, employers, neighbours or, more rarely, strangers, or who came from a family or community (most often working-class) already known to that agency. These characteristics seemed to cross religious and ethnic lines and thus to unite groups different in many other respects. Historically, the same factors that kept girls in rescue homes also kept them out of the juvenile courts and out of the criminal statistics. It might be assumed that girls were treated leniently by the juvenile justice system: kept out of court where possible; charged, when they did appear in court, under care and protection categories rather than with criminal offences; spared the rigours of formal custodial institutions by being placed in private rescue homes; spared, in short, the full force of the law. However, such an assumption would be wrong. Regulation at the margins of the law was regulation without rights. And yet the right to care and protection, though beneficial to many, could be extended in ways that seriously compromised other girls’ social and sexual freedoms even though it was extended in the name of liberalism. As this chapter has shown, not all girls experienced such liberalism as leniency.

4 Reforming

Efforts to reform young delinquents took a number of forms in the first half of the twentieth century. Of those cases that came before the juvenile courts, most were dismissed, or ended in a fine or a probation order. A small proportion were committed to the custody of relatives or a fit person, to institutions for defectives or to prisons, and a substantial if declining number of boys were whipped (until this was banned in 1948). Between 5 and 10 per cent of both boys and girls were sent to Home Office schools where they could spend anything from a few months to a number of years, depending on their age, their family circumstances, their employability and their offence. Early twentieth-century juvenile justice disposal options were broadly retained in the postwar period, although much greater use was made of formal police cautions, local authority care orders, supervision orders and intermediate treatment (a form of structured probation), and a number of new custodial institutions were introduced, including remand centres, attendance centres, detention centres, ‘punishment’ borstals and secure units. Of these, the non-custodial options were the most significant for girls, although enough of them served out care orders and supervision orders in community homes (the successors to Home Office schools) and in local authority children’s homes to challenge any assumption that girls’ reform in the postwar period moved beyond the institutional. This chapter examines the experiences of girls in Home Office schools in the first half of the twentieth century. These institutions went under various names in this period. Until 1933, they were known collectively as certified schools but divided into two main types: industrial schools, which admitted those under 14 who had committed an offence or who were in need of protection, and reformatories, which admitted juvenile offenders up to the age of 16. After 1933, the two institutions were unified 80

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to form new approved schools as part of an attempt to erode further the distinctions between delinquent and neglected children. With the increasing use of non-custodial alternatives, the number of certified schools in England and Wales declined from the late nineteenth century, with a large number of closures in the 1920s in particular, following declining admissions (see Figure 6, ‘Girls’ certified schools active in 1915–34, by closing date’, Home Office, Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ Directories, 1915–34). Together, numbers of boys’ and girls’ schools fell from 185 in 1915, to 135 in 1923. They rose again after the 1933 Children Act and during the second world war. In 1945 there were 141 approved schools, and in 1964, 121. Numbers of girls’ certified schools followed this broad pattern, falling from 61 in 1915 (51 industrial schools and ten reformatories), to 44 in 1923 (38 industrial schools and six reformatories), to 28 in 1933 (23 industrial schools and five reformatories). Thereafter, numbers rose to 51 in 1945, but fell again to 35 in 1964. Numbers of girls committed to certified schools by court order each year followed a similar pattern, falling from over 1,000 in the early 1910s to between 300 and 400 in the 1920s, and rising to between 500 and 600 in the 1930s. It should be noted, however, that these figures do not include the substantial numbers of voluntary admissions which were allowed at least until 1933 and which are likely to have been in the hundreds. In 1945, girls’ approved schools could house up to 2,300, a capacity reduced to 1,400 by the mid-1960s. 1 Relative to the numbers actually sent to them, institutional custodial spaces occupied a huge place in contemporary public imaginations of juvenile justice. Indeed, modern Western juvenile justice systems were essentially founded upon the nineteenth-century removal of children from adult penal spaces and the subsequent creation of special custodial spaces for children. As the most visible public and political symbols of the new juvenile justice system, much depended on perceptions of these institutions. The system was widely judged as effective or ineffective, as too harsh or too lenient, on the back of the perceived successes and scandals of certified schools, borstals and their successors – those institutional settings where juvenile reform was most dramatically attempted. If the public and policy-makers believed in a golden age of childhood, then they believed, too, in a dark age where children were maltreated in gothic institutions. Successive generations of child welfare officials, from heads of charities to heads of the Home Office Children’s Branch, used annual reports to detail successive ‘improvements’ within juvenile justice and routinely welcomed new legislation as ‘pioneering’. The 1948 Children Act, for

Girls’ certified schools active in 1915–34, by closing date

Source: Home Office Directories, 1915–34 and D.H. Thomas Annotated List.

Figure 6:

1850

1860

1870

1880

1890

1900

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Industrial Schools, Portsmouth King Edward, London Stanhope House, Bristol Sunderland Park Avenue,Hull Beckett Home, Leeds Brixton Hill,London Liverpool Maurice Home, London Halstead, Essex Nazareth House,London RC St Elizabeth, Liverpool RC Gordon House,London St Anne’s, Liverpool RC St Joseph’s, Manchester Stockport Carlton House, Bristol Shipton, Oxon Horwood House, Essex Stafford St Joseph’s, Darlington RC Plymouth / Eccles St Anne’s, London RC St Mary’s, Walthamstow RC St Hilda’s, York Dorset Home St Joseph’s, Yorkshire St Mary’s, Cold Ash Langford Cross,Essex St Elizabeth’s, Salisbury RC Elm House, London Holy Trinity, Liverpool Montefiore House, London Northumberland Village Homes St Joseph’s, Bristol St Mary’s, Croydon Thorparch, Leeds Bath / Walcot Home Blackbrook House, St Helens Coventry / Newfield Gisburne House, Watford Northenden Road,Sale Princess Mary’s, Surrey REFORMATORY SCHOOLS Liverpool / The Willows Red Lodge, Bristol Sunderland lpswich Queen Elizabeth Lodge, London Duxhurst, Surrey St Elizabeth’s, Brighton Toxteth Park, Liverpool Lancashire Inval, Surrey Arno’s Court / St Joseph’s, Bristol Devon and Exeter Knowle Hill, Warwick Parkside, Liverpool Stafford County Home SPECIAL INDUSTRIAL SCHOOLS St Ursula’s, Teddington Pontville, Ormskirk (md) Whittington Hall, Derbs St Lucy’s, Liverpool (opthalmic) St Winifred’s, Wolverhampton Besford Court, Worcestor (md) Heritage, Sussex (phys defec) St Elizabeth’s, Herts (epileptic) Stoke Park, Bristol Pield Health House, Mdx St Vincent’s, Mdx (orthopaed) Allerton Priory, Liverpool Clapham park, London Dovecot Horticultural, Liverpool Homerton, London (deaf) Royal Eastern Counties, Essex (md) St Mary’s, Buxted St Monica’s, Surrey St Christopher, Liverpool

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Photo 2:

‘Girls’ Reformatory at the beginning of the century’

Source: M. Simmons, Making Citizens: A Review of the Aims, Methods and Achievements of the Approved Schools of England and Wales, London: HMSO, 1945, facing p. 8.

example, was celebrated as a watershed within juvenile justice reform. New institutions would be set up, existing institutions improved, children in need would receive proper care and control, juvenile offenders would be better categorised, better diagnosed and better trained. The whole system would be better coordinated by newly established Children’s Departments within local authorities, working alongside the Home Office. This spirit of optimism was captured by a freshly appointed children’s worker: Our impression . . . was that the country outside was dotted with castlelike institutions in which hundreds of children dressed in blue serge were drilled to the sound of whistles. We were going to tear down the mouldering bastions. 2 Yet the 1948 Act was just one of a series of apparent watersheds. For a previous generation, the 1933 Children Act had represented a turning point from bad to good practice, from amateurish rescue to expert reform.

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Photo 3:

‘Approved School girls of today’

Source: M. Simmons, Making Citizens: A Review of the Aims, Methods and Achievements of the Approved Schools of England and Wales, London: HMSO, 1945, facing p. 8.

Prior to that, the 1908 Children Act had been hailed as a dramatic break with the past. Claims to progress were most powerfully measured against the juvenile justice system’s institutional side, the certified schools. A 1945 Home Office publication, Making Citizens, conceded that ‘some of the Approved Schools are still in the premises originally provided as Reformatory and Industrial schools’, but stressed that ‘few of these are now recognisable as the stark barracks they once were’. This new look had been achieved by the ‘removal of high walls’, the ‘enlarging of windows’, the ‘addition of bright schoolrooms, libraries and gymnasia, swimming baths’, the ‘modernisation of kitchens, bathrooms, dining rooms and dormitories’, and the positioning of ‘pictures on the walls and flowers on the table’ (see photographs 2 and 3, ‘Girls’ Reformatory at the beginning of the century’ and ‘Approved School girls of today’, from M. Simmons, Making Citizens: A Review of the Aims, Methods and Achievements of the Approved Schools of England and Wales, London: HMSO, 1945, facing p. 8).3 To underline further this progressive tale, Making Citizens reported the story of one past Superintendent

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who used to prowl through slum areas near his school, spying on children playing in the streets. When he caught sight of any of them engaged in mischief he would call a policeman, have them charged, and apply to the court for them to be sent to his school. His concern was less for the children than for his means of livelihood; without clients he would have been out of a job. 4 But times had changed. Psychological selection tests had replaced these old corrupt recruiting methods. However, this picture of a gothic past stands in contrast to those painted by earlier Home Office publications. Its 1923 Children’s Branch report, for example, struck an optimistic note: the ‘record on the whole during the last few years’ had been ‘one of continued progress in the treatment of juvenile offenders’.5 It continued, ‘comparing the schools today with what they were ten years ago, the greatest change perhaps lies in the decrease of “institutionalism” – to use an ugly word to describe an ugly thing’. ‘Grotesque uniforms’ and ‘cropped hair’ had been phased out. The ‘barring of windows, the locking of dormitory doors and the employment of night watchmen has been abandoned, except by a few’.6 Even earlier, the Inspection of Homes Association’s Officer for Girls’ Industries was pleased to report in 1914 that ‘managers and officials have at last realised that children and young persons are not “what they used to be”, nor are they likely to be moulded as a package of candles, all exactly alike’. 7 And earlier still, the 1907 annual report of the Reformatory and Industrial Schools Department had praised improvements in the schools, which ‘were at first conducted on punitive rather than on remedial lines, but this policy [was] now happily changed’. 8 Boys’ institutions played a more central role than that of girls’ in shaping broader public and political opinion around youth justice issues. This was partly because they were bigger and more numerous and also because the physical disciplining of boys’ bodies was such an emotive subject in this period, held up by hard-liners and reformers alike as one of the ultimate benchmarks of judicial liberalism. Girls’ institutions were also a subject of concern, however. Some of their voluntary homes were a particular target for reform, as were many of the certified schools, some of which were criticised for cruelty, others for their narrow regimes, and others for failing to keep up with the needs of ‘the modern girl’ variously defined. Despite almost constant demands for change and almost as frequent claims that such demands had been met, daily life in certified schools – more particularly in the girls’ schools – remained remarkably static.

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Domestic economy A girl sent to a certified school at any point in the first half of the twentieth century would have found her days dominated by domestic work. Girls cooked, cleaned, washed, sewed, mended, gardened and supervised younger children. If she was of school-age, she would attend lessons either in the school room of the institution or at the local elementary school. When she reached the age of 14, lessons would end and her day would be filled by full-time domestic duties. At this stage, provided that she had a good record, and that the institution could spare her labour, she could be released on licence to work as a domestic servant until the end of her period of detention. Whilst in the school, she would eat her meals in a communal dining room, sleep in a communal dormitory and spend structured free time in a communal recreation room. She would typically be allowed to write letters once a fortnight and have visitors once a month. She would attend church on Sundays, and might belong to the Girl Guides. In the course of a year, she might go on a couple of day-trips and perhaps a week’s holiday by the sea, though these privileges could easily be forfeited because of bad behaviour. If she was really disruptive, she might be caned, denied meals, locked in a punishment room or transferred to another institution. Girls’ experiences would, of course, have varied depending on the size and location of the school and the attitude of its managers and allotted inspectors. Some institutions, for example, thought themselves more progressive than others. The wars, too, brought temporary changes to routines, with a switch from domestic work to war work, and the introduction of shorter periods of detention and earlier licensing. Nevertheless, the aims of these corrective schools across the whole period remained modest and largely unchanging. Girls would not be encouraged to confront or discuss their offending behaviour. Rather, they would be reformed by living structured lives in ordered space. Through a regular diet of domestic labour, religious teaching, fair punishment and deserved rewards, they were gradually to learn the value of hard work, self-restraint and familiar routine. Domesticity was defined in two clear ways. The girls’ training was meant to prepare them in the short term for paid employment as servants and in the long term for unpaid service as wives (and mothers). As long as these two aims continued to be compatible, girls’ reform regimes remained static. A girl could be considered to be a certified school success if she kept clear of the courts, became a self-supporting servant and, ultimately, made a respectable marriage. But whereas the need to train girls for marriage and motherhood remained fairly constant,

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the demand for live-in domestic servants steadily declined. And once the vocational value of domestic training began to be seriously questioned, which it was after the second world war, traditional approaches to girls’ reform began to crumble and these institutions suffered a crisis of purpose. The idea that wayward girls needed to be domesticated (in the many senses of that word) firmly underpinned the philosophy and practice of girls’ reform for the century between the 1850s and the 1950s. Mary Carpenter, a juvenile justice pioneer, wrote in 1857 that ‘girls must be prepared for domestic life, either in the house of persons in the respectable portion of society or eventually in their own families’.9 Her own girls’ reformatory, Red Lodge, set up in 1854, was run on these principles. Carpenter and others knew that magistrates were reluctant to send young girls to penal institutions. If, however, those penal institutions were made to appear home-like, then this reluctance might be converted into enthusiasm, and the state’s actions in so committing a girl might be viewed as compassionate rather than cruel. So, while committal to a small reformatory was preferable in many ways to a sentence in a large women’s prison, this ‘liberal’ innovation masked an unpalatable act: the incarceration of a child by the state. Locking up the children of the poor thus became a humanitarian gesture, an emblem of a civilised society. The rise of boys’ reformatories and industrial schools was also, of course, a product of this recasting of child imprisonment. Moreover, the reclamation of boys was also to be effected in identifiably domestic spaces. The new British certified schools were modelled to an extent upon early nineteenth-century European farm schools, agricultural colonies and cottage homes, most notably Hamburg’s Rauhe House and Mettray’s agricultural reformatory. As Driver writes, these institutions were shaped by a new reformatory science which sought social regeneration through the design of moral landscapes and the manipulation of space. 10 They delivered moral and vocational training within a newstyle ‘family’ structure. But domesticity could be more flexibly defined for boys. Living in a small cottage community within a larger institution could be defined as domestic, as could having to undertake some household tasks as part of a broader range of training activities. But this was very different from the daily domestic drudgery encountered by girls. Domestication was therefore only one aspect of boys’ reform, whereas it was absolutely central to that of girls. Moreover, boys’ institutions were much more varied than girls’. Training ships, barrack schools and boys’ prisons were not best known for their promotion of a domestic demeanour.

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Photo 4:

‘St. Michael’s Home, Shipton-under-Wychwood’

Source: Our Waifs and Strays, December 1908, p. 465.

Ironically, the much-vaunted cottage homes were available to very few certified school girls. Because relatively few girls were committed by the courts, there were few large institutions of this kind. Only Princess Mary Village Homes in Addlestone, Northumberland Village Homes in Whitley Bay, and those mental deficiency institutions which admitted some children as industrial schools cases, such as the Royal Eastern Counties Institution near Colchester, resembled Mettray. Few girls’ certified schools were purpose-built. They typically occupied large former family houses, usually sited within a town or village (rather than buried in remote countryside), which had served various purposes and which therefore held varying associations for the local community (see photographs 4 and 5, ‘St. Michael’s Home, Shipton-under-Wychwood’ and ‘St. Mary’s Home, Cold Ash’, from Our Waifs and Strays, December 1908, p. 465). For example, the Stafford Industrial Home for Girls, certified as a reformatory in 1916, had formerly been ‘The Staffordshire Industrial Home for Discharged Female Prisoners and Fallen Women’, while by contrast, St Michael’s Home in Shipton-under-Wychwood had been a ladies’ college. Many of them were first established as private charitable children’s homes and only subsequently certified by the Home Office for the reception of cases committed by the courts. One effect of this continuing private ownership, which continued in many cases into the 1960s, was that most certified schools operated their own admissions

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Photo 5:

‘St. Mary’s Home, Cold Ash’

Source: Our Waifs and Strays, December 1908, p. 465.

policies, which could be very selective. They helped to produce a national juvenile justice system in which children were categorised not only according to age, gender and offence, but also according to whether they were Protestant, Catholic or Jewish, and whether they were judged mentally strong or mentally weak. Girls were further segregated according to their degree of sexual knowledge or their capacity for ‘moral contamination’. These divisions were maintained in the postwar period although, officially at least, they became less visible. Girls may not have lived in institutions designed by strict reformatory science, but the ordering of space was nevertheless seen as central to their reform. Their certified schools – of all kinds – tried to reproduce the atomised space of an idealised middle-class family home. Dormitories, dining rooms, kitchens, laundries, bathrooms and recreation rooms were clearly demarcated. Staff quarters, like parental spaces, were located within the same house, but were strictly off limits to the girls. These spatial arrangements helped to foster middle-class domestic power relations, which were emphasised further by patriarchal patterns of authority. Girls’ schools were often entirely staffed by women but were ultimately accountable to men. Local middle-class women were well represented on management committees but men usually occupied the senior positions. These committees were answerable to the Home Office inspectorate and, in some cases, to the head office of the particular charity responsible for the institution, both of which were male-dominated. While the matron or lady superintendent represented the central authority in the girls’ day-to-day

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lives, distant male figures, such as the local vicar, the doctor, the inspector, the education officer and the charity manager, appeared to wield a greater power during their occasional visits than full-time female staff. Calling these institutions schools was always something of a misnomer. Many of the girls were over the elementary school-leaving age, which stood at 14 between 1918 and 1944 (when it was raised to 15). Trained teachers, if they were present at all, were a minority among the staff. Girls’ school staff were usually headed by a matron or a lady superintendent and typically included a cook, a laundry supervisor, a housemaid and sometimes a gardener. Nineteenth-century patterns of recruitment prevailed into the twentieth century, though trained teachers were more common, at least in managerial positions in London and other large cities, after the first world war. Significantly, some women entering approved schools as staff in the 1940s viewed the job as an alternative to teaching. 11 Many were indeed ‘working for God’.12 Up to the 1940s, staff generally lived in and led highly regulated lives. They adhered to the same timetable as the girls, lived in similar spartan rooms and had limited holidays and personal freedom.13 This, together with the fact that certified schools were widely seen as ‘special’ schools with ‘low-ability’ pupils, most of whom were above the school-leaving age, helps to explain why they rarely attracted trained teachers. Before 1948, special local education committees dealt with any children who were not attending mainstream elementary schools. Hence, delinquent and neglected children were bracketed with feeble-minded, pauper and sick children, and received a poor basic education as a result. Their designation as ‘special’ by local education authorities meant that even less was expected from pupils who were already believed to have below average intelligence. This had an enduring impact upon definitions of ‘suitable’ training, despite the efforts of some inspectors to raise educational standards. A 1902 report noted that ‘these children . . . will have to earn their bread rather by sweat of brow than stress of intellect’. 14 An LCC inspector visiting the Sunderland Girls’ Reformatory in 1918 was ‘astonished to find girls of 17 in standards 1 and 2’ but believed that ‘something must be allowed for the lower level of intelligence that accounts for their being in a reformatory’.15 Even 50 years later, little had changed. A 1966 Home Office staff recruitment booklet advised that ‘the emphasis [of approved schools] is on social re-education first, and classroom education second’. 16 Within this broad group of children excluded from mainstream schooling, clear educational hierarchies emerged. Certified school girls generally fared worse than certified school boys, and girls with ‘knowledge of

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evil’ fared worse still. Sexually delinquent girls were thought by some to be even less deserving of educational resources. Staff at the Stafford Girls’ Reformatory (a former home for ‘fallen women’ and one of the ‘special’ certified schools), for example, used the girls’ sexual impropriety to argue against Home Office demands for educational improvement. They claimed that ‘these girls’ needed ‘perhaps a different system and a different treatment from those in ordinary Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ and that, given ‘the Institution [was] totally different to the Ordinary Reformatory Schools, [it was] absolutely impossible to conduct it on the same hard and fast lines’.17 Some certified schools taught children themselves. Others sent them out to the local elementary school if arrangements could be made with the local education authority, although some LEAs refused to accept responsibility for educating children who had come from other local authority areas. In 1918, Bath Borough Council refused to allow children from Bath Girls’ Industrial School to be taught in its elementary schools on the grounds that other local authorities were financially responsible for the girls’ education. The council relented only when the industrial school agreed to pay four pence per week for each child attending local schools.18 Girls who did attend local schools probably gained a better education and a certain degree of social integration. Anna remembered becoming a prefect and that another girl from her home became head girl, ‘a thing no home girl had ever done’.19 However, attending the local school could be very problematic for children known to be ‘different’. Girls living in certified schools were often victimised by teachers and often blamed for causing trouble and leading other children astray.20 Janet Hitchman, who spent her interwar childhood in a series of foster homes, children’s homes and training homes, recalls in her autobiography that a policeman visited her school and warned the other children not to play with her after she had stolen 10 shillings to buy her foster mother a birthday present. 21 ‘Home girls’, as they were often known, were easily distinguishable from other children. Singled out by their clothes and haircuts, many had to walk to and from school in a crocodile line and were not allowed to stay and play after lessons or to visit other children’s houses without permission. All this set them apart from other pupils, which meant that an exercise intended to effect integration only emphasised difference and their inferior status.22 By the 1920s, a variety of post-elementary educational options had been opened to girls, including central schools, higher grade schools, higher elementary schools and technical colleges. Certified school girls were very definitely among the majority effectively excluded from any

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Photo 6:

‘Youthful Washerwomen – Cold Ash’

Source: Our Waifs and Strays, December 1914, p. 488.

form of secondary education, not least because the cost had to be met by the school itself or by the local authority that had committed the girl, but also because time spent on education was time spent away from domestic work. In schools where there was shortage of girl labour, either as a result of licensing or falling admissions, even girls under the official school-leaving age of 14 could be withdrawn from academic education in order to work in the institution as full-time ‘house girls’ (see photograph 6, ‘Youthful washerwomen – Cold Ash’). This happened even though it contravened the 1908 Children Act’s requirement that all girls of elementary school age were to receive an ‘ordinary’ education. At Stockport Girls’ Industrial School, for example, ‘girls under 14 were withdrawn from full-time education’ because low admissions meant that there were ‘too few big girls to carry on the work in the laundry, kitchen, house and sewing room’. 23 In exceptional cases, some girls did have access to further education, with some certified schools able to pay for a few to attend local secondary schools or to register with local technical institutes for particular lessons in cookery and child care. However, in the interwar period there seems to have been only one girls’ certified school (the LCC’s Elm House, significantly one of the few actually run by a local authority) where secondary education was formally available to all inmates, and where girls were encouraged to look beyond domestic service to secretarial work, dressmaking and teaching. 24 This provision was expanded, but only temporarily, during

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the second world war, when inflated admission rates brought more girls ‘of higher mental ability’ into the system. For a short time, another special approved school was opened to cater for this group, offering training in shorthand typing and clerical work and classes in music, drama and art, but closed shortly after the war.25 The best of the boys’ schools offered far more than the best of the girls’ schools.26 Werrington Boys’ Industrial School, for example, claimed to operate a laboratory for rural science as well as offering full-time elementary education for boys under 14, and a ‘continuation school on a well-organised Dalton plan’, where boys aged 14–16 could study a range of subjects, including political economy, industrial history, practical mathematics and drawing. 27 Boys’ routines varied according to school location, but – largely free of extensive domestic work – often included farming, metal work, musical training, drill and sport. Although attempts were periodically made to introduce sport and physical training into girls’ schools, these did not take root. Low numbers, lack of suitable staff and equipment and often a lack of enthusiasm among the girls themselves made it very difficult for girls’ schools to demonstrate the muscular moral reform and team-player citizenship so favoured by boys’ schools. The ‘difficulties’ of encouraging girls to engage in sport have done much to shape the continuing and generalised ‘difficulty’ of occupying their time in custodial settings.28 This is not to say that boys’ labour was not exploited. Certified school boys were mainly trained for the army, particularly for army bands, and a number of the schools had direct military connections. Boys from the Warwickshire Boys’ Reformatory, for example, automatically became members of the cadet corps of the 7th Warwickshire Regiment. 29 Such military links were heavily exploited during the first world war, when many boys were licensed early and sent straight to the Front. 30 Others were trained in the old-fashioned trades of tailoring and shoemaking, which one Home Office report criticised for placing an ‘unjust handicap’ upon boys who were unlikely to ‘ever make a living at these occupations’.31 Training programmes described as ‘technical’ were often rudimentary. St Nicholas Industrial School in Ilford claimed in 1919 that the boys tending the boilers were receiving ‘engineering training’, when in fact, as an HMI noted, ‘their duties appear to consist mainly of lighting and stoking the fires, and watching the pressure gauge’.32 Nevertheless, the 1945 Curtis Committee concluded that ‘a much wider variety of vocational training is available to boys than to girls’, and found only a few girls’ schools offering training in dressmaking, tailoring and gardening rather than domestic work.33

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Not surprisingly, up to the 1940s, most ex-certified school girls, together with most ex-Aylesbury borstal girls, entered residential domestic service either in private houses or in other voluntary homes upon being discharged on licence. A few were employed as waitresses, hairdressers, shop assistants and factory hands, and a tiny number entered the more professional fields of dressmaking, nursing, teaching and secretarial work.34 Notably, Jewish girls leaving Montefiore House tended to enter a trade rather than domestic service, a trend which contemporaries put down to traditions of migrant female labour, anti-Semitism among the servant-employing classes and the proactive efforts of the Jewish Board of Guardians to arrange apprenticeships for working-class girls. 35 Some ex-certified school girls, as the last chapter suggested, evaded institutional monitoring and supported themselves at least in part through prostitution and petty crime. However, even ‘respectable’ alternatives to domestic service were not generally embraced. A 1934 LCC conference on the future of girls’ aftercare felt that even clerical work had its negative aspects, attracting ‘excessive’ travelling and clothing expenses, and feared that the ‘sudden emergence of girls from the comparatively sheltered life of schools to busy city offices is not always attended with success’.36 Such fears around the dangers of ‘exposure’ to urban life were another factor maintaining service as the most common form of girls’ aftercare. Residential domestic service was more than a means of earning money. It protected ‘vulnerable’ girls from their ‘unfit’ families, while offering secure housing and a chance to experience middle-class family values at first hand. Ironically, service was also notorious for affording opportunities for sexual experimentation and sexual abuse, but this was rarely mentioned.37 Given that very few girls were encouraged or enabled to return to their own families, the difficulty of finding suitable alternative lodgings was a major obstacle to change. Cheap rented rooms were morally dangerous, but respectable rented rooms were too expensive. In one of the rare cases where a ‘bright’ girl was offered an office job (with Unilever in south London), the weekly rates of hostels for ‘business girls’ proved prohibitively costly, and she was able to accept the job only after special arrangements were made for her to board at her Waifs and Strays home and then in a Girls’ Friendly Society hostel. 38 Hostels that would accept such girls were all too rare. The rescue sector had hundreds of homes, but tended to reserve them for fallen girls rather than reformed girls. According to one girls’ school manager, ‘if a girl goes wrong, you can get any amount of help for that girl; but if you get a good girl, only weak in character and rather irresponsible . . . you cannot

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get any home to take her. I have tried over and over again all over England.’39 Some certified schools ran official auxiliary homes, but there were never more than a handful across the country in the first half of the twentieth century. 40 Since they were not required by law, auxiliary homes attracted little or no statutory funding. The 1938 Criminal Justice Bill proposed the establishment of a national network of Howard houses – stricter probation hostels which would act as ‘half-way’ houses for young delinquents – but the Bill was delayed due to the impending war and never passed.41 Thus, breaking the circle of domestic training and domestic service for girls meant broadening visions of female citizenship to accommodate new modes of independent living for young women.

Disciplinary economy Everyday order in the schools was maintained by a system of rules which were largely set locally until the mid-twentieth century. When an institution was registered as a certified school, it had to agree to abide by basic Home Office regulations which outlined the duties of staff and management committees and set minimum standards of care for children, covering everything from diet, working hours, education, cubic sleeping space, medical inspection and clothing to outside contact and licensing. However, the fact that the schools were allowed to modify these rules (as section 54 of the 1908 Act allowed) compromised uniformity, leading to frequent battles between inspectors who were trying to enforce national standards and school managers who were often determined to retain their freedom of action as voluntary bodies. Lack of alternative accommodation meant that certificates were rarely withdrawn from institutions which failed to comply, a fact that outraged penal reformers. The Howard League, for example, was very critical of ‘those unreformed reformatories’, and the whole ‘privately-managed, publicly-financed Certified School System’.42 Inmate behaviour was governed by a variety of means. Most girls’ schools operated a mark system, awarding and deducting points for good or bad behaviour. This system allowed discipline to be effected through the school’s internal economy. At the end of a specified period of time, accumulated marks were converted into pocket money, outings and even contact with families via letters and visits. All of these ‘privileges’ could be withdrawn for bad behaviour, a powerful form of regulation that caused much tension between girls, parents and the school authorities, as detailed in chapter 5, but they were certainly favoured, officially

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at least, over corporal punishment, the use of which was heavily controlled in girls’ schools. Home Office guidelines stated that corporal punishment could be administered only for extreme offences committed by girls over 10. A beating had to be administered in the presence of a lady member of the Home management committee after permission had been obtained from the chair, the honorary secretary and another committee member, using a cane provided by the Home Office.43 Some schools which developed more creative ways of maintaining discipline were singled out for praise by inspectors. Duxhurst Girls’ Reformatory, declared by one to be ‘one of the most satisfactory reformatory schools for girls in existence’, devolved a certain amount of disciplinary power to the girls. A head girl elected each month presided over a regular ‘tribunal’, where any girl who had broken the rules was ‘tried’ by her peers. 44 Practices at the rather more experimental Little Commonwealth (one of the few mixed certified schools) were heavily criticised, however. Here, the director, Homer Lane, and his staff operated a policy of calculated leniency. Anti-social behaviour went unchecked until the children themselves decided to intervene. Significantly, this system seemed to work to boys’ advantage, who, according to a former staff member, ‘did no work’, but ‘swaggered about defiantly’. The girls ‘criticized the boys’ table manners, their behaviour at night, their laziness and lack of interest’. They repeatedly asked Lane ‘to take the boys in and stop their undesirable activities’, but he refused, insisting that it was ‘not his function to act as policeman’. Eventually, the community appointed a girl to act as a judge over the rowdy boys but she resigned when both boys and girls concluded that ‘no girl had a right to sit in judgement upon a boy’. She was later re-elected, but the whole episode points to a problematic gender dynamic (one also noted by Cyril Burt in his observations of another mixed certified school) within this otherwise truly innovative approach to juvenile reform.45 In fact, the Little Commonwealth proved just too innovative for the Home Office, which withdrew certification in 1918 after a series of scandals, some involving the alleged sexual abuse of girls on the premises. For all its difficulties, the Little Commonwealth stands out in the history of juvenile reform as a place where adolescents were, for a brief period, treated with a degree of respect and granted a degree of autonomy. Of course, institutional order was inevitably kept by means other than those set down in formal disciplinary guidelines and recorded in punishment books. Stella recalled that punishments at Queen Bertha’s in 1914 ‘varied from being sent to bed early, losing one’s pudding or cake or pocket money, running non-stop around the yard for a limited

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period or being “sent to Coventry”’. Girls were also sexually humiliated by being made to stand with their dresses over their heads. 46 At Vera’s Streatham training school, ‘absconders were obliged to scrub – on their knees – every inch of a wide corridor reputed to be a mile long’. 47 Staff also devolved disciplinary power to older girls, a power that was often abused and led to sanctioned bullying. Stella remembered that The ‘wet-beds’ had to undergo a cold bath, first thing in the morning, summer or winter, in that bleak stone-floored wash house. I wasn’t a regular culprit but I did have the occasional accident and I will never forget nearly losing my breath as the ‘big girl’ gleefully poured bowlfuls of icy cold water over me. But there was one little girl who wet her bed nearly every night, and I really felt sorry for her. When the eldest girls came to bed, it was their job to wake certain of the children to use their ‘pots’. Poor Lydia, these girls used to do all they could to humiliate her by making her run around the dormitory stark naked, all without the staff’s knowledge, and we were too frightened of these ‘bully girls’ to tell.48 Such disjunctures of power allowed girls to create communities and rules of their own, which countered their formal passivity within the school. They found many and varied ways to resist regulations; they took extra food when on kitchen duty, stole glances at choir boys on Sundays, and ‘found their ways of meeting village lads’.49 Contrary to school rules, they did, of course, talk about their past lives and the reasons for their committal and such conversations produced informal, alternative hierarchies among them.50 They discussed sex, practised masturbation and sometimes slept in each other’s beds. Undoubtedly, lesbian relationships and same-sex erotic encounters took place, but were very rarely discussed in any of the official and unofficial literature on the schools. Where girls were concerned, masturbation and even same-sex encounters tended to be viewed as evidence of excessive heterosexual passion and craving for affection, the consequences of which – prostitution and pregnancy – were thought to be much more dangerous than lesbianism.51 Lesbianism seemed to be a much more visible part of life among older girls in Aylesbury borstal. According to her biographer, governor Lilian Barker used ridicule to restrict their ‘soppy’ relationships and to expose kissing, cuddling and romantic graffiti. In the 1930s, the Prison Commissioners were pleased to note that giving older girls more responsibility had caused a ‘decline in their sentimental friendships with younger girls’.

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Nevertheless, in 1945 the News Chronicle proclaimed that homosexuality was rife at Aylesbury. 52 Girls also seriously disrupted institutional regimes. In 1901, the head of the Waifs and Strays Society dispatched his own special representative to deal with disturbances at St Michael’s industrial school in Shipton caused by a group of girls who, in the space of a few days, had escaped from solitary confinement, dressed in each other’s clothes, wandered in the fields, locked themselves in the laundry overnight, been disorderly and disobedient at work, truanted from school, stolen from the matron’s room and attempted to set fire to the dining room. 53 The ring-leaders were transferred and the matron replaced. Girls at Montefiore House showed similar resistance in the early 1940s. In one case, a girl telephoned her employers and impersonated a member of staff in order to excuse herself from work, went shopping in the city, and when confronted claimed to have been ‘to Barnet to buy a birthday present for the Headmistress’.54 Another 13-year-old girl, who had organised group escape attempts, refused to work and had been generally ‘rowdy’, defied all attempts to punish her. Isolated in a locked room at the top of the house after her letters, parcels and holiday week had been withdrawn and her diet restricted to the statutory minimum, she proceeded ‘to sing bawdy songs from an open window’. 55 Staff at Aylesbury borstal were also stretched by escape attempts, fights and outbreaks of ‘smashing up’, where girls would seriously damage their rooms and their contents.56 A particular crisis of control broke out during the second world war. Higher numbers of admissions led to overcrowding in remand homes and approved schools. Managers of new schools complained that they could not cope with the kinds of girls being sent to them and demanded that they be allowed to reject certain cases, a demand in this instance refused by the Home Office. Knowle Hill school was rocked by riots. The number of escapes soared: no fewer than 70 girls escaped from a Hammersmith remand home over a period of eight months. 57 The war-time panic over girls’ behaviour was linked at the time to an ‘unprecedented’ lack of vacancies, lack of resources, lack of experienced staff and to girls’ worsening behaviour. While higher numbers of older girls were placed in overstretched juvenile institutions during the war, the seriousness of previous school rebellions was simply forgotten in the ‘new’ search for the causes of the ‘new’ crisis. But to celebrate these episodes as examples of girls’ power would be to seriously underestimate the power of the schools and, by extension, the state, to deal with disruptive elements. In 1918, the LCC had heavily criticised the Sunderland Girls’ Reformatory’s disciplinary regime.

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Disruptive girls had been put in isolation, had their hair cut short and been beaten. The LCC believed that this was ‘most regrettable’ as it implied ‘a return to penal methods which one had hoped had disappeared for ever from our Reformatories’. Such harsh methods, ‘successful no doubt for many years’, might ‘with advantage be reviewed and compared with those employed in some of the newer schools’.58 Yet these criticisms were repeated, almost to the letter, by the Curtis Committee nearly 30 years later. One girls’ approved school visited by committee members had resorted to drastic measures to try to contain escapees. Locking girls up and restricting their diet having proved ineffectual, punitive attention was focused more directly on their bodies. The first time a girl absconded her hair was cut short. The second time, her hair was cropped. And the third time, her head was shaved, and she was dressed in ‘a shapeless twill smock’. One girl who had been treated in this way ‘certainly looked a very sorry sight, with front teeth missing (from recent extractions) a sack-like garment, and closely cropped hair’.59 Hardly an edifying testimony to over a century of efforts to reclaim girls for citizenship. Another sanction available to school managers was to transfer ‘difficult’ and ‘unmanageable’ girls. Where transfer within the juvenile justice system was possible, a girl could be removed by order of a magistrate to another certified school or to Aylesbury borstal. Borstal girls who were seriously disruptive or who had seriously breached their licence conditions could be sent to a special junior wing of Holloway prison. The following cases, just some of those removed from certified schools in the early twentieth century, illustrate the various incarnations of the ‘difficult girl’. Kath, described as ‘rude, coarse in conduct and disobedient’, was transferred to the Devon and Exeter reformatory for girls in 1909, having kept her industrial school ‘in a ferment’ since her arrival.60 Persistent thieves and escapees were other candidates for transfer, as were girls who showed signs of sexual delinquency by their conversation or by their actions. Winifred, 13, variously described as ‘a desperately bad character’, ‘a Criminal’, ‘a danger and an evil influence’ and as ‘at present untrainable’, was moved to a reformatory after repeatedly taking keys, breaking into locked rooms and stealing whatever she could find, including, to the even greater shock of the staff, items from the school chapel. 61 Eleven-year-old Frances, who had been sexually abused, was removed because she continued to ‘dwell on all the miserable things that she experienced and witnessed in her wretched home’.62 Helen was almost certainly removed to a school for ‘immoral’ cases in 1912 for masturbating. The matron reported that she was often found ‘awake at night and acting in the wrong way’, which was thought to explain ‘the

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dirty habits and nose-bleeding’ of which her previous foster mother had complained. 63 When such transfer possibilities had been exhausted, however, a further set of disciplinary options opened: the infirmary, the workhouse, the asylum and the mental deficiency institution. To send a girl from a certified school or borstal to an institution outside the juvenile justice system was to change the whole basis of her detention by effectively lengthening her period in ‘custody’ and radically redefining the ‘reform’ process. Twelve-year-old Clara was admitted to St Michael’s industrial school in 1915 by her parents because of ‘her Lying and Pilfering habits’ and her tendency to ‘wander away and sleep out’. Within 18 months, she had been moved to the Oxford County Asylum, after her ‘animal habits’ and violent temper had led staff to have her certified first as a moral imbecile and then as a lunatic.64 A number of other girls were certified mentally defective and removed, either to special certified schools or to psychiatric institutions. In many of these instances, the case for certification rested more heavily on the fact that the girls were ‘incapable’ of being trained for domestic service, than on any detailed investigation of their mental abilities.65 In 1910, fourteen-year-old Mary was moved to Stoke Park Industrial Colony, a large mental deficiency institution which accepted special certified school cases. She had been committed to the school by a London court at the age of six, having been ‘found wandering’ and to be without ‘proper guardianship’, and as a means of ‘rescuing’ her from her mother, an alleged prostitute awaiting trial for stabbing the man she had lived with. Significantly, Mary’s ‘mental defects’ attracted attention only when she approached the age at which most industrial school girls were released on licence as domestic servants. The school’s matron warned the Waifs and Strays Society that there was ‘likely to be great difficulty in providing for this girl when she should be old enough to earn her own livelihood’, as she was ‘below the average intelligence for her age, rather deaf and stammered badly’. Its medical officer agreed that she was ‘a degenerate’ and that as there was ‘very small possibility of her ever being able to earn her own livelihood in service or in any other honest way’, strongly recommended ‘her removal to a special Home’.66 In a similar case, Mabel was certified defective and institutionalised. At the time of her admission six years earlier to a Waifs and Strays industrial school as a result of her parents’ imprisonment for neglect, medical officers had given the school ‘a definite assurance’ that although her ‘mental growth had been somewhat stunted [by her] home circumstances’ she was not defective, and they were hopeful that she would

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improve with ‘proper care and training’. Apparently Mabel had not ‘improved’ sufficiently by 1915, and the school matron feared it would ‘not be possible to send her to service’. Even though staff agreed that Mabel was ‘dull’ rather than defective, she was admitted to the Royal Eastern Counties Institution in 1918. 67 These two cases were not isolated examples. The practice of certifying ‘difficult’ girls as defective was discussed by the 1911 Departmental Committee on Reformatory and Industrial Schools (although this discussion did not feature in its final report published in 1913). One witness, Fanny Townshend, who had extensive experience managing and visiting industrial schools in the Bristol area, told the committee that school staff encountered many girls who are not what we call physically or mentally defective to such an extent that they could be put into a home for mentally defectives. They would not be certified by a doctor . . . but on the other hand . . . they are not fit to go out into the world, and really want some place where they can be kept a little longer and protected from the world for another year or two. Townshend admitted that during the previous year she had sanctioned the transfer of two girls from her own industrial school to ‘a Home for mentally deficients’, even though she knew they were not defective: If I had been the doctor of that Home I should not have certified either of these girls . . . But we had nowhere to send them. We knew they were not fit to send to service. The only alternative was the workhouse . . . They are good laundresses, and the Home was glad of their work.68 Concern about the wrongful certification of girls was also raised in other quarters. In Jane’s case, managers of the Stoke Park mental deficiency institution considered an application from her industrial school detailing her ‘highly neurotic temperament’, ‘violent fits of uncontrolled temper’ and ‘deteriorating mental capacity’, but ‘felt some doubt whether the girl was not rather insubordinate than mentally defective’. The school’s application had already been turned down by at least two other mental institutions.69 An LCC inspector raised similar doubts in 1918, writing that the ‘majority of the girls’ at Dovecot, a special industrial school for defectives, were the ‘difficult cases in the schools or homes from which they have been sent’.70 Despite these criticisms, the use of certification

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to remove ‘difficult’ cases continued. The 1945 Curtis Committee found that a number of ‘seriously unstable’ children were regularly moved from approved schools to mental institutions, mostly as a way of keeping order in the schools. One junior girls’ school they visited had certified six of its 50 inmates as defective and sent a further six to the local mental hospital within a single three-month period. Of 42 girls in another school, ten had been diagnosed as suffering from a mental disorder (and eight of these certified) over the previous three years.71 Arguably, insubordinate or violent behaviour in a boy did not attract the same response. Persistently disruptive boys were certainly punished and also transferred out of certified schools, but their behaviour did not routinely raise questions about their stability as boys, or by extension, about their general mental health. It is difficult to make any direct, meaningful comparison of violent expression in boys and girls, or of institutional responses to that expression. However, there is no question that rough physical behaviour was tolerated and encouraged in boys generally and in boys’ certified schools in particular, where aggression was channelled through physical exercise, team games, scouting, cadet training and so on. Many went on to enter the armed forces. The difference between military service and domestic service was clearly vast. By no means all those girls in certified schools who were diagnosed defective were sent to mental institutions, however. Frequently, there was no agency willing to accept responsibility for maintenance payments. Local authorities were often reluctant to agree to the certification of children under their immediate care because this utterly transformed the nature of their commitment to pay for the maintenance of the child from a period of detention limited by a magistrate to an indefinite period of institutional care. This was especially the case where a child was resident in a different authority area at the time of the certification or where a child, usually as the result of parental neglect prosecution, had been adopted by the Poor Law Guardians. Many girls who were the legal responsibility of the Guardians were simply returned to the workhouse on their discharge from industrial school. Under the Released Persons Poor Law Relief Act 1907, the Guardians were required to provide for any child discharged from a certified school in need of immediate relief.72 Ellen, for example, was certified defective in 1916, but no vacancy could be found in a special industrial school and the Board of Control (the national body that oversaw mental deficiency policy) would not accept responsibility for her. The Home Office advised that there ‘was no alternative but to return the girl to the care of the Brackley Guardians’, the authority which had committed her to St Michael’s in 1907. 73 Thus,

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the certification process and the prescription of institutional treatment were both highly contingent on the monies made available for individual maintenance. Ironically, within a system that aimed to control the activities of the very poorest, ‘degenerate’ members of society, it was possible to be too poor to be diagnosed as defective. Life became very different for the girls who did enter the mental deficiency system. Those who were certified as a result of their behaviour in certified schools lost many of their rights and personal freedoms – limited as these may have been. Under section 9 of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, the Board of Control had the power to extend the period of detention beyond the expiration of the industrial school sentence set by the court. At least two of the young women discussed here who were sent to a mental deficiency institution remained there until their seventies. Family contact could also be severely curtailed as a result of the transfer. Often, parents were not told that their child had been transferred from industrial school. Home Office recommendations stated that parents ought to be informed of this and that they should be made aware of their right to apply to the Board of Control to have the ‘defective’ child returned to them. However, the recommendations also advised certified school managers to ask the Home Secretary to waive these requirements if they thought ‘it desirable in any case’, either because of ‘the vicious or immoral character of the parents’ or ‘for some other good reason’.74 Although family interest in and support for these girls should by no means be assumed, restricting family involvement in care decisions represented another instance where the girls’ rights were undermined within the public justice system. The journey undertaken by these girls from the certified school to the mental institution was highly symbolic. This was no simple substitution of one state institution for another. The act of transfer out of the juvenile justice system into the mental deficiency system represented a transfer of judicial and adjudicating power and had profound implications for juvenile justice. For these girls, the transformation from delinquent to defective meant crossing a line of reformability. It meant that they became ‘unreformable’ and ‘unimprovable’. In this period, an ‘unemployable’ girl was considered to be an ‘unimprovable’ girl. Even a progressive like August Aichhorn, the director of an experimental Austrian training school, saw no therapeutic potential in the mentally defective delinquent. Since their behaviour was seen as constitutionally rather than socially determined, he argued that in ‘these cases . . . we can accomplish nothing because educational means do not help us’. He concluded that ‘we must classify these cases as incapable of social

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adaptation and thereby excluded from the possibilities of social retraining’. 75 Their certification as defective dramatically extended their ‘need’ for ‘care and control’ as defined by the juvenile court and stretched the concept of penality far beyond a simple crime–punishment trajectory.

Defining reform The connections linking dominant notions of girls’ reform to domestic training and domestic service remained strong until the second world war. Up to that point, although attempts were made by the Home Office, some local authorities and some individual schools to promote alternatives to domestic service, these failed for a number of reasons. In a period where female citizenship was intimately connected to motherhood and family management, institutions which aimed to produce girl citizens were bound to emphasise the domestic. Moreover, describing certified school girls’ daily domestic duties as ‘training’ disguised the fact that the schools depended on girl labour in order to reproduce themselves in the absence of adequate funding. The daily duties meant that academic education was minimal and that there was too little time to offer many alternative training activities. On leaving the school girls were therefore thought to be ‘best’ equipped to work as domestic servants. Added to this, cultural hostility to young women living in independent accommodation, and, crucially, outside the discipline of a family, meant that other forms of non-residential work were not made available to them. Finally, demand created by the on-going ‘servant problem’ made it more difficult for progressives to argue for alternative employment, especially for former ‘delinquent’ girls who faced hostility and suspicion in the labour market. This circular thinking explains why domestic work, both paid and unpaid, dominated models of girls’ reform for nearly a century, from the 1850s to the 1950s. In the second half of the twentieth century, this domestic cycle was broken by changes inside and outside the juvenile justice system. Approved schools’ and borstals’ traditional emphasis upon vocational training was gradually displaced by an emphasis on full-time basic education with the raising of the school leaving age and broadening of secondary schooling from 1944 and with the introduction of even shorter periods of detention for young offenders. The collapse of domestic service, brought about by the reconfiguration of middle- and upper-class lifestyles and by the expansion of teenage employment in the manufacturing, retail and service sectors, finally weakened the long-standing

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equation between girls’ domestic labour and ‘training’. 76 This expansion of young women’s job opportunities, along with the rise of more professional local authority-based aftercare systems and the increasing willingness of juvenile justice workers to allow young people to return to their families once released on licence, meant that girls were freer to enter a wider range of jobs and to take up a wider range of lodgings. By the mid-1960s, nearly 80 per cent of approved school girls entered one of two areas of work: manufacturing and the personal service trades. 77 These changes not only freed girls’ reform from its domestic traditions, however. Perhaps more fundamentally they also symbolised the failure of early visions of the overall purpose of the modern juvenile justice system which had looked to a much more unified treatment of those in need of care and those in need of control. While this unification did occur, it occurred within the emerging care system via the expansion of judicial care orders and numbers of places in local authority care. By the early 1970s, most of those under 14 appearing before the juvenile courts appeared under care and protection categories, even if they had committed a criminal offence, and many of them were sent (together with older adolescents) into local authority care rather than to youth custodial options if ordered to be removed from their families. This meant that juvenile justice institutions became increasingly reserved for ‘serious’ or ‘hardened’ young offenders and that an older philosophy of reform, based on long periods of vocational training, gave way to one based on more short-term and more punitive containment and correction. This new vision of the purpose of custody did not sit easily alongside the domestic culture that had so dominated girls’ reform. Prior to this, the Curtis Committee had pointed to a certain crisis of purpose within girls’ approved schools. Where boys’ schools were ‘achieving a steady improvement in the application of methods which have been found to be to a large extent successful’, senior girls’ schools were ‘handling a problem to which . . . no satisfactory answer has yet been found’. The committee were uncomfortable with the arbitrary nature of the policing of girls. They accepted that ‘a period of restraint may be necessary in the . . . interests of society as well as of the girls’, but felt that a ‘good deal of experimental treatment’ was called for. In short, they doubted ‘the value of institutional treatment’ for ‘the over-sexed adolescent’.78 This view helps to explain why very few of the new custodial facilities introduced after the second world war were designated for girls. None of the attendance centres, and, apart from a brief period between 1962 and 1968, none of the detention centres, admitted girls. In their absence,

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juvenile justice custodial institutions continued to be judged according to their physical regimes and their treatment of the bodies of boys. For all the difficulties surrounding girls’ reform, formal criminal statistics suggest that juvenile justice institutions succeeded in keeping more girls than boys away from further crime. Figures for the late 1920s and early 1930s show that over 70 per cent of girls discharged from reformatories and 90 per cent of those discharged from industrial schools were described as ‘satisfactory’. Figures for the postwar period show an apparently identical proportion, with between 70 and 90 per cent of approved school girls released on licence during the 1950s recorded as not found guilty of any offence within three years.79 However, these ‘successes’ should be treated with caution as the criminal statistics registered only a proportion of girls’ contacts with the judiciary, and ‘care and protection’ cases were unlikely to have been routinely included in these figures. A system that defined success in terms of formal recidivism simply ignored its more awkward failures and the part that it played in producing them. The stories of Rose and Daisy exemplify the way in which the juvenile justice system failed girls.80 Committed to a special certified school between the ages of 10 and 16 because she had been sexually assaulted, Rose drifted in and out of institutional care all through her early adult life. Discharged on licence in 1920, with a history of violence, unwilling or unable to hold down a domestic service job and having been rejected by her family, she spent the next years in at least eight different institutions, including Waifs and Strays auxiliary homes, two Church Army hostels, a Salvation Army home, a detention home, a workhouse and two infirmaries, where she received unspecified mental treatment, having been admitted after more (unspecified) violent episodes. She then drifted out of the archives altogether. Daisy’s case notes are more complete but no less slim for this. They tell a short and chilling story of the lengths to which the state could and would go to reform girls and to contain them if they were deemed beyond reform. Daisy and her sister were committed to different certified schools in 1918 by an education officer acting on contested reports that the girls were neglected and their mother feeble-minded. Her sister was eventually discharged, but despite many attempts by her father and grandmother to secure her release, Daisy was later certified defective and transferred to a mental institution in which she was to live out the rest of her adult life.

5 Writing

The words of those subject to social policing and the words of young women in general feature too rarely in historical studies. Taken together, this has meant that the more personal experiences of girls involved in early juvenile justice and child welfare processes have received little attention. These experiences are more difficult to access than those of boys. Girls’ stories of delinquency have historically been of interest to fewer researchers. 1 Adult women who as girls went through care or the courts have been less likely to record their stories in published memoirs and autobiographies: perhaps because they have been too ashamed or too poorly educated; perhaps, as many studies of women’s autobiography have suggested, because they have not seen themselves as ‘representatives’ of their times;2 or perhaps simply because no one has suggested it to them. By contrast, jack-rollers, road-pirates and borstal boys have regularly retold their hooligan nights and their dangerous lives to social scientists and journalists anxious to trace the causes and effects of their crime and excited by their deviant lifestyles. 3 Adult men also seem to have been more likely to publish memories of disadvantaged childhoods, many of which are framed as exceptional stories of triumph over adversity by those who, against all odds, were able to ‘make something’ of their lives.4 This chapter is based on case files, letters and autobiographical accounts of women who experienced institutional care in certified schools or charitable children’s homes, mainly in the south of England in the first half of the twentieth century. It also considers the writings of some of their parents and some of those who worked in voluntary or statutory juvenile welfare.5 Marginal voices such as these, however, occupy a controversial place within historical research. Should they be viewed as autonomous or as constructed by and within a number of other discourses? On the one hand, radical historians have sought to demonstrate the degree 107

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to which the lives of the poor were conducted (and the words of the poor written) within the constraints of various forms of oppression and deprivation. But on the other, they have also wanted to show how the oppressed were still able to find autonomous spaces for individual and collective resistance which contributed to liberating social changes. In analysing the words of the socially marginal, there is a tension between attempts to show how they were bound by pre-existing hegemonic discourses and attempts to show how they were able to generate new discourses, or at the very least to tell their ‘own’ story of their ‘own’ lives.6 The personal writings and recollections featured here are not offered as an absolutely reliable guide to the real, but as a way of understanding how concepts of delinquency and neglect were mediated at the micro level, how they were variously internalised and expressed by those who were subject to, and in some cases, actively sought, public intervention into their private lives. As Steedman notes, stories of childhood have been given ‘a certain status as a form of history’ and as ‘a means of narrating time’. 7 But like all forms of history and means of narrating time, stories of childhood present their truths through a variety of discursive frameworks. Significantly, early sociologists working with life-histories and ‘own-stories’ never claimed that these narratives contained an objective or authentic truth. Thomas famously wrote that ‘[i]f men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences’.8 Shaw believed that ‘rationalizations, fabrications, prejudices, exaggerations, are quite as valuable as objective descriptions’. 9 More recently, critical historical work using personal testimonies has emphasised the multiple layers of individual subjectivity and the malleability and mutability of memory at the level both of experience and expression. 10 Clear hegemonic beliefs underpinned child welfare practices from the mid-nineteenth century onwards: the belief that low living standards were connected to low moral standards; that neglected and delinquent children had been deprived of good parenting rather than simply being deprived of a certain material standard of living; that children had the right to be protected by the state; that the state had the right, and the duty, to invest in the nation’s future stability. These hegemonic beliefs shaped categories of inclusion and exclusion; they therefore shaped both the lived experiences of those who fell within these categories, and some of the ways in which those experiences were publicly expressed. All the women discussed here who have written autobiographical accounts of their institutional experiences have written these from the position of having ‘come through’ a traumatic girlhood. They tend to reconstruct their lives from the perspective of the ‘ordinary person’ looking back to

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a time when they were trapped in the margins of society. This begins to account for the fact that these accounts show striking similarities in terms of their narrative structure and textual devices. However, they also testify to the tensions produced by new forms of family policing. On the one hand, the writers often laid claim to new categories of social ‘fitness’ and ‘responsibility’, and on the other, they also tried to resist these. As a result, the accounts tend to fall into one of two camps in their overall evaluation of the experience of institutional care, with some women viewing it, sometimes literally, as their salvation, and others greatly resenting it and the shame it caused them. Many in the latter group had kept their stories secret from family and friends. One ended her anonymous account of her life as ‘a waif and stray’ by saying that she would ‘rather die’ than let her story be known. 11

Entering care The series of events that led the girls to the door of these institutions are very often recounted by them in later life in a manner that does not question the logic of those events. At one level, this re-creates the ‘child’s eye view’ of the situation, which evokes a sense of the powerlessness of the girls and which contrasts sharply with the professed child-centred aims of the post-1908 youth welfare system. At another level, it is clear that embedded within the ‘plain facts’ of ‘what happened’ are broader understandings of the social relations which the women identify as the cause of their designation as a ‘Home girl’: that single fathers could not look after children; that step-mothers resented step-children; that state officials and charity workers had the right to intervene in family life; that definitions of being in need of care or protection were somehow self-evident. Thus, the women’s sense of the ‘proper ordering of the world’ does a great deal to shape their written memories. Their accounts typically begin with their often sudden journeys into this new institutional world, making very few references to their earlier family life or to the circumstances that led to their removal from it. Anna was almost certainly a voluntary admission to the Church of England’s Waifs and Strays Society, which meant that she was not committed into care by a court but by private arrangement. Her account begins simply, It was a Thursday in March 1926 and I was eight years old. On the Sunday I would be nine. Here I was travelling to Didcot, a luggage label pinned to my coat button . . . At Didcot I was met by the matron and taken to the Society’s home in Cold Ash near Newbury. Miss Kirby

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put me into the care of a big girl (she was 15) called Rachel and she took me to the play field and gave me pushes on the swing and that was my first day.12 Stella begins in a very similar vein, though with a more pronounced sense of childish adventure, by describing her sudden removal from her grandmother’s care to St David’s, a Waifs and Strays home in Broadstairs in Kent. It was one day in the Summer of 1912 when I was eight years old, coming home from school, my Grandmother who was looking after me at the time, told me that I wasn’t going back to that school anymore. She told me I was going to the seaside for a holiday. A seaside holiday! . . . I was so excited about it all, little did I know that I was never coming back to my dear Granny who I loved so much! . . . All I can remember of that first day . . . was crying myself to sleep, I was so homesick and wanted my Granny so much. . . . I suppose I soon settled down and got adjusted to my new life. It was a very happy Home and we were well looked after. 13 Nancy briefly details her early life at her grandparents’ London home with her father and younger brother, but, like Stella, swiftly moves on to describe her removal to a Waifs and Strays home in 1915. When she ‘was about nine years old’, ‘a real ready-made elder brother’ suddenly came to live with them, having been ‘left, over-night’ by her ‘real Mother’. Soon after this, her father moved the children and their new ‘so-called Step-mother’ to Camberwell. The stepmother ran a clothing club and made Nancy work outside school hours, which she recalls she disliked, but there is no other suggestion of neglect or cruelty in her account. Her removal from the family home is described in this extraordinary paragraph, At about this time Granny, who must have been becoming worried about our welfare, contacted the NSPCC and someone called on us to investigate the conditions under which we were living. This resulted in us children being taken from the care of our father and stepmother and we were separated. My brothers were sent to a Home at Stockport and I didn’t see them again for several years . . . I was fortunate, at that time, in having a school-teacher who considered me an intelligent child and she contacted the ‘Waifs and Strays’. Eventually it was arranged that I should go to live at a Home in Newbury.14

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Janet Hitchman, born in 1916, was informally adopted as a young child by an unrelated woman known to her as ‘Granny Sparkes’ after the death of her mother. She knew little of her father, although the later involvement of the Ministry of Pensions in her case indicates that he was in the military. Describing her sudden removal from Granny Sparkes by a Ministry of Pensions representative at the age of five in 1920, Hitchman can only speculate that no doubt officialdom had been working in the background. Officialdom strong enough to break a vow she [Granny Sparkes] considered binding, whatever the trial and torment, and even disgrace, involved.15 Family circumstances are briefly outlined in Eileen’s letter, which opens with the startling line, ‘I was once told by a magistrate that I “would end up on the end of a rope”.’ Her account continues, I was born in 1930, my parents divorced because of my mother’s adultery, father was given custody of 3 children, we were placed in orphanages so he could work. I was in a home at 9 months old til 5 years which was closed, for cruelty. Aged 5 I went into the Southern Railway Servants’ Orphanage at Woking, stayed there til I was 14 years.16 Vera’s account is rare in that its references to her earlier life are more full and it is one of the few to mention a court appearance prior to committal. I was adopted at 4yrs old in 1927. This did not work out and I was abused mentally and physically, and sexually abused by two foster brothers (ADULTS). The situation worsened and following a court case, where the magistrate decided that I was in need of care and protection, I spent some time in Church Army and Salvation Army Homes, eventually entering a Girls Training School in Streatham, spending the first week in sick bay with complete rest. 17 A very different account of entry into institutional care is given within Waifs and Strays case files. All girls admitted to certified schools and homes run by the Society went through a standard application procedure: as the recollections above suggest, it was a procedure which seemed to take very little account of the girls’ own views. Whether the Society was approached by the courts in formal committal cases or by parents, relatives or rescue workers in voluntary cases it required an application form to

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be submitted. These ‘applications for the admission of a child’ vary in the amount of detail they offer on each case. As a general rule, those relating to cases committed by the courts contain relatively little, since the courts themselves had already collected and processed the information necessary to secure a formal committal and did not routinely pass this documentation on to the Society. Those applications relating to voluntary cases often contained more detail as it was primarily on this basis that the Society decided whether or not to admit the child in question. The applications considered here were de facto those that proved successful. Failed applications did not go on to become the basis of a case file. A number of factors shaped the style and content of what might be called the ‘successful application narrative’: the status of the applicant; the need to persuade the Society to accept the case; and, as with the personal accounts discussed above, the applicant’s sense of the ‘proper ordering of the world’. Applications were submitted by one agency, but often included supplementary material from others. They were submitted by both voluntary workers (most commonly by local representatives of the Society, Anglican vicars, other rescue workers or police court missionaries) and by professionals (most commonly local education officers, Poor Law Guardians, juvenile court clerks and probation officers). These different groups had two key things in common which gave their narratives credibility: knowledge of the case and status. Those at Waifs and Strays headquarters centrally responsible for admission decisions were heavily reliant on the judgement of these intermediaries since they themselves were obviously unfamiliar with the details of each case. In these circumstances, the reputation, status and connections of the person making the application were very important. This, together with the influence of longer traditions of philanthropic case work and low levels of literacy among the very poor, helps to explain why the views of girls and their relatives are conspicuously absent in these crucial versions of their stories. This is not to say that the views of ‘reputable’ adults involved in a case were not sought or heeded, but to note that where they were featured they tended to be paraphrased. Applications were clearly composed for a particular purpose: to secure a sought-after place in a residential home. As discussed earlier, the Society was not inclined to accept all the cases referred to it, and, in any event, could not afford to do so since it had a substantial deficit throughout the period covered by these case files. Admission was thus by no means automatic. Like all charities running such homes, the Waifs and Strays Society had clear criteria, some formal, some informal. As outlined earlier, the case files studied here show that children had to be mentally and

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physically healthy, to be amenable to discipline and correction, and to have some financial support to cover at least part of their maintenance. They also had to have been, or be prepared to be, christened. If illegitimate, they had to be the only such child in their family. In addition, girls had to be suited for domestic service training, and if they had sexual knowledge or experience, were to be admitted only if they could be effectively segregated. Some of those compiling admission applications would have been familiar with these criteria, others not. Those who were would, presumably, have tailored their application narratives accordingly, although some did so in unusual ways. In a number of the cases featured here, applicants seemed to urge the Society to waive its criteria and accept ‘exceptional’ cases. However, at another level, a great many of these cases were presented as if they were ‘exceptional’ in some way or another. This provides a clue as to the kinds of beliefs, assumptions and conventions that made up the applicants’ collective view of the ‘proper ordering of the world’ and their task within it. Those involved in any kind of sustained social work, as most of those that submitted these applications seemed to be in their various ways, were likely to have developed their own sense of scale in their dealings with deprived and disorderly families. Thousands of children lived in such families, yet only a small proportion were referred to the Waifs and Strays and similar organisations, and an even smaller proportion admitted annually into their care. Constructions of ‘the exceptional’, ‘the urgent’, ‘the endangered’, ‘the deserving’ could take many forms and were a central part of child welfare work. Some applicants presented girls as exceptionally bad yet as coming from exceptionally deserving families, others as very innocent but facing exceptional dangers from their surroundings, and so on. Such narrative strategies sought to convey and perhaps amplify the urgency of a particular situation. Within this, and as examples below will show, two broad narrative structures can be observed within the applications featured here. Many are predominantly framed in terms either of a girl’s need to be rescued from her family or of a family’s need to be relieved of the difficulties, financial and otherwise, of raising a particular girl. Others combine elements of both and thus presented bad girls who needed to be removed from bad families, as well as, crucially, good girls whose removal would assist good families. The applications of girls who had been through the courts and committed to a Waifs and Strays certified school tended to tell rather condensed versions of their stories. These stories would, after all, have been told to, and (re)ordered by, a number of agencies over the weeks or

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months prior to their committal. In these cases, the identity of the applicant is not always clear though they were commonly drawn from a professional rather than a voluntary body, and often from the particular professional body that was to put up the bulk of the maintenance money. These narratives have a marked ‘shorthand’ style. Pictures were quickly painted by the compilers through a combination of legal terms and loaded descriptions that were presumably readily understood by their readers. They were perhaps aiming less to persuade the Waifs and Strays Society that the case was worthy of admission, since the court judgment had presumably already proved this, than aiming to aid the Society’s decision as to where to place the girl, given that the (sexually) innocent were to be separated from the (sexually) knowing. The applications of three girls admitted by Norwich and London courts to industrial schools within three years of each other (1912–15) can be usefully compared here. Janet, 7, was presented as an essentially innocent girl endangered by her family; Clara, 12, as a troublesome girl in a despairing family; and Winifred, 11, as a bad girl from a bad family. Janet was committed to the care of the Norwich education committee in 1915 after the NSPCC proved to a court that she was ‘living in immoral surroundings’. She was housed briefly in a Norwich ‘mission house’ run by nuns, one of whom completed the Waifs and Strays application. The ‘immoral surroundings’ in this case were multifaceted and involved her mother and father (who were unmarried) and a woman friend of her father. Janet’s mother had left her father to live with his brother, taking her three-year-old son with her. Her father had then taken Janet ‘to live at the house of a woman of notoriously bad character’. In addition, he had ‘50 Convictions against him’. He had ‘refuse[d] to part with her’ when challenged by the NSPCC, but, since she was illegitimate, he had ‘no legal claim to her’. Janet’s father was thus the NSPCC’s main target, but the nature of his connections with the other two women in the case were crucial to his construction as an unfit parent. The fact that he seemed to have a regular job as a ‘marine store dealer’, had ‘always been kind to [ Janet] as he knew how to be’ and that there had been ‘a painful scene in Court’ when the girl ‘had to be removed from [him]’ apparently did little to challenge this construction. 18 In the second case, Clara was charged by her parents ‘with being beyond control’ in 1915 after persistently lying, stealing and sleeping out. Her parents were presented as steady, reliable and responsible. Her father had been ‘in his present firm (umbrella makers) from a boy viz 20 yrs’ and her mother ‘was in the same employ until her second child was born’. They appeared ‘to be respectable’ and had ‘a nice home’. They

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had acted ‘for [Clara’s] own safety’, ‘desired her to be placed beyond the dangers of the streets’ and, moreover, were ‘prepared to pay for it’. 19 In the final case, Winifred, 11, had been ‘charged with larceny’ having stolen purses in school, but had also been ‘mixing with bad company’, been let down by her widowed mother, a ‘charwoman’ who was ‘co-habiting with an unemployed labourer’ and therefore judged to be living in ‘bad home surroundings’.20 Applications for voluntary committal to the Waifs and Strays tend to be richer in detail and often contain lengthier accounts of the child derived from more than one or two sources. Perhaps because they were written in order to persuade the Society to accept the case in the first instance they offer a more detailed insight into the intricacies of the dynamics within families as well as between families and welfare agencies. A further two cases can be usefully contrasted here. Ten-year-old Frances from Hull and nine-year-old Fanny from Sevenoaks were committed to the care of the Waifs and Strays in 1923. Both were committed voluntarily by their mothers who could not afford to keep them. Both were, in different ways, presented as innocents who had been wronged by adults, although Frances was also cast as the (potentially) bad girl within a bad family, and Fanny as the good girl within the good family. Frances was committed with one of her younger brothers to the Waifs and Strays Society as a voluntary case in August 1923. Her application, completed by a local officer from the Hull branch of the Ministry of Pensions, though also comprising reports from a local NSPCC officer, set out the circumstances of the case. Her mother, a twice widowed 37-year-old, was struggling to bring up her children on a ‘scanty’ military pension. Both her husbands had been soldiers and both had died as a result of the first world war, the first ‘in action’ and the second as a result of ‘an illness contracted in the War’. However, she seemed to be entitled only to a small military pension for her children rather than to a full widow’s pension because in re-marrying at all she had forfeited her rights as her first husband’s widow, and in re-marrying when she had (over 12 months after her second husband had been discharged), she could not be classed as an army widow. According to the application, she was ‘not earning anything now’ and it was ‘feared that she may [be] starting TB’. At the time, she was ‘getting 5/- per week from parish relief’ and had been ‘offered the House [workhouse]’. At this point, she apparently took the decision to commit two of her children to the Waifs and Strays Society (the third child had apparently lived with his maternal grandmother since birth). So far, so respectable, and not so unusual. However, the case hinged on the apparent moral corruption of the household.

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In the run-up to the application, the family had been subject to the attention of at least five separate authorities. The Ministry of Pensions (because of the children’s allowance paid by them to the mother), the Poor Law Guardians (because of the relief paid to the mother), the local police and courts (because prior to this Frances had been sexually abused, the victim of a proven ‘criminal assault’), and finally, the NSPCC (most probably in connection with the assault case). The assault case, and the mother’s reaction to it, seems to have been the trigger here. The NSPCC had visited the family and then notified the Ministry of Pensions, who made their own subsequent visits, resulting in the mother’s ‘voluntary’ application to the Waifs and Strays Society. The NSPCC inspector’s reports constructed an escalating crisis facing Frances. The first focused on the financial difficulties experienced by the family: The children are clean and tidy but are very poorly clothed and shod but are well nourished . . . The room is clean and fairly well furnished . . . The mother finds it hard to manage on her scanty allowance. 21 The report mentions the sexual assault, but in fairly neutral terms: The girl had a Criminal Assault committed on her by a man who has been prosecuted and sent to prison (by Police) . . . [She] has been very quiet and frightened since this assault happened. 22 However, the second, written three weeks later, seemingly by the same person, took a different tone, focusing on the moral difficulties posed by the family. The child Frances has been contaminated through this assault and the matter has been openly discussed in the presence of the children and the general atmosphere of the home to say the least has not been good for the children’s moral well being. I cannot say the mother leads a bad life, but from my own observations she is lax in her ideas of morals and ordinary decency, receiving myself in company with another woman with whom she shares a room in a half dressed condition and a man from the rooms above going into the room with tea whilst the other woman was in bed. She also dresses in a smart way herself and her appearance is not at all in keeping with a widow with 2 children to support on 16/- a week pension. 23

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The report thus suggests that Frances, already damaged by the assault, was being further damaged by her own mother. Indeed, the mother’s lifestyle may have contributed to the initial assault, with her choice of clothes, company and conversation all counting against her. That her appearance was ‘not at all in keeping’ with her circumstances could be read in a number of ways: that she should dress more soberly as a widow and a mother; that she should spend her meagre resources on her children rather than herself; that she may have paid for her ‘smart’ outfits in dubious ways. These themes were repeated in a report written two months later by a local Ministry of Pensions officer: This child lives with her mother and little brother in one room with one bed, which is shared by another woman. The women appear quite lacking insight regarding common decency. On two occasions when I visited the home [Mrs X], the child’s mother, was attired in one flimsy cotton garment and wore neither shoes nor stockings. The women are usually one or both of them in bed at midday though visitors of either sex are admitted. It has already been notified that Frances has been the victim of a criminal assault. A similar offence was committed by the same man, in the case of four other little girls in the same neighbourhood and all the details are freely discussed by [Mrs X] and the women in the presence of Frances and her little brother. It is very strongly felt that it is highly desirable that both the children should be got away into new surroundings and under good influence where they may learn to forget the evils with which they have so early been brought in contact. 24 Here images of flimsy garments, garrulous women, domestic disorder and absent fathers were combined in a single tableau that seemed to embody absolutely loose morals and low standards. Whether or not the particular presentation and ordering of these images was chosen as a deliberate means of persuading the Waifs and Strays Society to accept the case, it nevertheless did much to produce this outcome. With the Ministry of Pensions’ agreement to pay for her maintenance – a further crucial piece in their admissions jigsaw – the Waifs and Strays Society agreed to the mother’s request to admit Frances and arranged for her to be sent to St Michael’s industrial school as a voluntary case. Her brother was sent to another of their homes. Subsequent developments in the case are discussed later in this chapter. Fanny, the second case, was admitted to the care of the Society in the same year in circumstances that were similar yet very different. Like

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Frances, she was presented as an innocent girl who needed to be given a fresh start, but, unlike Frances, her innocence was not seen to have been clouded by sexual experience and her family was presented as morally sound. Her application was completed by a Miss Thompson who was described as a ‘district visitor’ and most likely a voluntary worker for a local charity. It had been preceded by a short correspondence between Thompson and the Society. Fanny’s mother, Ivy, was a 34-year-old domestic servant described by the applicant as ‘a bit simple’. Ivy had herself been sent to a Catholic penitentiary for five years at the age of 28 following the birth of her daughter, her second illegitimate child. The fact Ivy had given birth to Fanny in Sevenoaks workhouse in 1915 – in the middle of the moral panic of the first world war and less than two years after the passing of the Mental Deficiency Act (which recommended that women pregnant with illegitimate children and receiving poor relief should be certified as defective) – may well account for her removal to the penitentiary, although there are no further details on this question. For the five years that her mother was in the penitentiary, Fanny was brought up in the Sevenoaks workhouse (referred to here as ‘the Union Home’). However, once her mother returned and found paid work locally (as a domestic servant), Fanny went to live with her maternal grandparents and her 10-year-old half-sister. This arrangement lasted for a further three years, until the grandparents became too ill to work to support the household. Things might have continued as they were apart from the fact that the grandparents discussed their situation informally with a local nurse, who passed on the story to Miss Thompson, the ‘district visitor’, who eventually approached the Waifs and Strays Society, who admitted Fanny to St Mary’s industrial school in Cold Ash in January 1924. By rights, the Society should not have accepted Fanny, since, as the Secretary reminded Miss Thompson, ‘as a general rule [it] does not entertain applications where there has been a second illegitimate child’. However, he continued, ‘but I note the exceptional circumstances and if we can help we will be only too pleased’. 25 Thompson’s emphasis of two particular aspects of Fanny’s family’s story seemed to secure her ‘exceptional’ admission: her grandparents’ moral rectitude and her mother’s moral reform. The grandparents were ‘very respectable’. They would be ‘more than grateful if Fanny can be taken from them’. They were hardworking: [he] has worked for the Sevenoaks urban council for some years as road sweeper, but he has very bad health and has been obliged to

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remain indoors for the last two months. His wife suffers with bronchial asthma and can only occasionally do a little washing. They were poor but did not ask for help: As long as the grandfather could work, they managed to scrape along, but now they have gone very short, but they have never begged for help, although I am their district visitor they never once asked for relief. I heard it through a nurse and then found out all about their trouble. Fanny’s mother, Ivy, had managed to put her unfortunate past behind her. She was ‘a bit simple, but most clean and tidy looking’. She too was hardworking: ‘they say she is a very good worker’, ‘her Mistress, a helpless invalid, thinks a great deal of her’. 26 Here Thompson’s view was supported by another source, identified only by name, sought out by the Waifs and Strays Society to aid their decision. According to him, ‘[Ivy’s] employer thinks very highly of her . . . [Ivy] struck me as a very good sort of woman but without much backbone’. Ivy herself was also willing ‘for the child to go into a church home if not too far from here’, and to pay towards Fanny’s maintenance, despite the fact that she earned very little. There is also a sense in Thompson’s telling of the story that both Ivy and her parents had been let down by the state and confused by Poor Law rules. Ivy had apparently been told ‘that if she left her child in the Union they should make her return there too’, and this was why she had ‘fetched her away and put her with the grandparents’. The grandfather then applied for poor relief, but was told that his old age pension would be ‘taken away’ if he did. Thompson adds, ‘I do not believe either of these threats were legal, were they?’27 Notably, very little is said about Fanny herself, then aged 9, or her older half-sister, then aged 13. Miss Thompson refers to her at the end of her initial letter to the Society, but in a way that says more about her desire to do well by the grandparents: ‘The grandparents are very nice old souls, and I should very much like to feel one child had a fair chance in life.’28 Her half-sister was referred to briefly in an exchange of letters six months after Fanny’s committal but only in her new capacity as a wage earner. Since she was now ‘out to service’, Miss Thompson (who remained in touch with the family for several years) thought that her mother could increase the amount of maintenance she paid for Fanny’s care.29 Here, as in many other application narratives, the child herself is strangely absent.

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These application narratives, although fairly brief, have much to say about the writing of deprivation and delinquency, both in terms of the factors which shaped them as texts and in terms of the lived consequences of those texts for all concerned. Read alongside other unpublished narratives – the autobiographies and letters written by women who went through such processes as girls – they point to much that is otherwise hidden about the micropolitics of care. They show that discourses of exceptionalism were employed very frequently, and yet that families could be framed as both demanding and deserving intervention in very different ways. They show how notions of the (dis)reputable were linked to a whole range of behaviours and demeanours and were rarely reducible to one decisive factor. They show that the relationships between girls, families and external agencies were contradictory and complex. They also bear out the conclusions reached by many other historians of welfare and working-class life. They support Steedman’s critique of the conventions of working-class autobiography which wrongly position ‘an articulated solidarity (of family and friendship, of street and factory) against an external authority of school, the Guardians, the Assistance Board, or the police’, and which make it difficult to represent dislocation within working-class households.30 They also support Gordon’s questioning of Lasch’s view that juvenile courts simply ‘intruded’ upon the family life of the poor.31 As Donzelot suggests, child welfare ‘experts’ were clearly sometimes ‘invited’ into some working-class homes, although their interventions in family politics were more varied than he allows as Mahood, Thomson and other historians have shown.32 Examples of family cooperation should not be allowed to eclipse the many cases in which no such invitation was issued, or those in which parents who had voluntarily admitted their daughters to charitable care had to fight to maintain contact with them. As the next section shows, once a girl had entered care a whole new set of negotiations opened up.

Negotiating care Case files and personal letters reveal much about life in certified schools, children’s homes and, to a lesser extent, rescue homes. Chapter 4’s discussion of daily routines, resistance and discipline has already drawn on some of this material. The central content of the autobiographical accounts vary, but also have many common features. Descriptions of daily routines emphasise the hard domestic labour performed by home girls. Routines of cleaning, washing, cooking, care of younger children, and so on were sharply and gratefully punctuated by letters, visits, outings and the

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occasional holiday. However, memories of daily life in these institutions do not just work at the level of description and reconstruction. Rather, the ordering and presentation of these memories say much about their narrators’ understanding of ‘power’ – how power worked, where power was legitimately exercised and where power was abused. Notably, most accounts of institutional regimes were written long after girls had left them, and surviving accounts written during their time in these places are extremely rare. Outgoing and incoming letters were read by staff as a matter of policy in most children’s homes, which, of course, greatly affected the nature of their contents. According to Eileen, children at the Southern Railway Orphanage were allowed to write home every three months, but because of constraints on composition, these letters often said little more than, ‘Dear Dad I’m well how are you? Love . . .’33 Girls were encouraged to speak to inspectors, official visitors and chaplains, but again, with the possible exception of those involving chaplains, such exchanges would have mostly taken place in contrived conditions created by staff anxious to make a good impression. In the rare instances (discussed in chapter 6) where girls were interviewed individually by visiting psychologists, other staff objected because they feared this would upset the disciplinary balance of the institutions concerned. All this points to an unease surrounding the voice of the child in care and a deep mistrust of the voices of girls in particular. As outlined earlier, girls in certified schools and other homes were positively discouraged from, and even punished for, speaking about their past lives and the circumstances which had brought them to public notice. Such silencing served a number of purposes. It limited the spread of ‘moral contamination’ and provided a further means of imposing institutional discipline but more importantly perhaps, it was thought to play a key part in the overall reform of the wayward child. To silence girls’ talk of their earlier lives was to sever their links with those lives, to push them to erase their ‘unfortunate’ past was to give them a real chance of a better future. In other words, the silencing of such talk was used in an attempt to reclaim the innocence of the child who had experienced too much too soon. This philosophy rested heavily on the Christian belief in redemption and, crucially, upon the belief that memories could be managed, and that children’s memories in particular could be easily reordered, suppressed or erased altogether. In the North American reformatories run by the Door of Hope organisation, the badge given to girls on admission encapsulated this philosophy. The anchor-shaped badge had the letters PBF imprinted on its cross bar, standing for ‘Past, Buried, Forgotten’.34

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Reactions to a rarely documented example of girls’ complaints about an institution show how girls’ talk was met with systematic mistrust. During the first world war, staff at the Little Commonwealth strongly refuted girls’ allegations of mistreatment. Looking back on the episode, one wrote that girls of this kind had a marked tendency to ‘indulge in gossip of a sensational and outrageous type’, and that whereas ‘young people in the outside world were assuaging their desire for fantasy at the cinema’, these girls were ‘satisfying the same sensational impulse by the invention of fantastic stories’. One staff member’s view, that to the inexperienced or to those ‘who have not studied the psychology of delinquency, the stories are alarming and often convincing’, was supported by Burt, who later wrote that the ‘pathological liar’ was ‘nearly always a girl, and frequently pubescent’. 35 The allegations (which are not specified in this account) and the Home Office investigation which followed certainly played a part in the closure of the Little Commonwealth in 1918. But although investigators took the girls’ claims seriously, they may well have done so because it helped them to justify the closure of a controversial and experimental institution.36 The dismissal of many other children’s allegations of abuse in certified schools, children’s homes and foster homes over the course of the twentieth century shows only too clearly that the authorities’ willingness to listen to children was intermittent and instrumental. If girls’ own contemporary descriptions of institutional life are rare, letters written by parents to their daughters and to the various authorities responsible for them provide something of an insight into the micropolitics of care. Many of these letters were motivated by parents’ complaints about the system, which commonly centred on two issues: access to their daughters while in care and the control of older girls’ labour power. Parents and relatives regularly challenged the Waifs and Strays Society on these issues, some claiming that they would pursue the matter with solicitors, archbishops, ‘head office’, MPs and the magazine John Bull. This questions Martin’s suggestion that the lack of parental complaints within the certified school system demonstrated the extent to which ‘the state had come between parent and child, leaving concerned parents uncertain of how, where or to whom they should complain’. 37 A small but significant minority of parents were prepared to complain in the strongest terms with varying degrees of success. They commonly held the view that as long as their children were ‘not paupers’, they exercised rights over them which they were prepared to defend. All certified schools and children’s homes had their own regulations governing outside contact. In general letters could be written, and suitable

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visitors admitted, on a monthly basis. The Waifs and Strays Society allowed visits only by those parents ‘known to be quite respectable and not likely to unsettle their children’, and sometimes insisted that a member of staff remained in the room throughout.38 Withholding visits and letters was widely used as a punishment both for bad behaviour on the part of the children and for inappropriate behaviour on the part of parents. Faced with these constraints, parents often tried to contact children unofficially. ‘Undesirable parents’ who tried to meet their children on those occasions when they were allowed outside, usually after church or after school, were warned that ‘arrangements would be made for the children to be transferred to another Home’ if they persisted.39 Relatives were often not clear precisely where children had been sent even if they had cooperated with the admissions process. Daisy’s grandmother, who seemed not to have been invited to cooperate, wrote the following letter to the matron of St Ursula’s industrial school where two of her granddaughters were placed in 1918: dear matron will you be so kind as to rite to me and let me know how the[y] are it nearly overcame me when iheard they were took away and Daisy was taken from school he snached her from there and said she was dirty daisy was not and her mother was weakminded and could not get about much i offered to have them but he would not let me idone there washing and mending and would have them now if I could the house got a father to work for them and it seems very hard to have them took away so iam there grandma and I was very fond of them daisy spent most of her time heare all her nights she slept at home and [we] did not have there address till the other day and then there father went to the educational office for it if you will be so kind as to let me now and tell daisy to write to her grandmother and father and grandfather. 40 Transfers were another source of tension. The parents of a girl admitted to Maurice Girls’ Home in Ealing were angry when she was transferred to St Michael’s industrial school in Oxfordshire without their knowledge in 1920. The mother wrote: she is not a pauper as we are paying towards her keep and have done ever since she has been away. We will not pay anymore until we know why she has been sent away all those miles where we will not be able to see her. 41

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Protests like this had little effect. Four years later, when St Michael’s gave up its certificate in 1924, this girl was transferred a second time, again without her parents’ knowledge, to Newfield industrial school in Coventry. Other transfers were more dramatic. The 1908 Children Act (section 70) empowered managers to place older boys in the navy or army. They were not obliged to inform parents of their actions or to obtain their consent. During the first world war, many boys were sent to the Front without their parents’ knowledge. 42 Children were also emigrated without their parents’ knowledge, or with their very partial consent. The Waifs and Strays Society vigorously promoted emigration to Canada, although industrial school cases were rarely considered suitable as they required the consent of ‘fit’ parents and, more importantly, of the Home Secretary. In addition, delinquent children were increasingly rejected by immigration authorities in the ‘white dominions’.43 However, some industrial school girls were sent abroad. Constance was committed to St Mary’s in 1906 as a voluntary case in part for ‘lying in the fields with boys and staying out late’, and her father was informed in March 1909 that she was soon to be sent to Canada. The father, a cowman, represented by the Cambridge Association for the Care of Young Girls (which had been involved in the original case), claimed that he had ‘heard nothing of the plan and given his consent to nothing’. The Society claimed in turn that consent was given in 1906 when the child was committed to their care and that the girl herself wanted to go to Canada. Eventually the father relented. The Cambridge Association reported that ‘he says he had not understood that Constance would really have to go, but he supposes she ought’, adding that he wanted ‘to know for certain . . . whether Constance would like to go, what she is to do when she gets to Canada, and if there are nice people to look after her on the way and in Canada’. He also wanted to see her before she went, saying he missed her and ‘thinks Canada is too far unless she likes it’. 44 As this example suggests, relatives who had committed children to the Society on a voluntary basis often had little say over their subsequent treatment, especially if they were considered undesirable. Frances’ case, discussed earlier, shows this very clearly. Her mother had committed her and her brother to the Society in 1923 following an investigation into the family by the local representatives of the Ministry of Pensions and the local NSPCC. By May 1927, she had made arrangements for the children to live with their maternal grandmother in Leeds. Pensions officials vetoed these plans, whereupon the grandmother herself wrote to the Waifs and Strays Society, issuing

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a significant invitation to them to affirm her as a ‘fit’ person to care for her grandchildren: I think you are aware those children are not Waifs or Strays and they were put under your care until such time as my daughter found them a home, and my home is given to them as it was to their eldest brother. You are welcome to send anyone at anytime to my home to see if it is or is not a fit and decent home for any child to live in. 45 The children were not allowed to move, although soon after this Frances absconded anyway and moved in with her grandmother. In her efforts to keep Frances, the grandmother informed the Society that her daughter was ‘not a fit person to have Frances under her care, and I don’t want her . . . coming and making a bother for me’. Frances, she said, wanted to stay with her, but her daughter was demanding that she ‘sent Frances down to her for a bit’. She asked the Society to ‘notify me what I have to do’ adding, ‘I am willing to sign anything to be made Frances’ Guardian [and] the girl herself also wishes it.’46 Her concern for her granddaughter was thus expressed, for these purposes at least, in the formal language of ‘fitness’. Parental expressions of love and affection were often perceived by home staff and other child welfare workers to be false, self-seeking and above all irrelevant to the child’s needs. A father who repeatedly requested his 14-year-old daughter’s return to the family home was said to be attempting to ‘deprive’ her of two further years of training, and was described as ‘harping on the fact that she had not seen her brothers and sisters for so long and ought to be at home’. He had decided to admit three of his eight children to the care of the Waifs and Strays Society on the death of his wife in 1915. Two sisters had been placed together at Cold Ash in 1923. When the older one was sent to service on licence, he was concerned that the younger one would be lonely without her and had decided to bring her home.47 In this instance, the appeal was successful and the girl was allowed to return to her family. In a similar case, a father who campaigned with the help of his mother and local vicar to have his daughters released from St Ursula’s was said by the matron not to appreciate ‘how happy the children were’. She continued, He went on with of how ‘’ard’ it was for him to have his children taken away. At last I had to tell him that ‘the Society was helping his children, not his children the Society’. 48

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His efforts were unsuccessful, and one of his daughters, Daisy, spent the rest of her life in institutions. Staff views on these occasions may well have been shaped by the emerging popular sciences of child and baby care. Best-selling authors of infant care manuals, like Truby King, emphasised the importance of clean water, fresh air, regular routines and breast milk, but played down parental love, often seeing this as an indulgence to be disciplined along with the baby. 49 But this modern transformation of intimacy was based on older beliefs that legitimised dramatic intervention in working-class families and that played on wider social fears of disorder and degeneracy to justify the breaking of family ties. Those few middle-class parents seeking access to their daughters in care or custody were not subjected to nearly the same scrutiny. Agnes, for example, regularly rejoined her ‘superior’ and ‘well-to-do’ parents for holidays during her stay at Cold Ash, where she had been voluntarily admitted in 1915 in order to prevent her from being committed to a reformatory for repeated theft. 50 By contrast, staff often suspected that working-class parents wanted their children back for economic rather than emotional reasons. Certainly many parents used their family’s need for a girl’s wages to justify their call for her to be returned home. Some letters can therefore be read as evidence of resistance to what Zelizer describes as the modern construction of the ‘economically useless child’.51 While compulsory education and restrictions on child labour signalled the emergence of the economically ‘worthless’ but emotionally ‘priceless’ child, this particular model of childhood was clearly class-bound. Poor families often depended upon their adolescent children’s paid and unpaid work. In these cases, disputes over the labour power of the girls intensified when they were licensed out to service. Parents frequently complained of having to continue to pay maintenance to the Waifs and Strays Society when their daughters were earning money. The Society’s position here was that maintenance was owed for as long as the girl was formally under their care, which included the licence period. Grace’s mother wrote to the Society in 1918, as she felt that Grace ‘shuld be big enough now to be put out [to service]’. She continued, I can’t afford to pay toward her now I have 4 children now to keep the food is so dear I cannot meet it I shall be glad if you could possibly stop me to pay to her it is hard times now and her age is 14 this last November 6th . . . Please write back and let me know without fail. 52

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Ethel’s mother made a similar request, I think now she would be a little help to me and I should like to know if I could have her home with me. I have to work very hard myself and there are times when I think at her age she should be home with me.53 In this case, the Society agreed to investigate the matter, with the help of the philanthropist, Lady Anne Ritchie, who had initially referred the case to them the year before. Maggie’s mother, who had already complained to the Society in 1920 for transferring her daughter to another home without her knowledge and for reneging on a promise to allow her home for Christmas, complained again in 1924, I think it is time she was coming home as she is 15 years old. we cannot come to see her as the fare is so much and her father is not doing much work. Her father has trouble to keep the payment up towards her support. she is not a pauper or a stray child. so if do not get a satisfactory answer why she is sent away again we will write to the head office and ask them.54 This request was ignored, and Maggie was transferred to another industrial school. In 1911, the traveller stepfather of a 17-year-old girl admitted to St Michael’s in 1905 wrote to Prebendary Rudolf (founder and secretary of the Waifs and Strays Society from 1885 to 1919) asking to ‘know why she was not allowed to receive letters from her uncle, or mother or myself’ and why Rudolf had ‘not thought it worthwhile’ to answer earlier enquiries. He continued, I wish you to distinctly understand me that if you do not answer this letter I shall have to take other steps to make you give an account of what power you are keeping Elsie. Also you are aware that her time is up that you cannot keep her for from her mother . . . Now, Sir if I have no answer to this by Wednesday I shall have to seek a personal interview with the President their Graces the Archbishops. 55 Although letters were resumed, Elsie did not formally leave the Society’s care for another two years. In the meantime she was sent to work at the

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Philanthropic Society’s Orphan School in Stockport. This indicates that the Waifs and Strays Society’s action in retaining some of the older girls was equally economically motivated or, at least, presented as such. Charitable homes depended on these girls’ labour and there is evidence to suggest that, as in Elsie’s case, some older girls, who were apparently not ‘ready’ to be released, were swapped between charities as a means of retaining cheap labour within the rescue sector. In a more clear-cut case, a stepfather’s demand to know when 19-year-old Gladys would ‘be allowed her liberty’ was refused by staff at the Waifs and Strays laundry home in Newark where she worked, who claimed that they could ‘barely spare her from the laundry’.56 Some certified schools benefited directly from girls’ licensed work by taking a proportion of their wages. The LCC noted in 1918 that, It is almost universal practice where girls or boys go out to work from a School . . . to credit the worker with half or one third of the sum earned, and use the rest for some special purpose to benefit the whole number eg buying new games, library books, provision of a treat, or improvement of a recreation room.57 Given that girls working on licence as domestic servants were badly paid, this caused resentment among girls and parents. One girl insisted that Rudolf should arrange for her bank book to be returned to her from St Michael’s, writing emphatically that, ‘I am certainly not going to send my money for them to put in, and my Mistress is not going to send no money likewise.’58 Parents who were frustrated in their formal attempts to secure their daughters’ release and access to their earnings tried to contact the girls directly via their employers. Many girls were reported to have lost their service positions because mistresses would ‘not put up with the parent constantly badgering [them] for money’. 59 This kind of correspondence shows that parents and relatives were certainly not passive players in this game. They made concerted attempts to put their children into institutional care, to remove them from it, to influence institutional practices and to negotiate better positions for themselves as fee-paying parties. These efforts were by no means always successful, but they do point to an active engagement by many parents and relatives in the shaping of the modern juvenile justice and care systems. These interventions were made via a variety of narrative tactics with some letter writers presenting themselves as polite and enquiring, others as aggrieved victims of the Society’s deliberate and unjust attempts to withhold information and basic rights from them.

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Beyond care On leaving their institutions, girls continued to keep in contact with staff, in many cases beyond their formal licence period. Prebendary Rudolf, who established the Waifs and Strays Society in 1885 and served as its secretary until 1919, routinely maintained personal contact with girls once they had left the homes to work on licence. Many of the letters discussed here are addressed to him as well as to other staff. Letters written soon after their discharge say a great deal about their immediate evaluations of the institutional experience. Two themes characterise surviving correspondence: the girls’ unhappiness as domestic servants, sometimes expressed through a wish to return to the institution, and their desire to trace their families, usually their mothers. Although many young women valued their time in care and the relationships they made there, others saw this experience as the defining source of a later unhappiness and sense of rootlessness. This seemed particularly pronounced where the experience involved a separation from their mother (and more rarely from their father). Girls’ letters to Prebendary Rudolf contained frequent requests for help in finding their relatives. He recognised the ‘desire on the poor girls’ part to find their mothers’, but was very rarely prepared to help. Occasionally, he would initiate an investigation into the family home circumstances, relying on the often scant knowledge of Society outreach workers, vicars, employers and local gentry.60 Information was withheld from the girls if the family was considered ‘unfit’. In general, Rudolf thought that reunions should not occur. The girls, he said, very often ‘refuse to believe what you tell them about their mothers, and the only true safety is to put them as far as possible away from their mothers’. 61 Julia’s letter to Rudolf in 1921, written six years after her mother had committed her to the Society’s care as an ‘uncontrollable child’, gives some indication of the emotional confusion this situation produced for some girls, and of how the authorities’ stories of ‘unfit’ mothers often sharply conflicted with the young women’s own memories and idealisations of their former family life. You will be greived to hear that I am not getting on half or a quarter as I did wen I first came out. I have dropped so suddenly and find it a great struggle to work up again. I will tell you the whole cause of it and what I think is doing it. Well to begin with I have been thinking about my past life and that has tempted me to write to my mother

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when I have been told by elder people than myself that she is not a fit mother for me to write to. On the other hand I have not the love of a mother . . . Some times when I am alone and different thoughts enter and go out of my head I always have a feeling that all my friends and those I know have gone away and forsaken me for ever. It seems so hard to forget my past life that I will remember it till I die. 62 Molly asked to be allowed to return to her mother in part to escape the abuse she claimed to be suffering as a servant: Dear Sir, I have got to leave my place, I do not do my work well enough to please my mistress and I do not know where I shall go to now. I do not want to go to another home. I want to go to my own home and help my own mother. I do not want to stop here as the cook is so disagreeable and if I stand still she put the broom handle across my back, punches me and smakes me in the face and I have to bear this, and she is always try to make me unhappy . . . I have often gone without my food and have had to do more work.63 The Society found her another position in London, but did not allow her to go home. Rose’s request, written in 1920, was also ignored: Dear Sir there is something I have [been] wanting to ask you for a long time; and that is do you possible think that you could tell me where my mother is; she was seen in Piccadilly about 4 months [ago] by a friend or customer of Father’s. I go home every Sunday 4pm til 10pm to see my Father and Cousins etc: But Mother was so good to us until she left . . . I should be so full of joy too because one day I hope to go Home again and live peacably: because it is not a Home without Peace and Love is it will you agree?64 Her manipulation of the reforming rhetoric of the homes is particularly interesting here, and is a feature of other girls’ letters to Rudolf. In appropriating the languages which had been used to regulate them, and attempting to turn them to their own advantage, the girls were able to transform elements of these discourses and to expose some of the inherent contradictions and rather selective possibilities of forgiveness, salvation

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and personal change embedded within them. Ada wrote to Rudolf in 1915 to ask for money: Oh how I wish that I was back again under your controll . . . I cannot go to service as I have nothing tidy to wear. Dear Sir do you think that you could lend me a little to buy one or two things to set me up? . . . Sorry I have no good news to tell but hoping that I shall be better off later on. I am always thinking of all the kindness and goodness that you have done for me. 65 A 16-year-old girl used similar tactics to try to persuade Rudolf to allow her to return to her mother in 1917. Her last line effectively undermines Rudolf’s ability to refute her logic without undermining his Christian credentials: My mother asked me wether I shall be able to go home and give help as she works in a munition factory and my sister is not old enough to do the work I should very much like to help her in all ways as she gave help to me when I was young, it is nice I know to help others very much.66 Obviously, not all girls wanted to see their parents and not all parents condemned the Society’s treatment of their daughters. Nancy recalls being upset when the Society contacted her father after she was severely burnt in a kitchen accident, writing that ‘[m]uch to my disappointment, my father insisted that I should go home as soon as I was able’.67 In other cases, parents actively supported the Society’s work. Gladys’s mother refused to allow her daughter, who as a 12-year-old had been committed to Cold Ash for stealing and being beyond control, to return home in 1916. According to the Sister Superior who had recently sacked Gladys from her licence position at a Windsor hospital, her mother had said that, she would on no account have Gladys at home as she had been so worried over her 2 years ago. She was very sorry she was losing her place and told her that she must make up her mind to work as she had to get her own living.68 Two years later, the mother’s position was unaltered. I have heard that she has behaved very badly while out at service and I am truly sorry as I do not know what will become of her if she carries on like she has been.69

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In a final example, Rose’s extended family quickly reconsidered their decision to accommodate her after her discharge from certified school in 1920. Within a few weeks, her uncle wrote to the Waifs and Strays Society requesting that they ‘remove Rose at [their] earliest convenience as we can’t stand to keeping her a minute longer’.70 The autobiographical accounts take a longer view of the institutional experience. The writers’ evaluations of care are characterised either by a continuing resistance to, or an acceptance of, their earlier categorisation and treatment. Very few contain any detailed information about the women’s later lives. Stella concludes her account as follows, ‘My story must end as my life after “Care” is another story.’71 In her epilogue, Janet Hitchman writes, ‘This is a story of childhood, and I don’t propose to go into great detail now as to “what happened next”.’72 Emma Smith was told upon her release from the Home for ‘errant girls’ ‘never to talk about the Home or let anyone know where I had come from’, as it was ‘something to be very ashamed of’.73 The period in care therefore appears as a very distinct episode of the writers’ lives. This compartmentalisation broadly mirrors the distance imposed between childhood and adulthood common to many autobiographies. In these accounts, however, the fact that the independence of adulthood is bound up with freedom from institutional care means that this boundary is much more emphatically drawn. Positive memories of the institutional experience are expressed by those who, perhaps, broadly accept that certain modes of social regulation are required to uphold a certain vision of social order. Common visions of social order within these girls’ homes were built upon a common core of beliefs which accepted that neglectful families needed to be policed, that children could not make their own decisions. Positive memories therefore legitimise the actions of trusted relatives, trusted child welfare workers, trusted Waifs and Strays officials, and so on, in ‘rescuing’ the writer from their fate in an ‘unfit’ family. For example, Nancy commented that ‘the training received at St Mary’s fitted girls admirably for domestic service’ and believed that ‘because of this training I have held, during my life, several responsible and interesting positions which would not otherwise have been open to me’. She worked as a school matron and housekeeper and was active in charity work.74 Similarly, Vera trained as a nurse. Stella, who was placed in service when she left St Edith’s, wrote ‘I am very grateful for the training and the discipline I received over the years, although I didn’t always appreciate it at the time.’75 Janet Hitchman, who hated Barnardo’s as a child, was impressed by the organisation as an adult. As she notes, her conversion to Christianity was a vitally important factor in developing this sense of gratitude, as it was for Stella and Nancy.

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Their attitude is not untypical. Many young women and men returned to visit certified schools and children’s homes after they had left. Nancy recalled ‘several girls returning to St Mary’s for holidays and telling us of their experiences’ and that ‘many years later I myself returned with my two children’.76 This continuing contact with the school was in part the product of economic necessity, particularly during holiday periods. Many young people with live-in jobs, low wages and no known family relied on their old certified school or children’s home for accommodation during holidays. Stella remembers a dormitory being set aside for old girls of St Edith’s who came to the home for their holiday ‘because they had nowhere else to go’.77 However, former pupils also seem to have been motivated by emotional ties, as evidenced by the number of legacies left by them to the schools. Such stories were included in annual reports and forwarded to local and national newspapers wherever possible, and were actively used as proof of the ‘transforming’ qualities of the schools.78 By contrast, those women who questioned or rejected these visions of social order, either in adulthood or in girlhood, remembered their experience in a much more negative way. Eileen was bitter. At the close of her letter, she writes, ‘I could count on one hand the good times I had . . .There was never anyone any good to me until I met my husband.’79 Anna felt so negatively about her time in a certified school that she kept it a close secret. For her, the experience of being berated by a police sergeant at the age of 12 after absconding marked a turning point in her perceptions of care. She wrote: According to him we were no better than beggars who but for the like of him supporting the likes of us by charity would be in the gutter where we belonged. We should be grateful and keep our places and not repay his kindness by daring to run away. He changed my character by giving me a hard streak to it. Never again in spite of all the bible teaching did I confuse love and charity. 80 Significantly, both women rejected the domestic work for which they had been trained. Eileen worked as an assistant in Selfridges and, from time to time, as a prostitute. She also became a local beauty queen, elected Miss Brighton in the early 1950s. Anna ran away from her domestic service placement in Devon. She ends her account as follows: I came from Exeter to Paddington back to where I started when I was eight years old nearly nine . . . I never went into domestic service

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again. I made new friends and I never let anyone look down on me as ‘a waif and stray’. Even now I would rather die than let it be known.81 But it would be wrong simply to celebrate negative stories as brave examples of resistance and to see positive stories as weak examples of compliance. Both, in their way, contribute (to use Giddens’ phrase) to the ‘recursiveness’ of modern welfare policing.82 Both (to paraphrase Young) therefore contribute to an ongoing and internal dialogue about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ welfare policing practices.83 Positive accounts do this in a more obvious manner by supporting old child welfare practices, while negative accounts do this in a less obvious, but no less significant, manner by helping to open a critical space for new child welfare practices to emerge. Personal unpublished writings offer a valuable insight into the micropolitics of care and control. They show how some young women made sense of the delinquent and endangered identities ascribed to them and how they and their families variously opted to instrumentalise and criticise the child welfare system, to comply with and to resist its reforming efforts. They also show how those reforming efforts were framed by welfare workers and highlight the importance of constructions of ‘exceptionalism’ in determining when and why children were placed in care. However, personal writings should not be privileged above others. The evidence of experience and the insights it offers cannot, after all, be considered separately from the discursive structures which helped to constitute it as evidence, as a field of knowledge, in the first place. Put more simply, new welfare policing measures generated new arenas in which the stories of the poor could be produced. In some instances, for example within juvenile court proceedings, these stories were demanded. In others, for example when a girl chose to maintain a correspondence with Prebendary Rudolf over a number of years, they were offered more voluntarily. In yet others, girls’ stories were silenced or dismissed. Clearly, however, the power of the juvenile justice and care systems to demand certain kinds of stories from the poor was greater than their power to refuse to tell them. And in terms of defining lived outcomes, the narratives of the magistrate, the education officer, the child rescue worker, the certified school matron remained much more powerful than those of girls and their families.

6 Diagnosing

Diagnoses of delinquency took many new turns in the first half of the twentieth century. The emergence of discrete disciplines within the human sciences helped to shape and refine particular theories of child and adolescent development. Between them, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, educationists, criminologists, sociologists and psychoanalysts created new fields of knowledge based on their monitorings of young people’s physical and mental growth and their emotional and affective relations. Differences of disciplinary emphases notwithstanding, these various studies of normal and abnormal adolescent development defined delinquency within very similar terms. First, many of these studies viewed delinquency as the consequence of an awkward transition from childhood to adulthood, which could be caused by a number of factors, from poor parenting, to social inequality, from the temptations of modern culture to inherited dispositions, from the generalised instability of adolescence to specific disorders of the mind or body. Second, many of these studies combined notions of the natural and the social. Positivist biomedical psychologists, for example, did not confine themselves to investigations of the biological and the natural, but based their findings on observations of the environmental, the social and the affective. Similarly, early sociologists and subcultural theorists may have aimed to discard pathological and somatic explanations of delinquency in favour of firmly social explanations, but they nevertheless made very many unquestioned assumptions about, for example, the natural ordering of gender relations and the naturally based, and therefore different, social aspirations of girls and boys. Changing theories of girls’ delinquency, largely framed in the spaces between theories of adult women’s crime and theories of male youth crime, are the focus of this chapter. With some exceptions, delinquent girls 135

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themselves were rarely researched as a distinct group. British studies tended to be conducted on a small scale (compared to American investigations, for example, such as that conducted by the Gluecks1) and were often published as articles in specialist journals rather than as full books.2 Delinquent girls also featured in broader studies of adult women’s crime, prostitution, adolescence, child poverty and youth work. 3 Again, while the emphases of these studies of girls’ delinquency vary according to discipline, they too analyse girls’ behaviour in very similar ways. As this chapter shows, most assumed that girls’ nature and socialisation led them to conform and kept them out of trouble. The researchers’ task was to discover what led a minority of girls to break criminal laws and, more significantly, to flout social and gender codes. In this, these studies echoed Lombroso and Ferrero’s infamous late nineteenth-century dictum that most women conformed but those who did not were ‘doubly monstrous’. 4 Cowie et al. concluded from their investigation of 318 girls admitted to the Magdalen Hospital classifying approved school in 1958 that while ‘the behaviour of delinquent girls [was] much less obnoxious than that of delinquent boys’, the girls themselves constituted ‘a more abnormal sample’. The results of their investigation supported ‘the very wide consensus that girl delinquents deviate from sociological and psychological norms much more than boy delinquents’. Their findings seemed to them to confirm those of earlier twentieth-century comparative studies of male and female delinquency, which they summarised as follows: Comparing delinquent girls with delinquent boys, the girls are found to come from economically poorer homes, with more mental abnormality in the family, with poorer moral standards, worse discipline, more often a broken home, more frequent changes of home, more conflict at home and more disturbed intrafamilial relations . . . The girls have a worse school record . . . Pathological psychiatric deviations are much more common in delinquent girls than in boys . . . Delinquent girls more often than boys have other forms of impaired physical health; they are noticed to be oversized, lumpish, uncouth and graceless, with a raised incidence of minor physical defects. 5 Two broad questions followed from this dominant formulation of girls’ conformity and delinquency. What factors caused a small number of girls to swap conformity for delinquency, and were these factors increasing? Or, put another way, what lay behind girls’ traditional

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immunity to delinquency, and was this immunity likely to be weakened in the future? Important as these specialist texts were in creating new ways of diagnosing delinquency, their wider cultural influence cannot be taken for granted, as the final section of this chapter shows. In analysing the dynamics of these texts, it is easy to forget how their authors accessed the children who became their research subjects. Some found their own subjects, but many relied, directly or indirectly, on referrals from others. Decisions to prosecute a young person or to refer her to a doctor, psychologist or psychiatrist were based on the prior and, crucially, lay diagnoses of parents, the public, teachers, police officers, child welfare organisations and so on, who therefore did a great deal to determine the subjects that became visible to researchers. These lay decisions, in turn, were based on a whole variety of popular beliefs about the causes of and remedies for delinquency which were drawn from texts as diverse as the Bible, the Daily Mail and Rebel without a Cause. Thus, in charting the rise of new diagnostic discourses of delinquency it is important not to lose sight of the relationships between the professional and the popular and between expert opinion and lay opinion: relationships which are very difficult to trace. The human sciences certainly did much to shape twentieth-century popular views on delinquency, but they did not have a complete monopoly over them.

Pathology, puberty and the sex-instinct According to most studies of delinquency, girls tended to break the criminal law far less often than boys for two reasons: they were naturally less aggressive, less adventurous and less likely to take risks; and they were more closely controlled by their families. These studies on the whole took comfort in the fact that girls’ basic nature, whether they saw this as derived from latent maternal instinct, hormones or sex chromosomes, would change very little if at all. What could change, and in the twentieth century seemed to be changing at an unprecedented pace, was the stability of the family and the ability of the family to police girls. In turn, such family failings were thought highly likely to lead to an increase in girls’ formal offending and their informal sexual offending. This focus on sexual delinquency, common to all these studies, was linked to another orthodoxy they also shared: that all girls experienced greater sexual tension than boys during adolescence because they reached puberty at an earlier age, but were then subject to greater sexual restrictions. As Burt put it in 1925, changes in ‘size and strength, figure and

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form, sexual functions and sexual consciousness’ meant that ‘the girl suddenly finds herself already a woman’ while ‘in self-control, in worldly experience, and in common sense she is still little more than a child’. Girls were physically ready for sex long before the law or public sensibilities allowed, resulting in the build-up of ‘an unusual store of sex-emotion’.6 Writing over a third of a century later, Cowie et al. agreed: sexual maturation in the girl predisposes her to a form of behaviour to which society is much more allergic in her case than in the case of the male, and her earlier maturation is likely to bring it out before the critical age at which official prohibitions are relaxed.7 Burt had been referring here to girls who ‘suffered’ premature puberty. The ‘over-developed’ girl would more easily become an ‘over-sexed’, and even a ‘hyper-sexed’, girl. But given that girls could not have legal sexual intercourse until they were 16 (and that even at that age they could be deemed to be in need of care or protection) and that the average age of marriage was around the mid-twenties, most adolescent girls in early twentieth-century Britain could have been regarded as ‘over-developed’. Burt was typical of other writers in predicting the consequences of girls’ sexual tension. He believed that their frustrations were likely to have one of three outcomes: they could give in to their desires and become sex delinquents; divert their desires by committing other petty crimes; or repress their desires – sometimes with damaging emotional results. He calculated that ‘over-potency of the sexual instinct’ accounted for 16 per cent of the delinquent episodes identified among his 200 delinquents (of both sexes) and claimed that for 7 per cent of the girls it was the ‘sole’ or ‘chief contributory cause’.8 ‘Unconscious sexual conflict’ and ‘sex-excitement’ were particularly pronounced during girls’ premenstrual and menstrual phase, and explained the high levels of petty theft committed at these times.9 For Burt, then, sexual conflict, whether expressed, diverted or repressed, was the root cause of disturbed and delinquent behaviour in many girls. It also meant that there could be many types of sex delinquent: Some are brisk and animated creatures, fast in action and forward in behaviour, ready to dive into any daring enterprise. Others are inert and easy-going sluggards, limp, lazy and languorous, dreaming all day on cushions like a cat, and prowling round in the evenings to steal or solicit because they are too indolent to work. Others, of a sturdier mould, battle for long against their own temptations and desires; and,

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when at last they give in, take to venial crimes of a substitutional type. With a few, the show of struggle and restraint is little else than self-deception and hypocrisy: they will sooth both themselves and others by unctuous prattle about religious conversion and spiritual reform, but no sooner have they proclaimed their penitence than they sink back into their old immoral ways. 10 Put like this, sex delinquency appears as a spectre stalking all girls. Those who succumbed to its influence could be difficult to spot because they were capable of repressing their desires or expressing them in coded ways. This view was in many ways a highly gendered extension of what might be termed Burt’s democratisation of delinquency. One of the most famous claims of The Young Delinquent was that delinquency in general was nothing more than ‘an outstanding sample . . . of common childish naughtiness’.11 All children were naughty at times, but in some, as a result of various forces, this naughtiness was more deep-rooted or allowed to develop to extremes. In the same way, all girl children had the potential to become sexually delinquent although, crucially, this might present itself in different forms. Burt and others’ debt to Freud here is very clear.12 Psychoanalytic discourses of child sexuality exerted a strong influence on many of these texts and contributed to this dubious democratisation of girls’ delinquency. August Aichhorn spelt this out, writing that ‘Freud has taught us that the surge of libido in puberty is accompanied by a strong wave of repression’ and that this was ‘more powerful in girls than in boys’. This repression was linked to the general breaking of infant libidinal ties, a process necessary to the forming of new object relationships outside the family, but a process made more complicated for girls by the more strict social constraints governing the proper timing and proper nature of their mature love-object choices.13 Psychoanalysis, then, added a new twist to existing popular perceptions of the problems of girls’ puberty and the dangers of premarital sexual desires. All girls went through puberty, therefore all girls could potentially exhibit a form of sex delinquency. This view assumed a great deal about girls, not least that they were generally aware of, and frustrated by, their sexual potential. And while a purist psychoanalytic position would stress that such feelings were experienced at the level of the unconscious, much of this diagnostic writing suggested that they were not confined within that realm. Many of the writers concerned presented girls as very knowing in this regard, and in so doing clearly projected some of their own (repressed) desires upon them. There are numerous examples in The Young Delinquent, for

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example, where Burt himself seems to reveal his own susceptibilities to certain of his girl clients. Thirteen-year-old Emmeline is described as ‘[d]ark-haired, dark-eyed, of deep complexion, and a full, rounded figure’ and as appearing ‘to the casual eye to be at least sixteen’. 14 While recognising that all his young clients had a sexual instinct, Burt thought that this was particularly pronounced in the over-developed girl. For her, sex became ‘an urgent and importunate want, as inexorable as thirst, or the necessity for sleep’. With them, their ‘physiological predisposition’ was ‘hardly to be mistaken’, being ‘legible often at a glance from every curve of her form and every motion of her body’.15 The lay, as well as the trained eye, could therefore read delinquent dispositions just by looking. Puberty could trigger medical as well as emotional problems, and these were thought by some directly to explain girls’ delinquent behaviour. For some psychosocial researchers, delinquency was a medical problem requiring medical solutions. One of the early exponents of this view was Dr Henry Cotton, director of a clinic serving New Jersey correctional institutions. In a 1921 series of lectures at Princeton, he argued that focal infections and their resultant bodily toxins were a prime cause of delinquency, citing as evidence the fact that almost all the inmates of the New Jersey State Home for Girls had dental, intestinal, cervical or glandular disorders. Drawing heavily on older gynae-psychiatric theories, he believed that the uterus and the ovaries could be a major source of toxin which, once activated during puberty, could cause significant behavioural change. Girl ‘sex offenders’ were those that were ‘easily misled because of hyper-sexual activity’, which was itself due ‘to a disturbance of the sex glands [which became] an uncontrollable factor in their habits’. Thus, even though ‘the days of wholesale ovariotomies’ were over, gynaecology remained a primary diagnostic tool, and surgery a possible cure, for delinquency. Notably, Cotton himself believed that such medical explanations freed girls from charges of moral misbehaviour, writing that it was ‘much better to explain waywardness and incorrigibility on the basis of physical disturbance than on a suppositional inherent badness of the individual’.16 Others moved more easily between the medical and the moral. Like Cotton, American neuropsychiatrist Grimberg found it ‘impossible to look at the problem [of delinquency] otherwise than as a physician’.17 In his Emotion and Delinquency, published in 1928, Grimberg claimed that bodily malfunctions, or ‘organic inferiorities’, were the main causes of delinquency, and that, of these, defects within the endocrine system were the most significant. Applying the findings of endocrine research on shell-shocked soldiers from the first world war which linked

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emotional strain to thyroid disturbance, Grimberg argued that the ‘sexual neuroses’ developed by some girls at puberty were also caused by hyperthyroidal conditions. However, he drew a closer link between the medical and the moral, going on to argue that ‘emotional instability and delinquency’ often started with the ‘onset of puberty’ or the ‘first sexual experience’, when ‘a complete psychic change takes place’, causing some girls to lose ‘every moral stronghold’ and their ‘sense of shame’.18 Somatic explanations of delinquency survived within and alongside psychological, psychiatric and sociological models. At a more extreme level, genetic factors were highlighted by various authors. Building on the mid-century work of Swedish researcher Edith Otterström, Cowie et al. argued that girls’ immunity from delinquency and boys’ propensity for it must be explained to some degree by the chromosomal differences which underlay gender differences in ‘[e]nergy, aggressiveness, enterprise and rebelliousness’.19 In some ways pre-empting the late twentieth-century search for ‘the criminal gene’, they believed that future genetic research would support this claim, although they stressed that genetically based delinquent predispositions should always be considered alongside a range of other factors, particularly socialisation and inferior family relationships. This was very similar to the position earlier outlined by Burt in the 1920s. Although he placed great emphasis on family ‘pedigree’, history and temperament, Burt was ultimately sceptical of those who aimed to explain delinquency in terms of heredity and ‘born criminals’. For him, the ‘hereditary constitution of the criminal, such as it is’ had ‘but an indirect effect’ on their actions.20 However, the issue of heredity remained particularly prominent in discussions of delinquency among black and ‘mixed-race’ children. Studies from the 1890s to the 1950s stressed the undesirability of mixed-race relationships between white girls and what was presented as a ‘succession’ of ‘foreign’ men.21 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries commentators’ concern centred on male migrants and merchant seamen from China, southeast Asia and Africa. During the second world war it focused on African American GIs, and in the postwar period on African Caribbean migrants. The girls and young women who entered such relationships were commonly portrayed by social investigators as sexually wayward and mentally weak, their ‘foreign’ fathers as ‘over-sexed’ and their children as naturally disadvantaged and delinquency-prone. In 1896, London City Missionaries complained that young women such as ‘Canton Kitty’, ‘Calcutta Louisa’ and ‘Lascar Sally’ had turned parts of the city into ‘perfect pest-spots’ and that the ‘commingling of the worst vices of East and West’ had spawned a ‘mixed population of

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half-castes . . . [who] were often utilised by men of the Fagin type to steal, or beg, or both’.22 In the 1950s, Michael Banton had painted a similar picture of young white women known in London’s East End as ‘utilities’, who became involved with black men when their own communities had apparently rejected them. He described one such case, Anne, and the wider social dangers she posed. Anne had been born into a family with weak mental health and was herself ‘mentally retarded’. She was ‘married to a Pakistani who [had] left her’, and had ‘six children, none of whom [were] any longer in her care, most having been taken away as being in need of care and protection’. Banton argued that ‘coloured’ children born and brought up in the United Kingdom ‘often had such women for mothers’, women whose girlhoods were tainted by broken homes, criminality, immorality and mental illness.23 In a late 1930s Eugenics Review article, Julian Huxley argued that ‘if the alleged inferiority of the half-castes really exists’ it should be seen as a ‘product of the unfavourable social atmosphere in which they grow up’ rather than ‘any effect (which would be biologically very unusual) of their mixed heredity’.24 Nevertheless, social scientific discussions of the ‘nature’ of mixed race children emphasised their ‘disadvantages’ in ways that constantly blurred the social and the natural and that imagined ethnic difference as a ‘handicap’. Liverpool University Settlement workers wrote in 1938 that ‘mixed parentage is in the modern industrial world a handicap comparable to physical deformity’ and that mixed-race children should be given ‘compensating advantage’.25 Earlier, Muriel Fletcher, whose research into ‘half-caste children’ had been in part sponsored by the Liverpool Settlement, had concluded that one reason why half-caste girls seemed unsuited to regular work and tempted by prostitution was their heredity: ‘From her mother the half-caste girl is liable to inherit a certain slackness, and from her father a happygo-lucky attitude to life.’ One of Fletcher’s aims was to see whether her training home for half-caste girls, where girls were paid piece-rates for embroidery, could be ‘developed along similar lines to those of the Schools for the Blind, thus providing an avenue of employment for half-caste children’.26 Rachel Fleming, whose earlier work on half-caste children in Cardiff had partly inspired the Liverpool investigation, believed that they suffered ‘not only from disharmony of physical traits but disharmony of mental characteristics’.27 Writing in the late 1940s, Kenneth Little believed that ‘mixed blood’ children experienced particular psychological disadvantages that might predispose them to delinquency. Forced between loyalty to their black parent (usually father) or to the white society, the safest option was ‘filial

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neutrality’, or the deliberate repression of ‘previous emotional fixations on either parent’. This was dangerous, however, as it could ‘lead in turn to a habit of detachment in other respects, and in particular to a neglect of arduous emotional as well as intellectual problems’. These children’s under-achievement at school and their tendency to ‘run quite wild’ was seen to be connected to this, and was compounded by their fathers’ ‘inability’ to exercise culturally consistent control. 28 Twenty years on, the 1969 report of the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration, entitled ‘The Problems of Coloured School Leavers’, concluded that young blacks’ continuing social disadvantages were caused by four factors: employment discrimination, deficiencies in education, defective social adjustment, and personal and psychological stresses arising from the social position of first and second generation migrants.29 The personal and the pathological still featured prominently within debates about deviance and racial difference. Besides discussions of inherited characteristics, somatic explanations for delinquency focused on the kinds of medical problems that inhibited children’s academic and social development, and that therefore made it difficult for them to form good relationships with their peers. Large numbers of delinquent girls, like boys, were recorded in many studies as suffering from simple problems of hearing, speech and sight, as well as more complex but relatively common conditions such as epilepsy. Discussion of mental defects of various degrees were also common in these texts. According to Burt, ‘if they are not always definitely defective, most delinquents are yet definitely dull’. 30 Winifred Elkin’s 1938 study, The English Juvenile Courts, reported that 40 per cent of those appearing before Manchester juvenile courts in 1936 demonstrated ‘poor attainment’, and that as many as 85 per cent of those charged at Southend juvenile court in 1937 were described as ‘retarded’. 31 As well as general learning difficulties, these studies observed that a number of delinquent children showed signs of psychiatric conditions ranging from neuroses and depression to hysteria and schizophrenia. Many researchers observed such conditions more commonly in girls than in boys. Some explained this in terms of girls’ greater general disposition to psychiatric problems, but others, such as Cowie et al., argued that delinquent girls showed a higher incidence of psychiatric problems because they had generally endured much higher levels of social and psychic stress than boys before seeking what some had already termed a ‘delinquent solution’ to their problems. Girls’ ability to form good social relationships, according to many of these studies, was very dependent on their physical appearance. While

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not going quite as far as the Gluecks who apparently described the young women they observed as a ‘swarm of defective, diseased, anti-social misfits’ and who apparently suffered ‘practically every imaginable defect and handicap’,32 Cowie et al. reduced their sample of over 300 girls to the following general description: The main impression which one forms on seeing a group of these girls is that of lack of grace or beauty; in technical jargon, they tend to be of dysplastic physique. A large proportion of them are largeboned powerfully built girls, nearly all overweight and some grossly obese. A smaller number are small, thin and poorly developed girls with pinched and sometimes shrewish faces. Their quick ferret-like movements are in strong contrast with the elephantine gracelessness of the bigger girls. There are, of course, well-proportioned girls, sometimes handsome in a Junoesque way; but even then one is likely to see physical deformities such as squints, or skin-blemishes or scars, the evidence of childhood neglect or of the wounds of battle in their jungle background. They concluded that: It seems quite likely that physical defects and lack of physical attractiveness have played a part in causing delinquency. With such a disadvantage, a girl will be all the more likely, one supposes, to become miserable, angry, rebellious or resentful when adolescence compels her to take notice of it. 33 The inference here is clear, and connects with earlier observations about acceptable outlets of adolescent sexual tension. A girl whose facial features or body shape deviated from ever-changing feminine ideals would find it more difficult to find a boyfriend or a husband and might, as a result, become either more sexually repressed or more sexually promiscuous. Again, this was a view which Lombroso and Ferrero would have recognised. They had speculated that one reason why numbers of seriously criminal women were so small was that their physical appearance had repelled many possible mates allowing only a few to reproduce, though they had also drawn a close link between female criminality and promiscuity, embodied ultimately in the figure of the prostitute. 34 In a fascinating if brief passage in her Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools (a study undertaken in three institutions in the 1950s but not published until 1969), Helen Richardson noted the frequency with

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which girls’ appearance drew comment from judicial and welfare personnel, and how important these comments were in determining their treatment. Staff at one girls’ classifying approved school, ‘while struggling to be fair and undiscriminating’, paid ‘far more attention to the personal features’ of their charges than staff at comparable boys’ schools. As part of the classifying process, staff were required to complete a ‘pen-picture’ of the girls, which then comprised the first page of their assessment reports. Richardson examined 500 of these and found that for many staff, ‘physique seemed correlated with behaviour’. They regarded 60 per cent of cases as ‘normal, or fairly normal looking members of the species’, but ‘they saw, nevertheless in fully 20 per cent . . . less attractive features’, which were ‘appreciable factors in the girls’ social relationships before committal’, and a ‘small percentage’ who ‘had the kind of physique which to Lombroso would have seemed typical of the degenerate criminal’.35 One such case was M, described in her pen-picture as at present a pathetic and almost grotesque figure. She is small, with a short neck and hunched shoulders. Her fair hair is straight and ragged, and her grey eyes, inside their purplish rings, are those of a deprived anxious person. She has a smallish face, with large, rather bulbous features, and sallow skin.36 Other ‘less extreme’ cases were described in terms which were quite similar, none the less: L is a small girl, with the look of a hungry, neglected street urchin. Her sandy hair is thin, lank, and rarely tidy. Her narrow face has sagging cheeks, a weak cleft chin and a permanently grimy-looking complexion. The least hardened, and the least malevolent of her features are her childish, light blue eyes. 37 ‘E’ by contrast was ‘short, with a thickened, almost matronly figure, and a noticeable double chin, where her meekly bowed head meets her short neck’. ‘M’ was ‘a little thin, round-shouldered girl, whose whole posture and facial expression suggest nervousness, dull intellect and the possibility of anti-social attitudes’. ‘A’ was ‘typical of a crippled girl who is also maladjusted’. And another ‘M’ was ‘like a very drab and disillusioned Alice in Wonderland’. In general, Richardson found that although most girls appeared ‘normal’, there were ‘more odd builds and odd bearings, and the odd tend to be odder than most; there are more who seemed to be just less than normally good to look at and more who

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were broader and shorter’. Although critical of some of the terms used to describe the girls, Richardson concluded that it was ‘difficult not to believe that their bearing was a true indicator of some inner state’.38 But if plain girls were prone to delinquency, then so were pretty girls. Richardson noted that despite the preponderance of ‘odd’-looking girls in her sample, around one fifth of the girls studied (86 of 500) ‘had qualities of physique which would have drawn notice of an agreeable kind to them in a crowd’.39 Good looks, however, held their own hazards, as Burt’s extraordinary outline of one hypothetical girl’s transition from pretty child to prostitute shows: Everyone knows how the good-looking girl is first petted and spoiled by kindly uncles and by munificent friends of the family; and soon, quite pardonably, begins to cultivate a coy appealing look for every visitor – a silent glance that begs, always in the most winsome and irreproachable way, for sweets, for a silver coin, or for an invitation to the pantomime or the pictures. She grows older; and the same feminine arts can be practised with success on the moneyed youths of the neighbourhood. And from thence it is no long step to soliciting, with dumb demureness, the passing stranger in the street. 40 If the plain girl found it hard to make relationships, the pretty girl made only false and manipulative relationships. The ideal girl, in this scenario, was the good-looking but good-living girl; one who, in short, never knowingly or obviously used her sexuality to her own advantage. This was an ideal which proved as elusive within expert texts as in everyday life.

Families, social relations and subcultures Although much was written around the apparent bodily, biological and pathological aspects of girls’ delinquency these were by no means the only factors examined in expert texts which also discussed the familial, the social and the subcultural. Broadly speaking, these studies tended to agree that girls who enjoyed good relationships with good parents and who went on to form an acceptable sexual relationship with an appropriate partner at an appropriate time were very unlikely to fall into delinquency. The quality of a girl’s family life, in terms of her relationships with her parents and her ability to form a stable future family of her own, was seen as highly important. For Cowie et al., the range of physical and mental problems they observed in delinquent girls was ‘dwarfed in

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importance by the nearly universal evidence of grossly disturbed family life’.41 This finding seemed to confirm half a century of Western research on bad girls. Investigations carried out over the seven decades up to the late 1960s seemed to them to reach the same conclusion: that ‘the delinquent girl’ was ‘generally an unhappy girl’, and her unhappiness was ‘most commonly related to disturbed emotional relationships with the parents’. 42 More importantly, family (in)stability seemed to matter much more to girls than to boys. Helen Richardson found that between 50 and 60 per cent of her sample of approved school girls came from broken or disrupted homes, a proportion which far exceeded that ‘found in any major research into male juvenile delinquency’.43 Researchers investigating this question on the whole ignored the fact that, as Smith put it in 1955, children from broken, disrupted or disreputable homes were likely to be subject to differential treatment by law enforcement and social agencies, and that this was why they were therefore likely to display ‘higher’ delinquency rates. 44 Instead, they set out to divine the causes of and remedies for family instability. In doing so, they greatly narrowed definitions of the ‘proper’ family and girls’ ‘proper’ place within it. The view that unstable families produced delinquent girls was based on the deeply-rooted assumption that girls were more closely tied to their family than boys, and therefore were more seriously affected by family disruption than boys. If a girl’s family relations collapsed, her whole world collapsed. In the same circumstances, a boy, although doubtless affected, would be compensated by other public aspects of his more socially differentiated world. Moreover, a ‘normal’ boy was supposed to break with his parents (particularly with his mother), to ‘cut the apron strings’, as a prelude to making his way in that more differentiated world. Some writers saw these ties between girls and their families as social, others as biological, others as a combination of the two. All, however, were preoccupied with the circumstances in which these ties were weakened or broken, and with the wider effects of this. In an influential text detailing the apparent connections between delinquency and family life, Nye argued that since girls were traditionally more closely controlled by their families, any weakening of that control could cause them to become delinquent. His study might just as well have been subtitled, ‘give them an inch and they’ll take a yard’.45 The ‘broken home’, however, takes confusing and contradictory forms across this literature. At one level, the broken home was defined in opposition to the ideal family, images of which were more easily conjured and more consensually held. In their equally influential 1940s

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study of delinquency, Carr-Saunders and his co-writers started from the assumption that the ‘normal family’ consisted of ‘husband and wife, who are the parents of the case, and children (including the case) living at home’. Writing over 25 years later, Cowie and his co-writers were quite happy to use the same definition as their own starting point.46 This definition of the delinquent’s ‘family’ as consisting of the holy trinity of house, parents and siblings, a nuclear family living in a singular and clearly demarcated space, obviously excluded many people who might be concerned with their care. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbours, relatives from parents’ previous marriages and so on rarely feature in these texts, except perhaps where they formed branches of ‘defective’ family trees or where their influence was offered as evidence of family instability and parents’ inability to fulfil their proper roles without outside help. 47 Those factors which could be more easily quantified tended to be more readily prioritised by researchers. It was a relatively simple matter to chart the incidence of homes broken by the physical absence, permanent or temporary, of one or other parent through death, desertion, separation, divorce, illness, illegitimacy, imprisonment, migration, and so on. It was much less simple to quantify precisely how children might be affected by such an absence. Nevertheless, these writers made serious attempts to do just that. Helen Richardson, despite apologising for her ‘cold statistical terms’, still thought it vital to try to draw out the differences between girls who had suffered ‘No major, but from 0.5 to 2.5 or more minor detrimental situations’ and those who had suffered ‘1, 2 or 3 major and from 0.5 to 2.5 or more minor detrimental situations’. ‘Major detrimental situations’ were defined here as ‘illegitimacy, death of parent(s), and separation or divorce of parents’, while ‘minor detrimental situations’ were ‘serious illness of parent, imprisonment of parent, father absent in Forces, child evacuated without Mother, child hospitalised for a period’. 48 This example from Richardson’s work is just one among hundreds and her text-accompanying statistical tables absolutely typical of the genre. As such, it illustrates an enormously powerful shift in the technical representation of delinquency brought about by the modern psychosocial sciences: the concerted attempt to reify the affective and to use the resulting statistics to diagnose delinquency to ever greater degrees of ‘accuracy’. Before this tabulation of ‘trouble’ could take place, delinquency had to be represented as an abstraction, as a boundaried field of social experience whose characteristics could be named, known, mapped and represented.

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This process of abstraction and reification had its origins in the early nineteenth-century collection and collation of a range of social statistics which simultaneously defined and exposed supposedly discrete social fields such as ‘crime’, ‘disease’, ‘poverty’, ‘deprivation’, and so on.49 These fields were presented as if they were self-evident and separate aspects of social experience rather than more complex social phenomena that had been as much culturally conjured as quantifiably defined. With the further refinement of the human sciences in the later nineteenth century, this earlier concern to map the external and material features of the physical world turned inwards. Emergent disciplines such as psychology, criminology and psychoanalysis aimed, in their different ways, to apply similar investigative tactics to the internal and invisible world of the mental, the emotional and the relational. Hence by the early twentieth century, attempts to reify the affective impacts of family disruption, however this was defined, seemed, to those concerned to understand delinquency, to be practically possible and totally necessary. That the early twentieth-century search for definitive answers to the questions raised by family disruption continued into the 1960s and beyond suggests, not the incompetence of researchers, but the impossibility of the task they had set themselves. The regular ‘discovery’ of new sources of family disruption meant that the central problem was constantly being redefined and the whole project perpetually enlarged. In other words, the goal posts – in terms of stable definitions of the normal and abnormal family – kept moving. Defective genes, household poverty, unresolved Oedipal crises, war trauma, lax parental discipline, excessive parental discipline, damaging parental absence, damaging parental presence, maternal deprivation, paternal deprivation and many other conflicting variables have all featured in twentieth-century psychosocial texts, where they have been variously accorded major or minor statistical significance. Similarly, these texts tended to identify, albeit often indirectly and obliquely, ever-increasing external threats to inner family life. ‘Traditional’ family dynamics were presented as being disrupted by a now familiar line-up of ‘modern’ culprits where commercial youth cultures, American cinema and indifferent education stood alongside state benefits, working mothers, contraception, divorce reform and others. These social developments ‘undermined’ the family via the essentially liberalising effect they seemed to have upon (girl) children and women in particular. They exposed children to new values and legitimised their challenges to parental authority in ways which could open the door to delinquency. As argued above, such disruption to family dynamics was thought likely

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to have a greater effect on girls’ behaviour than on boys’. Where adult women were concerned, these social developments threatened to allow them to live free of economic and moral dependence on men and marriage by allowing them to manage their reproductive choices and to support themselves financially via their own wages, state benefits and, if the situation arose, divorce settlements. Of course, both the scale of these fears and the impact of these new freedoms were exaggerated. Nevertheless, the idea that ‘modern’ social trends would seriously undermine ‘the family’ by encouraging (girl) children and women to renegotiate their positions within it exerted a powerful and lasting influence in diagnostic literature. William Thomas’s position in his 1923 text The Unadjusted Girl might be taken as typical here. Thomas believed girls and young women (and young European migrants to the US in particular) experienced change in dramatic ways, caught as they were between old moral values and new social practices and unable or unwilling to ‘adjust’. While ‘[a]ll age levels’ were ‘affected by the feeling that much, too much [was] being missed in life’, this ‘unrest’ was ‘felt most by those who have, heretofore, been most excluded from general participation in life – the mature woman and the young girl’, who might express this through ‘despair and depression’ but also ‘in breaking all bounds’. 50 Thomas believed that the modern blurring of traditional boundaries between ‘two types of women’, the one ‘completely good and the other completely bad’, had been caused by ‘the same movement’: ‘a desire to realize their wishes under the changing social conditions’ or, put another way, ‘the release of social energies which could not find their expression under the norms of the past’. Significantly, he embraced this movement (an aspect of his work overlooked within early feminist criminological commentaries51), believing that ‘[a]ny general movement away from social standards implies that these standards are no longer adequate’ and that ‘the life of the past was nothing we wish to perpetuate’. 52 However, he was also concerned to find ways of channelling these new forms of independent young womanhood (and individualism more generally) into new forms of collectivism and community. Thus, ‘the problem of the sexes’, one of five key challenges facing modern society, could best be addressed by finding answers to two questions: ‘how can a maximum of reciprocal response be secured with a minimum of interference in personal interests?’ and ‘[w]hat forms of cooperation between the family and society are most favourable to the normal development of children?’53 Both questions suggested that freewheeling girls should not be given a totally free hand. The ‘Unadjusted Girl’ of the 1920s looked backwards to the

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‘Girl of the Period’ of the 1860s and looked forwards to the ‘New Female Criminal’ of the 1970s in a long narrative that linked girls’ social and sexual freedom to increases in their delinquency. Few commentators thought this a price worth paying whatever the costs. Given this wider context, it is not surprising that the behaviour of adult women as mothers, and girls as future mothers, came under particular scrutiny in texts exploring the links between ‘the family’ and delinquency. John Bowlby made one of the most striking and influential claims in this regard: that those children separated from their mothers for any substantial length of time were more likely to develop disturbed and delinquent personalities. Moreover, the effects of separation could manifest themselves at any time after the event, making it difficult if not impossible to compensate for earlier absences. 54 In an earlier study Bowlby had suggested that up to a third of prostitutes had started life as ‘affectionless’ girls who had suffered prolonged separations from one or both parents.55 Here, then, was an omnipresent challenge to ‘the family’ that was beyond immediate measure, but all the more powerful for its latency. Just as earlier work on the complications of puberty had turned all girls into potential sex delinquents, so this later work on the mysteries of maternal deprivation turned all (future) mothers into potential creators of delinquents. Donald Winnicott, whose experiences as a consultant psychiatrist to war-time evacuation schemes led him to agree strongly with Bowlby, popularised this notion further. Winnicott had very high hopes for the social effects of Bowlby’s findings: Acceptance of the principle to which Bowlby’s statistics point could lead to reduction of anti-social tendencies and the suffering that lies behind them, exactly as vitamin D has lessened the incidence of rickets.56 Cowie and his colleagues reached much the same conclusion nearly two decades later, arguing in their closing recommendations that the best way to deal with delinquency in the long run was to minimise the numbers of children born to ineffective mothers, to foster better standards of mothering by a combination of education, encouragement and coercion, and, as a last resort, to remove children from the care of persistently bad mothers.57 Connections between bad girls, bad mothers and bad families remained close and powerful in modern topologies of delinquency. This emphasis on the primacy of girls’ personal and familial relationships is common to literatures which differ in many other respects.

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Sociologists, for example, with their focus on the structural, the cultural and the economic, were far removed in many ways from psychologists, sociobiologists and psychiatrists. Yet when it came to dealing with issues of gender, the family and the affective, sociology relied on older notions of the natural and the pathological. From the 1930s onwards, sociologists began to develop distinct diagnoses of modern delinquency. Functionalist, subcultural, labelling and strain theories revolutionised constructions of social disorder, but they did this in a way that prioritised boys and men, but almost totally sidelined girls and women. Whereas they were reasonably prominent in medico-psychological and psychiatric and psychoanalytic texts, delinquent girls were conspicuously absent from these new sociological texts, which essentially attempted to understand delinquency in terms of working-class boys’ struggle to achieve status in capitalist societies structured upon systematic inequality. As a means of gaining status, some boys took up the ‘delinquent solution’ and engaged in deviant activities which afforded psychic gain in the form of thrill, risk, prowess and status, and which sometimes afforded material gain in the form of money or goods. Different theorists placed different emphasis on distinct elements of this process: Merton stressed the material instrumentality of property crime, while Cohen and Cloward and Ohlin stressed the less material rewards offered by deviance. 58 Common to all these accounts, however, was the implicit or explicit belief that working-class boys used delinquency as a way of achieving masculinity. As Cohen wrote in 1955: In short, people do not simply want to excel, they want to excel as a man or as a woman, that is to say, in those respects which, in their culture, are symbolic of their respective sex role.59 Social status was thus conflated with ‘full’ masculinity – being independent, being autonomous, having a public presence in public space, holding sway, holding power. Lack of status was in turn conflated with emasculation – being dependent, being weak, having little, holding nothing. These definitions of what it was to have status were seen as effects of attempting to achieve ‘successful’ lives within the terms dictated by liberal capitalist consumerist societies, rather than as self-evident truths. However, while status was seen as constructed, and the search for status seen by many as a misguided journey towards false consciousness, the perception of masculinity with which it was so closely connected was presented as naturalised and its origins not held up to the same scrutiny.

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One of the lasting effects of these approaches was to fix the notion that delinquency was essentially an activity used by boys and young men as a strategy to achieve status, selfhood and manhood. It followed from this that girls and young women had little need of similar ‘delinquent solutions’, and therefore had little place in emerging analyses of such solutions. Girls were assumed not to be subject to the same cultural and economic pressures as boys, and not encouraged or expected to achieve social status in the same terms. Their route to status, selfhood and womanhood took a very different turn, taking girls through processes of relationship, marriage and motherhood which were played out in very different spaces: the family, the domestic, the home. In her 1964 study framed around these assumptions, Ruth Morris found that delinquent girls were more likely to come from broken or disrupted homes, less likely to be conventionally attractive to boys and particularly susceptible, as a result, to relational problems.60 Girls’ proper development, then, did not depend upon their successful public performance within peer groups so much as upon their successful private performance as daughters, partners and parents. Those who found this process difficult might well become delinquent, but their delinquency would be far less likely to take place among groups of other girls and far more likely to be expressed sexually than criminally. Such conclusions assumed much about patterns of girls’ friendships and about their instrumental use of sex. The idea that girls used sex to get what they wanted was used by some writers to challenge more pathologically-based claims about innate sex delinquency. Thomas was an early exponent of this view. While he believed that girls by nature had a greater need than boys of love and affection, he also believed that modern girls were using degrees of sexual persuasion to achieve material and emotional gains. As he put it: ‘[t]heir sex is used as a condition of the realization of other wishes. It is their capital.’61 In a new age of individualism, a girl knew that she ‘should pay something as she goes’ and that ‘she does not pay in cash but in favors’.62 This ‘demoralization’ was the mark of a society in which traditional morality was losing its bargaining power and where it no longer necessarily paid girls to stay pure. It followed that girls did not engage in sex for its own sake or for pleasure. Even to the young prostitute, ‘sexual intercourse [was] something submitted to with some reluctance and embarrassment and something she is glad to be over with’. 63 Forty years later, Gibbens and Prince also wrote of girls’ sexual appeal as a form of capital activated by puberty, which ‘suddenly converts the [disadvantaged] girl from one who feels an underrated child to a person

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with assets which are sought after, and which supply a need for affection as well as things which money can buy’. Sexual waywardness – ‘staying out late, running away, going with undesirable boys or being promiscuous’ – could deliver both affection and material goods, whereas conventional crime was comparatively ‘unrewarding’. 64 Many writers saw this new strategic use of sex by girls and young women as a mark of modernity. For Gladys Hall, the new promiscuity was a new form of prostitution, sanctioned by a new morality. As a result, a young man ‘had opportunities for promiscuous sexual relations with girls from among his own social group’ and would ‘pay for his satisfaction’, as he would pay a prostitute, although with a new form of payment: ‘a gift, or a dinner, or a motor run’. The ‘episode appear[ed] less commercial’ and therefore ‘infinitely more attractive’ than ‘a similar episode with a prostitute’. The fall in professional prostitution in 1930s Britain could therefore be largely explained, according to Hall, by ‘the increase in the number of amateurs’.65 Cecil Bishop – who alleged that modern girls were willing to sell their virginity for the price of a cinema ticket, to the extent that ‘the price that hundreds of girl children now receive for the surrender of what should be their most precious possession ranges from fourpence to a shilling’ – observed that ‘in many cases the girls do not trouble to disguise their irregularities, maintaining that it is now “the thing” to disregard old-fashioned laws of conduct’. 66 Assumptions about girls’ use of sex shaped research on their friendships and subcultures. Where they addressed this issue (and relatively few did), social scientists were heavily reliant on natural scientists’ presumptions that female relationships in both the animal and human worlds were naturally competitive rather than cooperative, and that this competitiveness derived from a deep-seated need to attract and keep a sexual mate. Burt, for example, wrote that, in girls, the ‘social instinct . . . seldom develops into a conscious group-instinct’. 67 It followed from this that girls’ natural asocial tendencies meant that they did not form strong friendship groups or strong subcultural groups, and therefore did not create the social conditions necessary for group-based delinquency to emerge. According to postwar studies, the only exceptions to this occurred when girls became involved as marginal members of male subcultures, where their role was apparently limited to servicing young men in various ways, sexual and otherwise. As Campbell observed in the first of a series of second-wave feminist challenges to this work, such studies implied that such a girl was ‘a complete social isolate except when her body [was] being “used” by boys’, and was ‘able to relate to others only from a horizontal position’. 68

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The first major studies of girls’ subculture completed by McRobbie and Garber in the 1970s agreed that girls’ friendships were distinct from those of boys, that their subcultures were played out in distinct spaces (principally their bedrooms at home), and that much of this was shaped around discussions and fantasies about boys, clothes, make-up and sex.69 However, this work differed from other subcultural studies in several important ways: in demonstrating that girls did indeed create their own cultures; in showing that girls’ friendships consisted of more than a temporary break in hostilities in the battle for boys; and, in illustrating that these friendships, and the gendered commercial culture which in part sustained them, were a resource which allowed working-class girls to construct new notions of what it was to be a woman in the postwar period. New visions of young womanhood also feature strongly in Anne Campbell’s pioneering work. Her interviews with girls in the late 1970s and early 1980s presented a further challenge to traditional criminological and subcultural studies by showing that girls’ perception of status reached above and beyond the sexual, marital and maternal. The domestic role was very important to these girls, but only alongside other values. In Campbell’s words, the working-class girl still aspires to be a ‘coper’ – an attractive wife and mother, certainly, but for all that a character to be reckoned with. She must be a woman who can provide materially and yet does not lose her sense of fun, her ability to ‘have a laugh’. Other values [that are important] are those of loyalty and integrity. The quintessential woman is one who will defend the good name of her friends and family against all-comers and who is prepared openly to challenge anyone, who, by his or her speech or behaviour, belittles her or her acquaintances. Moreover, the girls in these studies were prepared to use delinquent means to achieve these ‘legitimate’ goals. As Campbell put it, ‘being attractive on very low pay may require shoplifting . . . having a laugh may involve breaches of the peace and loyalty may end in physical confrontation’.70 In other words, these girls aspired to become women who were more than simply wives and mothers, and some were willing to use deviant means to achieve these ends. In this model, girls, like boys, appear to use delinquency as a means to achieve a desired identity, but the desired identity is presented in their case as much more social than natural. It is not bound within traditional definitions of womanhood, but constituted through a number of traits, dispositions and characteristics,

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by senses of loyalty, integrity, humour and honour. However, Campbell did not use this argument to dispense with the natural altogether, but rather used it as a way of expanding notions of the ‘quintessential woman’. While Campbell used girls’ words to show that there was more to womanhood than maternalism, she did this by broadening, rather than questioning, essentialist definitions of woman. Campbell’s early study also fell into the old paradigmatic trap of trying to explain why ‘modern’ girls were getting ‘worse’, and why girls’ traditional tendency to conform was being undermined by ‘new’ forces. She argued that girls seem to be taking a much more forceful role in adolescent delinquent groups. No longer content to remain in the background, girls are beginning to instigate and commit many previously ‘male’ crimes. Taking and driving away, burglary and grievous bodily harm are becoming as much female as male enterprises. In the area of violence girls were once content to provide an excuse for male fighting and occasionally to engineer boys into aggressive encounters for vicarious excitement. Today, girls increasingly fight their own battles and take pride in their ability to look after themselves.71 Although Campbell was critical of Freda Adler’s infamous thesis that postwar permissiveness and women’s liberation had led to relaxed social controls and rising female crime, this summary makes these girls look suspiciously like the New Female Criminal incarnate. 72 No longer prepared to live their lives exclusively through the family, and, to use another of Campbell’s phrases, ‘borrowing from boys’ in all directions, such girls were helping to break down some of the fundamental relationships seen as central to traditional social order. Unlike other authors, Campbell, of course, was not unduly alarmed by this. But her implied suggestion that these developments were somehow unprecedented belies a lack of engagement with the broader history of female crime, a lack of engagement typical of the genre within which she was then writing.

Consuming expert diagnoses To chart the twentieth-century production of new expert configurations of delinquency is relatively straightforward. To chart their consumption and application, however, is more difficult given that much of this writing was confined to academic and clinical circles. Certainly, the impact of medical, psychological and sociological research upon juvenile justice

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practice was very much more limited than others have suggested, even after the second world war. Rose’s picture of a juvenile justice system that helped to establish a ‘new psychological jurisdiction’, where legal adjudication became increasingly based upon behavioural disorders, and where children were increasingly dealt with on the basis of the ‘origins of their pathological conduct’ rather than on the basis of their illegal acts, is hard to reconcile with pictures painted by accounts of everyday practice. 73 Juvenile justice personnel, from magistrates to certified school managers to probation officers to social workers, did work with experts where resources allowed, but many remained sceptical and many more remained ignorant of the new diagnostic discourses. Medical and mental examinations were requested by the juvenile courts, but only in the relatively small proportion of cases where children had been ordered to be whipped or committed to a certified school. As relatively few girls were sent to certified schools, and no girls were officially whipped, very few of them underwent specialist examinations beyond the cursory, if highly invasive, gynaecological variety. Medical tests were carried out by doctors, but, in the early twentieth century, mental tests were very often carried out by teachers and educationists rather than by psychologists. London juvenile courts relied on the LCC’s special education committee to investigate children’s backgrounds, and called on ‘expert medical staff’ or on ‘the psychologist’ only if these enquiries proved insufficient.74 Later Home Office plans to set up new state observation centres, which would assist the courts in dealing with difficult cases, were dropped from the 1933 Children Bill on cost grounds.75 In any event, where specialist tests were carried out, the courts often found it difficult to act upon their results because specialist facilities were so scarce. There were few institutions which would accept young offenders who were found to suffer from a mental defect, for example. Children waiting for appropriate vacancies to come up in junior mental deficiency institutions, special certified schools, or borstals for those with ‘low-grade mentality’ overcrowded the remand homes. In 1941, London magistrates suggested that it would be ‘helpful’ if doctors ‘would bear these [problems] in mind’ when making their psychological assessments for the courts.76 In short, identifying children as mentally defective or disturbed and providing for them within the juvenile justice system was expensive, time-consuming and confounded by a shortage of appropriate accommodation. Specialist discourses did have their prominent practitioner supporters. Penal reformer Margery Fry, radical magistrates William Clarke Hall and Mrs St Loe Strachey, chief inspector of London schools Dr C.W. Kimmins, pressure group the Howard League, as well as members of the Home

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Office Children’s Branch and of the newly established Child Guidance Council and the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency were just some of those who pushed for the expansion of psychological, psychoanalytic and child-centred work within juvenile justice in the interwar period.77 But specialists also had their detractors. Judicial officers were commonly sceptical about ‘fads and cranks’. 78 Cecil Chapman, a leading London magistrate, opposed the practice of using specially trained magistrates for children’s cases, believing that such a person ‘would tend to get one-sided, perhaps faddist’ and that once ‘his bias or fads’ were known to people, there would be ‘much more chance of their being able to take advantage of him’.79 Others were openly critical. Henry Waddy, another London magistrate, thought that Freudian approaches which related delinquency to sex were ‘both fanciful and mischievous, and even a trifle nasty . . . especially when these suggestions are passed on to the children themselves’. 80 Criminologist Edward Glover recorded how his early 1920s address to magistrates on the importance of psychoanalysis in understanding crime simply ‘fell flat’.81 Writing in the 1930s, Dora Russell complained that ‘ideas that are commonplaces to the mind of the psychologist still seem fantastic to the mind of a judge’.82 These kinds of attitudes actively inhibited the development of psychological research in Britain. Cyril Burt, Helen Richardson, John Cowie, Trevor Gibbens and others did base their published work on institutionally derived case studies, but on the whole, and by contrast to their American and continental European counterparts, British clinical psychologists were rarely employed as permanent staff, and rarely able to conduct major research projects, in juvenile justice institutions.83 Of the approved schools studied by Richardson, for example, none appointed a trained psychologist until 1957. 84 Psychologists were briefly employed from 1913 at Montefiore House, the Jewish girls’ industrial school, although their consultative remit was limited to dealing with ‘problem’ girls. The contract of one woman psychologist employed there (on the recommendation of Cyril Burt) was cut short when staff complained that her private talks with the girls were superseding their authority and that the girls’ behaviour had deteriorated since she had arrived.85 Grace Pailthorpe experienced similar difficulties in her research in the 1920s. Staff at one rescue home objected to her focus on one particular girl, claiming that the ‘other girls would be jealous’ and that ‘it took too much time from her work’. They also objected to her interviewing girls who were not ‘mentally defective or border-line cases’, and directed her to ‘the cases which cause the most trouble’.86 Mannheim summed up reformers’ complaints: probation officers, child

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guidance workers and psychologists were ‘tragically hampered by the absence of suitable institutions’ in which they could work effectively with young clients. The network of girls’ after-care hostels and rescue homes might have provided such therapeutic spaces, but were instead used primarily as ‘an insurance against unwelcome pregnancies’. 87 As earlier chapters have shown, moreover, many girls’ institutions both certified and otherwise continued to organise their reforming efforts in religious terms until at least the second world war. In the 1940s, the LCC refused requests from women graduate students from Oxford and Cambridge universities to undertake psychological research in its remand homes. The council stated that research permission could not be extended to psychologists working outside its own service as the children in the remand homes were still subject to legal proceedings. 88 In other instances, the medical profession refused to cooperate with juvenile court requests for psychological profiles of individual defendants. In 1938, doctors at the Maudsley Mental Hospital refused to provide a London court with information about voluntary child patients without parental consent, even though it was argued that they had a responsibility under the 1933 Children Act to do so. Justifying the decision, the Chief Officer of the LCC Mental Hospitals Department invoked the right of the voluntary child patient to privacy.89 And lastly, but crucially, experts also faced rarely documented resistance from their young clients themselves. John Cowie alluded briefly to the difficulties he experienced when conducting individual psychiatric interviews with girls at the Magdalen Hospital Classifying School in the late 1950s, who were ‘distractable’, ‘avoid[ed] direct gaze, and fidget[ed] in the chair’, and who could be ‘negativistic, sullen and aggressive, or gay, frivolous, coquettish’.90 A 1945 Home Office publication describes a rather more unambiguous encounter between a psychiatrist and a 16-year-old approved school girl: ‘Do you know what I wished to talk to you about?’, asked the psychiatrist. ‘Yes’, replied the girl. ‘You want to test my reactions. Well here’s one!’ and then ‘walked out of the room and slammed the door’.91 The human sciences were, of course, popularised to a degree in the early twentieth century, particularly so after the second world war. Training programmes for voluntary and statutory child welfare workers became more common in the interwar period, and the fields of probation and social work developed their own formal qualification systems which required knowledge of the social and human sciences.92 A number

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of guides were published and a few radio series broadcast which aimed to help teachers and parents identify and deal with delinquent behaviour.93 Official reports on delinquency produced by the Home Office, the Board of Education, London County Council and other local authorities helped to introduce certain psychological concepts to a wider readership, particularly since they tended to attract media attention.94 However, new languages sat alongside old languages in these reports: for example, a 1938 Children’s Branch publication feared that ‘emotionally unstable’ girls would drift into ‘moral disaster’ or ‘indecent or immoral habits’.95 And media coverage often reduced complex psychological analyses to single-phrase headlines. The arguments of one 1937 LCC report which gained extensive media coverage were reduced to ‘Bad Influence Of GetAll-We-Can-People’ in one popular newspaper, and to ‘Laxity in Modern Homes’ in another. 96 The press, both quality and popular, seized upon the more sensational aspects of juvenile crime and generated diagnoses of its own. American films, crime fiction, café culture, one-arm bandits, war disruption, women teachers, absent fathers, working mothers and the banning of the birch all had their day as key causes of delinquency. In the postwar period, growing interest in infant development and the effects of various deprivations upon it was one of the most effective means by which psychomedical discourses came to shape everyday experience. Yet, positive reviews of books by Bowlby and Winnicott were published in professional journals such as Social Service alongside articles lamenting the ‘decline of manners’, explaining the rise of rudeness in terms of a damaging ‘reshuffle of moral and social conceptions’ in which ‘old moral standards are replaced by any workable alternative’ and warning that it was folly to ‘eschew religion unless one has found an equally effective moral gyroscope’.97 Home Office officials investigating the steep rise in juvenile prosecutions in the years immediately following the second world war asked those working at the sharp end of youth justice – education officers, approved school managers, probation officers, chief constables and justices’ clerks – whether ‘any identifiable shortterm factor had come into being’ which might explain this. Answers covered familiar ground, variously blaming young people’s ‘worsening’ behaviour on moral malaise, lack of respect, falling standards of conduct, failure to correct bad behaviour and modern temptations. 98 One other overview of explanations for the same postwar rise in youth crime presented a list of ‘scapegoats’ which included: Dick Barton; and the BBC for putting on such a programme; children’s comics; the Church, for failing to do its duty – often undefined; too

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much money; too little money; too much leisure; too few policemen; parents, teachers, schools; overcrowding; poverty; illegitimacy; the law, for being too lenient; divorce, for being too easy or too difficult to get; the modern generation for being what it is; and not least (and quite rightly so), the effects of war. 99 While expert discursive configurations both drew from and reshaped popular beliefs about delinquency, their impact upon juvenile justice practice was much more fragmented and contested than might first appear. Nevertheless, their importance as creators of modern knowledges of delinquency and modern knowledges of ‘proper’ gender relations is clearly very considerable. These diagnoses of girls’ delinquency stressed the importance of managing both the natural and the social. They therefore combined the sociobiological and the sociorelational. Girls’ pubescent bodies had to be managed and their sexual energies safely channelled. Their relationships with their families, particularly with their mothers, had to be strengthened. Their relationships to the wider culture, particularly to those things that threatened to undermine the traditional bases of their conformity, had to be carefully negotiated. These texts were also therefore marked by particular combinations of continuity and change, of the static and the dynamic. The physical body of the ‘modern’ girl, apparently unlike her predecessors, was presented as being beset and besieged by the pressures of modernity. Commercially fuelled, media-driven, urban-based sexual cultures were pushing girls towards greater degrees of sexual delinquency. Girls’ traditional tendency to conform was presented as facing serious and unprecedented threats. Good girls would be those who learnt how to resist these, but bad girls, already weakened by pathological, personal and social circumstances, would be those who succumbed. If too many succumbed, then traditional social orders – the gender order, the generational order, the sexual order, the racial order, the domestic order – could crumble. This sense of the ‘new’ pressures facing ‘modern’ girls featured in studies completed as far apart as the 1910s and the 1970s. Very few of these linked ever-widening definitions of the threats facing girls to the ever-widening network of regulation created by the expansion of the juvenile justice and care systems. Very few of them really questioned the basic assumptions which underlay continual cultural and judicial attempts to police girls’ morality. And very few read the apparently changing behaviour of modern girls as positive challenges to traditional orders rather than as threats to undermine them.

7 Redefining

The history of girls and the twentieth-century juvenile justice system is a history more than usually marked by both continuity and change. Old behaviours were constantly transformed by new explanations and old methods of reform constantly transmuted by new rationales. Girls were, for some, ‘always’ getting ‘worse’, while measures to deal with them were, for others, ‘always’ getting ‘better’. Any summary of the broad developments covered in this book needs to try to capture something of the dynamic senses of time that were present in this, or indeed any, historical ‘period’. It needs to show how the choices made and actions performed by all the actors involved in the multiple processes that constituted ‘the’ juvenile justice system, from the highest official to the lowest young shoplifter, were shaped by both individual and collective senses of pasts, presents and futures. Those working to reform the twentieth-century juvenile justice system were working within a framework that had been largely set down in the nineteenth, but which differed in a number of respects. The establishment of separate juvenile courts in 1908 cemented the longer-term development of distinct judicial procedures for children. The creation of new custodial spaces – borstals in 1908, approved schools in 1933, and remand homes, attendance centres, and detention centres in 1948 – continued an older search for half-way houses between the unsuitable spaces of bad homes and adult prisons. In the same way, the development of probation schemes and police cautioning schemes from 1907 onwards formalised existing efforts to keep young offenders, especially girls, out of court and out of custody, even whilst the expansion of care orders aimed to bring more non-offending children into court for their own protection. The employment of a range of child welfare professionals by local and central government made new inroads into 162

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a sphere previously dominated by voluntary networks, but notably did not seek to destroy the crucial public–private partnership upon which the day-to-day delivery of youth justice services depended. The creation of distinct local and central administrative spaces for the management of child welfare – the Home Office Children’s Branch in 1913 and local authority children’s departments from 1948 – furthered the development of ever-more specialised governmental domains. Taken together, these broad developments within the juvenile justice system changed the policing of girls in a number of ways. The creation of child-centred facilities and the development of protective legislation brought more delinquent and neglected girls into the judicial system. Once in the system, however, they presented an immediate and lasting problem to it. Although purportedly child-centred, juvenile justice philosophy and facilities continued to be modelled around the perceived needs and natures of boys. Girls complicated matters in all kinds of ways, as this book has shown. Always a minority, their mere physical presence in police stations, remand homes and juvenile courts caused a disruption to the ‘normal’ running of these institutions, a disruption which was magnified even further if they also happened, as many were, to be found to have been sexually active, pregnant, suffering from a sexually transmitted disease or the victims of sexual abuse. Through its care and protection and other proceedings, the juvenile justice system encouraged and sometimes commanded girls to tell their stories, but then struggled to accommodate what was told, especially if those stories were of a certain sexual kind. The sexually knowing girl challenged everything from a court’s toilet arrangements to its conventions of giving evidence and its presumptions of childish and female innocence. Those girls who were committed to custody posed further problems. It was difficult to create institutions that could accommodate the many differences observed to divide them, yet practically difficult, too, to further subdivide a group that was already, in comparison to boys, very small. Even where this question was settled, it remained difficult to maintain a traditional reform regime for girls based on domestic training during a period which saw the decline of domestic service, the expansion of girls’ educational and employment opportunities and an opening up of the whole question of what it meant to be a ‘modern girl’. The disciplining of unruly elements posed another problem for institutional staff, given the formal restraints on the physical punishment of girls and a certain unease surrounding the strategic pathologisation of ‘defective’ or otherwise disruptive girls.

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The perceived problems of keeping girls in custody helped to justify the continuing influence of private policing in the modern juvenile justice system. Although the work of the mainly religious rescue sector was subject to new levels of state regulation in the period 1900–50 and much of its work taken over by formally appointed school attendance officers, probation officers, women police officers and social workers, this sector remained very powerful within the policing of girls. Its culturally familiar network of charitable shelters, homes and hostels was at times clearly favoured by the police, public, parents and magistrates alike over the formal services of the juvenile justice system which seemed so much more suited to training the bodies of boys. Its survival kept older girls out of the courts and out of formal custody, and while it was doubtless a valuable resource for some girls, it subjected very many others to regulation without rights. The postwar workings of this sector would certainly seem to be a fruitful area for future historical investigation. The sexual policing of girls practised by so many of these charities and by so many juvenile justice agencies has in many ways dominated this book. Indeed, it is difficult to see how any history of a juvenile justice system which ordered routine gynaecological examinations of young shoplifters, separated girls by degree of sexual knowledge, saw sexually active girls as endangered, excluded many infected or pregnant girls from its institutions, and defined girls’ citizenship in terms of marriage and motherhood, could fail to emphasise this hyper-sexualisation of girls. But why was this? And, equally importantly, how can the notion of ‘sexual’ policing be expanded in ways that demonstrate its diversity and its relationship to other forms of censure? As this book has shown, the sexualisation of girls’ delinquency was a complex phenomenon. Evidence presented here suggests that girls were rarely brought to public attention (as defined in statutory or voluntary terms) as a result of sexual delinquency if that is to be defined simply as actual or potential sexual activity outside marriage. Rather, they were much more likely to be subject to some kind of external intervention if their actual or potential sexual activities were accompanied by one or more of the following factors: their parents, relatives, guardians or neighbours judged these to be shameful or had themselves been subject to outside ‘moral’ scrutiny; they had proved defiant in other ways by staying out late or spending their money on particular goods or choosing certain kinds of clothes, hair-styles and accessories, and so on; they had committed another offence (status or otherwise) such as theft or running away; their intimacies involved men or boys judged to be unsuitable or dangerous; their sexual experiences had been forced upon them, or had

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resulted in bodily infection or pregnancy. To examine ‘sexual’ policing in these more varied terms is to broaden definitions of the sexual in this context and thereby to free it from what can be restrictive and overly essentialist associations. In short, the often-stated view that girls were subject to ‘welfare policing’ because of concerns to curb their ‘sexual misdemeanours’ can conceal the many forms which both of these could and did take. To say that sexualisation is more complex than first appears is by no means to minimise its centrality. Indeed, the very complexity, mutability and flexibility of this process perhaps explain why it has played such an enduring part in this history. What lay behind this deep-seated and on-going concern to intervene in the private lives, moral choices and sexual practices of working-class girls? For one thing, the private sexual choices of this social group had very public ramifications. For another, moral management lay at the heart of the modern welfare project and its engagement with modern democratic capitalism. This moral management was bound up with the regulation, from the early nineteenth century onwards, of the realm of the economic which, in turn and necessarily, helped to establish the realm of the social. In other words, early social policy was policy which sought to regulate what to bourgeois eyes were the excesses of capital: its preference for cheap labour, its tendency, therefore, to employ women and children over men, its capacity, as a result, to turn the traditionally gendered world upside down. This economic regulation was cast as a moral issue, both by those who campaigned for it and those who eventually acceded to it. Of course, boys as well as girls were targeted by laws controlling child labour, but, as this book has shown, anxieties and hostilities raised by the linkage of girls with certain forms of paid work were more acute. Working girls with money to spend did not spend their time at home. And even if their lower wages meant that they were not financially independent, they were certainly less dependent on marriage for their future security than girls who stayed at home. Working girls lived closer to the moral edge than working boys. The economic and the moral were also inseparable within later shapings of child welfare policy. Liberal societies judged their own liberality in terms of the way they treated those who could not work to support themselves. Policies providing (albeit at very meagre levels) for those sections of the working class who were old, sick, disabled or young, were the bedrock of the modern welfare state. Where children were concerned, however, this provision was presented both as a moral imperative and as an economic investment which would ensure future

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industrial, national and imperial strength and, by extension, future social stability. Between them, policies establishing a range of state-funded and state-monitored minimum services for children in the fields of education, poor relief, health and hygiene, established a new framework of rights and responsibilities for children and families. The 1908 Children Act and the new juvenile justice system were a product of this gradual reconfiguration of the relationship between the state, households and children which ushered in a new politics of citizenship. As this book has shown, this new politics of citizenship was predicated upon notions of difference but conducted in the language of the universal. Gender difference was not, of course, the only significant difference here. But it was a difference that, unlike others, was firmly and formally institutionalised within state educational, protective and judicial policies. These policies may have been introduced in the name of the child, but they routinely drew divisions between types of children, most consistently and openly between girls and boys. Girls and boys could strengthen the nation in different ways, but could also weaken it in different ways. This is one reason why girls’ private sexual choices were subject to such close scrutiny by both statutory and voluntary agencies. Good choices appeared to produce strong families, healthy children and strong states. Bad choices appeared to threaten all of these. It would be wrong to suggest, as many histories of the welfare state perhaps tend to do, that early twentieth-century social policy, and childrelated policy in particular, was driven only by grand and calculating concerns about future national and imperial strength, by a no-nonsense quest for rational national efficiency. The broad juvenile justice reforms introduced in this period and outlined earlier were certainly made possible by a number of connected macro-processes: the expansion of the state’s willingness to manage the social much more directly and the expansion of its ability, not least as a result of the two world wars, to undertake such management. Yet, as this book has shown, these reforms and this state intervention were also very much driven by more traditional, local, charitable, spiritual and familial values. Efforts to regulate working-class girls were generated at least as much by a concern to preserve past socio-moral standards and individual, family and community reputations, as by a more abstract concern for future national economic development. Of course, questions of reputation, honour and shame were themselves bound up with the economic, but with a notion of the economic which was more local than national, more private than public. In short, girls with bad sexual reputations would damage their families’ name. They would find it harder to make a good marriage in an age

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when good marriages were still widely seen as working-class girls’ main means of social mobility. Girls with bad sexual reputations were also sinners in the eyes of many, and moreover, sinners who gambled with the riches of the afterlife unless they repented. The policing of girls was therefore lived out as a recurring melodrama as well as an exercise in social management. This applied just as much to the public officials involved as to private organisations and private individuals. And it applied just as much to the mid-twentieth century as it did to its earlier decades. The more neutral terminology of the 1930s onwards which described delinquent girls as ‘being beyond control’, ‘lacking proper parental control’ or ‘being in need of care or protection’ rather than as having ‘knowledge of evil’ or ‘immoral antecedents’ may suggest that a new language of management had displaced an older language of melodrama. Yet these new terms were applied to girls whose cases continued to be presented as sensational stories of ruin and rescue, shame and dishonour, passion and betrayal, secrecy, suspense and scandal. Delinquent and neglected girls were subject to outside intervention because they were thought of as sinners and Cinderellas as well as citizens. In other words, to enforce new care and protection regulations within the modern welfare state was in part to engage in an older cultural struggle between good and evil, to enact an older morality play about saving the fallen and falling girl. And to use the new liberal language of welfare rights was to maintain older gender relations, the very relations which gave matters of shame, honour and sex their continuing potency. In this way, the modern state perpetuated the moral policing of girls during a century which has been celebrated for its emancipation of women and for its relaxation of ‘old-fashioned’ moral standards. The state was able to do this in the name of modernity, civility and liberality because it claimed to do this in the name of the child, and of the child’s right to protection – new terms which at first glance appear to denote a new social project, but which were in fact rooted in older stories and were conceptually sustained by older values. There is a simple but very important point to be drawn from this: that regulatory and disciplinary discourses have a dynamic and continual history, a history that is never adequately framed within neat periodisations or neat transitional models that track shifts from the punitive to the progressive, from punishment to welfare. Such models are commonly found in histories of juvenile justice written from more exclusively political and policy sources.1 This book, by contrast, has attempted to show that the treatment of girls, long associated with welfare rather than punishment, has been, for all that, just as punitive. To equate

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‘welfare’ with diversion, informal justice and more relaxed custodial regimes, and ‘punishment’ with formal justice, corporal punishment and harsh, military-style custodial regimes is misleading. It is to assume that ‘punishment’ was inflicted only in certain judicial spaces and only upon certain (male) bodies, and to ignore the fact that children could be, and were, treated just as harshly in ‘safer’ spaces, such as charitable children’s homes, girls’ training homes, foster homes, probation hostels, and so on. Given this, this book has aimed to show how girls (and boys) were not placed in rigid regimes which aimed either to protect them or to punish them, but rather were located within a disciplinary continuum sustained in part by the very adaptability of its languages and practices.2 To stress the importance of continuums and continuities here is not to suggest, as still other accounts have tended to do, that once modern forms of monitoring, regulation and surveillance were put in place they exercised an enduring and unchanging power. Instead, it is to argue that historians of governmentality in all its forms must be alert to the ways in which disciplinary tactics change over time, to be alive, as Rose has recently argued, to the multiple ways in which modern power subjects in the name of freedom.3 This book has shown how changes within early twentieth-century juvenile justice helped to create a system full of ambiguities. In effect it both centred and decentred the child. It required children to speak at certain times while requiring their silence at others; it sought to draw some children into the courts while seeking to divert others; it sought to place some vulnerable children under a watchful statutory eye, while turning a blind eye to the private policing of others; it extended children’s right to protection while extending the possibilities for their regulation; it tried to make room for certain of the new freedoms claimed by modern girls while trying to make sure that these freedoms did not threaten wider social order. These ambiguities testify, in many ways, to a genuine struggle within twentieth-century social policy. This struggle was a product of competing definitions of the nature of rights and the nature of responsibilities, and of competing views as to how a liberal democratic state should set about economic, social and moral management. How could cycles of poverty and crime be broken? How could bad parenting be made better? How could rights and responsibilities be more properly balanced? How should those without a wage be supported? How should entitlements to basic services be defined? What, indeed, should those basic services be? How should bad girls who had not committed a crime be dealt with by juvenile courts? Conventional histories of the twentieth-century welfare

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state and criminal justice system can give the impression that this struggle was won, at least temporarily in the mid-twentieth century, by a broadly defined liberal camp, who, helped greatly by the democratising effects of the two world wars and the postwar welfare settlement, succeeded in removing the more coercive elements of public policy. Indeed, the heavy-handed sexual policing of young women has become truly emblematic of ‘the bad old days’, a time in which, as contemporary documentaries, articles and oral histories frequently remind us, young women could be certified as mentally defective simply for having sex outside marriage. By contrast, the ‘better days’ of the postwar period are seen to have produced judicial and welfare systems which were no longer shaped by the old oppressive obsessions to promote national, imperial and white supremacy and to eliminate degenerative, defective and immoral populations. This view would be rightly questioned by more culturally-based histories of social management in the postwar period. The questions raised by the history of gender and justice presented in this book need to be put to late twentieth-century developments. How were girls policed in the postwar ‘permissive’ society? How did the management of children in need and children in trouble change in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s – the age of second-wave feminism and other liberation and civil rights movements? Certainly, much has already been written on this by criminologists, sociologists and other social scientists who have tracked the major trends within postwar youth justice: the further diversification and then declining use of custody; the similar expansion and then declining use of the care order; the increase in diversionary strategies such as cautioning, intermediate treatment and community supervision; the elevation of social workers over magistrates; the reform and eventual replacement of the juvenile court by a ‘family proceedings court’ and a ‘youth court’ dealing respectively with care and criminal cases. These developments have generally been discussed with close reference to the Children Acts of 1948, 1969 and 1989 and to the battles between writers of major reports, notably the 1960 Ingleby Committee report, the 1964 Labour Party report, Crime: A Challenge to Us All, and the 1965 and 1968 Labour government white papers, The Child, the Family and the Young Offender and Children in Trouble.4 A smaller number of valuable criminological studies have looked at the experience of girls in the postwar juvenile justice system. These have shown how girls continued to enter the courts in far smaller numbers than boys, to form a persistently small yet persistently troublesome

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proportion of juveniles in custody, and to be more readily diagnosed as suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They have also shown that the sexual policing of girls, variously defined, remained as pronounced as ever. Separate studies have shown that girls’ delinquency was still configured in terms of their need for care and protection, still explained in terms of their personal unhappiness, unsettled family life and sexual promiscuity, and that new strategies, such as intermediate treatment and needs-led assessment, continued to prioritise girls’ need for a stable intimate life. 5 These kinds of sexualisation need however to be analysed alongside the relaxation of both older moral cultures and older youth custodial regimes: girls’ juvenile justice institutions from the 1960s onwards allowed their inmates many more notional freedoms regarding, for example, clothes, cigarettes, music and visits, than their pre-war counterparts.6 The view of many of these criminological studies – that postwar British penal-welfare practices continued to be shaped by a strong need to regulate female sexuality – could be usefully qualified by closer attention to the differences and similarities between definitions of sexual delinquencies in the early and late twentieth century. Such an exercise would help to show how modern intimacies may have been transformed whilst still being shaped by particular constraints. 7 What is still needed, then, are studies of the broader cultural, social, economic and political justifications of this sexual policing in an age more generally known for its sexual liberation. How was the policing of girls affected by the growing use of contraception and abortion; the greater acceptance of teenage motherhood; the rediscovery of sexual abuse; the modern work of traditional child-saving charities; the spread of drug cultures; the growth of a multi-ethnic population; the increase in young homelessness; the rising use of school exclusions; the reconfiguration of the juvenile justice system and the emergence of new female folk-devils ranging from boom girls to Essex girls to riot grrls? How did such developments inform the regulation of boys? How, in short, can questions of policing and permissiveness in the postwar period be worked into broader histories of gender and governmentality? As this book has shown, the policing of girls took many forms in the first half of the twentieth century. It was conducted by many agencies, effected within a range of spaces and deployed a variety of tactics. Parents, philanthropists, social scientists, the police, public officials and ordinary people worked alongside each other (and often against each other) to define and reform wayward and vulnerable girls. Yet for all their diversity, however, efforts to regulate girls displayed a certain unity of purpose which extended across the period covered here and beyond. They

Redefining 171

commonly placed sexual proprieties, variously defined, at the centre of definitions of girls’ delinquency. They commonly read these improprieties as a warning of greater impending social calamity. And, whether they were operating in 1900 or 1950, they ultimately aimed to preserve familiar generational and gender orders which ‘modern’ society and its bad girls appeared to place under siege. But how was this consensus held in place? How did it survive across the times and spaces considered here? How might it be possible to conceptualise continuities and connectivities of power without simply returning to older metanarrative notions of patriarchy? For the record, it is important to note that earlier second-wave feminist debates around patriarchy were very much less singular and very much more subtle than later dismissive characterisations of them have suggested. That subtlety was derived from their attempt to make sense of the complicated and shifting relationships between different forms of power (albeit often cast as different forms of oppression) and to understand the different effects that these forms of power had upon the lives of different groups of women (though less commonly upon different groups of girls). The effects of labour processes, reproductive processes, legal processes, racialising processes, psychic processes, cultural processes, and so on have all been examined by feminist historians and theorists, who have variously emphasised the importance of the economy, the body, the psyche, law, custom and social institutions in shaping women’s experiences of the world. Indeed, in focusing on different sources of power (or different sources of oppression), feminist histories quickly moved away from more singular notions of patriarchy to stress the importance of difference over sameness. In the process, the very concept of a unified category ‘woman’ was rightly called into question, in ways which for some caused the untimely collapse of feminist history writing but for others allowed the opening of new radical conceptualisations of identities, power and social processes. 8 While endorsing the post-Foucauldian proliferation of discourses of power, this book raises the question of the reworkings of traditional gender orders across a century commonly celebrated as the first to have seriously ‘liberated’ women. The history of the policing of girls could be written as the uncomplicated rise of democratic liberalism and welfarism, which together delivered a more humane and just society in which the daughters of the poor were simply given the social assistance to which they were entitled as citizens. Alternatively, and as this book has shown, it can be written as a history of highly gendered modern disciplinary power that charts the actions of an interventionist state predicated

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upon heavily gendered notions of the social, of a welfare state which defined need and entitlement in relation to idealised nuclear families headed by male workers, of juvenile justice institutions where models of girls’ reform remained dominated by the domestic, of psychologists who believed girls’ misplaced desires for sex to be the root cause of their deviance, of Christian philanthropy which cast premarital sex as a sin whose social consequences weighed more heavily upon girls, and of families – from a number of ethnicities, nationalities and faiths – where the micro-politics of shame were played out through the management of girls’ sexual lives and social reputations. Rigid concepts of patriarchy and hegemony have been rightly called into question by feminists and others. But, faced with such a catalogue of past activities, not to mention the continuing fascination with genderbreaking bad girls, it is difficult to accept that the analysis of enduring patterns of gendered power, patterns sustained by a combination of economic and cultural, material and moral factors, no longer has a place in historical and social research. History might help here in more ways than one. This book has shown how successive generations have experienced delinquency as ‘new’, and how, far from seeing delinquency and their reactions to it as part of some grand narrative, they have tended to see it as unique to them and their time. Specific narratives tend, then, to supplant metanarratives. This particular sense of time could well be particular to modernity and could be connected to the very creation of the social sphere itself. The idea that futures could be managed and past mistakes put right, so vital to social action of all kinds, depends, after all, on the notion of segmented and discontinuous time. In the same way, the power of conventional gender orders has been asserted and experienced in a continuous yet discontinuous way. The ongoing story of the policing of girls in free societies shows this only too well. As long as there are conventional gender orders to disturb, bad girls will have the power to disrupt.

Notes

1

Defining

1 M. Rutter, H. Giller and A. Hagell, Antisocial Behaviour by Young People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); M. Morrison, ‘Rising Tide of Female Violence’, Daily Mail, 12 November 1996; P. Johnston, ‘Girls are Turning to Violent Crime’, Daily Telegraph, 16 October 1998. 2 R. Carroll, ‘Gangs Put Boot into Old Ideas of Femininity: The Violent Side of Girl Power’, The Guardian, 22 July 1998. 3 Morrison, ‘Rising Tide of Female Violence’. 4 J. Clark, ‘Nightmare of the Bully Girls Culture’, Daily Mail, 5 June 1997; Morrison, ‘Rising Tide of Female Violence’; R. Carroll, ‘Gangs Put Boot into Old Ideas of Femininity’. See also Anon, ‘Girl Gang Beat Me Senseless Because I Was New’, Daily Mail, 30 September 1996; J. Hardy, ‘Girl Gangs Pack Prisons in Crisis’, The Mirror, 10 July 1998, and many other reports from the mid-1990s onwards. For assessment of this panic, see K. Thompson, Moral Panics (London: Routledge, 1998) pp. 111–20; S. Batchelor, ‘The Myth of Girl Gangs’, Criminal Justice Matters, 43 (2001) 26–7. 5 H.D. Willcock, Mass Observation Report on Juvenile Delinquency (London: Falcon Press, 1949) p. 40. 6 Report of Joint Select Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Bill and Sexual Offences Bill, 1918, evidence of Mr Neville MP, p. 39. 7 LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/177/2 London County Council inspector’s report on Sunderland Girls’ Reformatory, 1918. 8 Oxford Times, 1888, cited in S. Alexander, ‘St Giles’ Fair’, History Workshop Pamphlet, 2 (1970) p. 12. 9 E.L. Linton, ‘The Girl of the Period’, Saturday Review 25 (1868), cited in M. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses (London: Robson, 1985) p. 132. 10 See R.M. Alexander, The ‘Girl Problem’: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1995) p. 1. She explains the emergence of the female sex delinquent in terms of modern girls’ ‘selfconscious’ rejection of the behavioural and moral values of the nineteenth century and substitution of ‘self-assertion and conspicuous heterosexuality for deference and sexual purity’. 11 The 1879 Summary Jurisdiction Act, which extended earlier statutes of 1847, 1850 and 1855, brought under summary jurisdiction all children under 12 charged with any indictable offence except murder or manslaughter and all juveniles under 16 consenting to be tried summarily. 12 F. Hunt (ed.), Lessons For Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women 1850–1950 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987); C. Dyhouse, Girls Growing up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1981); J. Rowbotham, Good Girls Make Good Wives: Guidance For Girls in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); R. Auchmuty, A World of Girls: The Appeal of the Girls’ 173

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School Story (London: Women’s Press, 1992); P. Tinkler, Constructing Girlhood: Popular Magazines for Girls Growing up in England 1920–1950 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995); A. Davin, Growing up Poor: Home, School and Street in London 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram, 1996); C. Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780–1930 (London: Virago, 1995); L. Johnson, The Modern Girl. Girlhood and Growing up (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1993); C. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England, 1920–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) esp chs 3 and 4; T. Proctor, On Their Honour: Guides and Scouts in Interwar Britain (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002). 13 L. Mahood, Policing Gender: Class and Family Britain, 1800–1945 (London: UCL Press, 1995); L. Mahood and B. Littlewood, ‘The “Vicious Girl” and the “Street-Corner Boy”: Sexuality and the Gendered Delinquent in the Scottish Child-Saving Movement, 1850–1940’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 (1994) 549–78; A. Davies, ‘“These Viragoes Are No Less Cruel Than the Lads”: Young Women, Gangs and Violence in Late Victorian Manchester and Salford’, British Journal of Criminology, 39 (1999) 72–89; and ‘Young Gangs, Gender and Violence, 1870–1900’, in S. D’Cruze (ed.), Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850–1950: Gender and Class (Harlow: Longman, 2000), pp. 70–88; M. Cale, ‘Girls and the Perception of Sexual Danger in the Victorian Reformatory School System’, History, 78 (1993) 201–17. See also P. Cox, ‘Rescue and reform: girls, delinquency and industrial schools 1908–1933’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge (1997); B. Blythe, ‘The Borstal System For Girls, 1908–1948’, unpub. MA thesis, University of Essex (1998); A. Cox, ‘Defining and Controlling the Female Juvenile Delinquent: Burford House 1950–1970’, unpub. MPhil thesis, University of Cambridge (2000). 14 L.A. Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England (London: Routledge, 2000); and ‘“Singing Birds as well as Soap Suds”: The Salvation Army’s Work with Sexually Abused Girls in Edwardian England’, Gender and History 12 (2000) 107–26; P. Bartley, Prostitution. Prevention and Reform in England 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 2000). 15 For the period 1750–1900, key texts include P. King and J. Noel, ‘The Origins of the “Problem of Juvenile Delinquency”: The Growth of Juvenile Prosecutions in London in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Criminal Justice History, 14 (1993) 17–41; P. King, ‘The Rise of Juvenile Delinquency in England, 1780–1840: Changing Patterns of Perception and Prosecution’, Past and Present, 160 (1998) 116–66; H. Shore, Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth Century England (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 1999); ‘Cross Coves, Buzzers and General Sorts of Prigs: Juvenile Crime and the Criminal “Underworld” in the Early Nineteenth Century’, British Journal of Criminology, 39 (1999) 10–24; and ‘The Trouble with Boys: Gender and the “Invention” of the Juvenile Offender in the Early Nineteenth Century’, in M. Arnot and C. Usborne (eds), Gender and Crime in Modern Europe (London: UCL Press, 1999) 75–92. For the period 1900–1950, key texts include V. Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the Young Offender 1914–48 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); G. Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillan, 1983); S. Humphries, Hooligans or Rebels?: An Oral History of Working Class Childhood and Youth 1889–1939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981). For an overview of literature on the

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19

20

21

22

post-war period, see G. Pearson, ‘Youth, Crime and Society’, and L. Gelsthorpe and A. Morris, ‘Juvenile Justice 1945–1992’, in M. Maguire et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Pearson, Hooligan p. 209. See also S. Cohen, Folk-Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: McGibbon and Kee, 1972). Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship. For feminist critique of this literature, see F. Heidensohn, Women and Crime (London: Macmillan, 1985 and 2nd edn 1996) ch. 1, and Campbell, Girl Delinquents ch. 2. For a general overview, see D. Downes and P. Rock, Understanding Deviance: A Guide to the Sociology of Crime and Rule Breaking, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Pearson, ‘Youth, Crime and Society’; T. Newburn, ‘Youth, Crime and Justice’, in M. Maguire et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) pp. 613–60. See, for example, M. Chesney-Lind, ‘Juvenile Delinquency: The Sexualisation of Female Crime’, Psychology Today, 8 (1974) 43–6; D. Klein, ‘The Aetiology of Female Crime: A Review of the Literature’, in L. Crites (ed.), The Female Offender (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1976); C. Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976); C. Smart and B. Smart (eds), Women, Sexuality and Social Control (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978) esp. L. Shacklady Smith, ‘Sexist Assumptions and Female Delinquency’; F. Heidensohn, Women and Crime. C. Lombroso and W. Ferrero, The Female Offender (London: T. Fisher and Unwin, 1895). As B. Brown notes, critiques of this book often misinterpret it; see B. Brown, ‘Reassessing the Critique of Biologism’, in L. Gelsthorpe and A. Morris (eds), Feminist Perspectives in Criminology (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990). On the development of British criminology, see P. Rock (ed.), A History of British Criminology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); D. Garland, ‘British Criminology before 1935’, British Journal of Criminology, 28 (1988) 1–17, and ‘Of Crimes and Criminals: The Development of Criminology in Britain’ in Maguire et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. For an overview of the development of feminist criminology see Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology; Heidensohn, Women and Crime; Gelsthorpe and Morris, Feminist Perspectives in Criminology; A. Howe, Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality (London: Routledge, 1994); N. Naffine, Feminist Criminologies (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996). See A. Campbell, Girl Delinquents (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), and The Girls in the Gang (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); J.W. Ackland, Girls in Care: A Case Study of Residential Treatment (Aldershot: Gower, 1982); D. Webb, ‘More on Gender and Justice: Girl Offenders on Supervision’, Sociology 18 (1984) 367–81; P. Carlen, ‘Out of Care, into Custody: Dimensions and Deconstructions of the State’s Regulation of Twenty-Two Young WorkingClass Women’, in P. Carlen and A. Worrall (eds), Gender, Crime and Justice (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1987) pp. 126–60; D. Elliott, Gender, Delinquency and Society: A Comparative Study of Male and Female Offenders and Juvenile Justice in Britain (Aldershot: Avebury, 1988); L. Gelsthorpe, Sexism and the Female Offender (Aldershot: Gower, 1989); B. Hudson, ‘Justice or Welfare? A Comparison of Recent Developments in the English and French Juvenile Justice Systems’, in M. Cain (ed.), Growing up Good: Policing the

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23

24

25

26

27

28

Notes Behaviour of Girls in Europe (London: Sage, 1989); A. Worrall, ‘Troubled or Troublesome? Justice for Girls and Young Women’, in B. Goldson (ed.), Youth Justice: Contemporary Policy and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999) pp. 28–50; S. Batchelor, M. Burman and J. Brown, ‘Discussing Violence: Let’s Hear it for the Girls’, Probation Journal, 48 (2001) 125–34; M. Burman, S. Batchelor and J. Brown, ‘Researching Girls and Violence: Facing the Dilemmas of Fieldwork’, British Journal of Criminology, 41 (2001) 443–59. For an overview of recent work on American girls, see M. Chesney-Lind and R.G. Shelden, Girls, Delinquency and Juvenile Justice (Pacific Grove CA: Brooks/Cole, 1992); M. Chesney-Lind, The Female Offender: Girls, Women, and Crime (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997); J. Miller, One of the Guys: Girls, Gangs and Gender (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and on Australian girls, see K. Carrington, ‘Feminist Readings of Female Delinquency’, Law and Context 8 (1990) 5–31. Further studies have been published in medical, developmental and psychiatric texts and journals. See Bartley, Prostitution; Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse; L. Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1990); L. Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality 1885–1914 (London: Penguin, 1995); J.R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992), and Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980; D. Gorham, ‘“The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon” Re-Examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late Victorian England’, Victorian Studies (Spring 1976) 353–79; G.K. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England 1870–1908 (Stanford University Press, 1982). For an overview, see Naffine, Feminist Criminologies and Howe, Punish and Critique. See also S. Cohen, Visions of Social Control: Crime, Punishment and Classification (Cambridge: Polity, 1985). See, for example, M. Cain (ed.), Growing Up Good: Policing the Behaviour of Girls in Europe (London: Sage, 1989); A. McRobbie and M. Nava (eds), Gender and Generation (London: Macmillan, 1984); S. Lees, Losing Out: Sexuality and Adolescent Girls (London: Hutchinson, 1986) and Sugar and Spice: Sexuality and Adolescent Girls (London: Penguin, 1993); S. Bartky, ‘Foucault, Femininity and the Modernisation of Patriarchal Power’, and S. Bordo, ‘Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology and the Crystallisation of Culture’, in I. Diamond and L. Quinby (eds), Feminism and Foucault: Reflections On Resistance (Boston: Northeastern Press, 1988); C. Smart (ed.), Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992). M. Cain, ‘Towards Transgression: New Directions in Feminist Criminology’, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 18 (1990) 1–18; L. Gelsthorpe and A. Morris, ‘Introduction: Transforming and Transgressing Criminology’, in their Feminist Perspectives in Criminology; C. Sumner (ed.), Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990). See A. Davin, ‘When is a Child not a Child?’, in L. Jamieson and H. Corr (eds), Politics of Everyday Life: Continuity and Change in Work and the Family (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). M. Cousins, ‘Men’s Rea: A Note On Sexual Difference, Criminology and the Law’, in P. Carlen and R. Collinson (eds), Radical Issues in Criminology (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1980) 114–19. See also J.W. Messerschmidt, ‘From Patriarchy

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29 30

31

32

33 34 35 36

37

38

39 40 41 42

to Gender: Feminist Theory, Criminology and the Challenge of Diversity’, in N. Hahn Rafter and F. Heidensohn (eds), International Feminist Perspectives in Criminology: Engendering a Discipline (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1995); D. Riley, Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988). Advisory Council on the Penal System, Detention of Girls in a Detention Centre (London: HMSO, 1968) pp. 1–3. K. Daly and L. Maher, ‘Crossroads and Intersections: Building from Feminist Critique’, in K. Daly and L. Maher (eds), Criminology at the Crossroads: Feminist Readings in Crime and Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 1–2. D. Garland, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot: Gower, 1985) and Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). N. Rose, The Psychological Complex: Psychology, Politics and Society in England 1869–1939 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985) p. 174. See also N. Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1990). R. Reiner, ‘British Criminology and the State’, in P. Rock (ed.), A History of British Criminology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) p. 147. M. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) p. 381. See also Carrington, ‘Feminist Readings of Female Delinquency’ on this key point. Among the largest denominational charities managing certified schools were the Church of England’s Waifs and Strays Society, the Church Army and the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. Other main charities providing for children included National Children’s Home, Dr Barnardo’s and the Catholic Crusade of Rescue. School denominations are listed in the Home Office Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ Directories, 1915–33. Approximately 30 per cent of certified schools were Catholic in the early twentieth century. See M. Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); N. Rose, Powers of Freedom. Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Mahood, Policing Gender, pp. 7–13, 151–6. For an overview, see R. Cooter (ed.), In the Name of the Child: Health and Welfare 1880–1940 (London: Routledge, 1992); and H. Hendrick, Child Welfare. England 1872–1989 (London: Routledge, 1994) and ‘Constructions and Reconstructions of British Childhood: An Interpretative Survey, 1800 to the Present’, in A. James and A. Prout (eds), Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (London: Falmer Press, 1997). G. Newman, Citizenship and the Survival of Civilisation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1928) pp. 29, 85–6. See H. Roberts, S.J. Smith and C. Bryce, Children at Risk? Safety as a Social Value (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995). Anon. review, Monthly Film Bulletin of the British Film Institute, 31 August 1946, 13:152, p. 107. On historical relationships between gender, welfare and citizenship, see J. Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England,

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44 45

46

2

Notes 1900–1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1980) and ‘Gender, the Family and Women’s Agency in the Building of “Welfare States”: the British Case’, Social History 19 (1994) 37–55; G. Bock and P. Thane (eds), Maternity and Gender Politics: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States 1880s–1950s (London: Routledge, 1991); S. Pedersen, ‘Gender, Welfare and Citizenship in Britain During the Great War’, American Historical Review, 95 (1990) 983–1006; S. Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); D. Sainsbury (ed.), Gendering Welfare States (London: Sage, 1994); G. Lewis (ed.), Forming Nation, Framing Welfare (London: Routledge/Open University, 1998). See R. Harris and D. Webb, Welfare, Power and Juvenile Justice: The Social Control of Delinquent Youth (London: Tavistock, 1987); Gelsthorpe, Sexism and the Female Offender; Hudson, ‘Justice or Welfare?’; Worrall, ‘Troubled or Troublesome?’. T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950). See, for example, J. Roche, ‘Children: Rights, Participation and Citizenship’, Childhood; A Global Journal of Child Research, 4 (1999) 475–91; P. Moss, J. Dillon and J. Statham, ‘The “Child in Need” and “the Rich Child”: Discourses, Constructions and Practice’, Critical Social Policy, 20 (2000) 233–54. See P. Cox, ‘Futures For Feminist Histories’, Gender and History 11 (1999) 164–8.

Counting

1 For a broad overview of the rise of social statistics, see M. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), and Making a Social Body. On the systematic manipulation of criminal statistics, see H. Taylor, ‘Rationing Crime: The Political Economy of Criminal Statistics since the 1850s’, Economic History Review, 51 (1998) 569–90. 2 Prior to 1908 cases involving children and young persons as defendants were heard at the assizes, the quarter sessions and the summary courts. The three principal sources comprising government criminal statistics – the police, prison and criminal proceedings returns – varied in their compilation and did not always include the age or gender of the offender. For overview, see V. Gatrell and T. Hadden, ‘Criminal Statistics and their Interpretation’ in E. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) p. 347. Juvenile court statistics, published from 1910 onwards, recorded the total numbers of boys and girls proceeded against, but did not generally break these figures down by age or offence. 3 O. Pollak, The Criminality of Women (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1961). 4 Fifth Report on the Work of the Children’s Branch (1938) p. 8 referring to girls found guilty of indictable offences between 1929 and 1936. 5 Feeley and Little have argued that the marked decline in the numbers of women prosecuted for serious crime between the seventeenth and the twentieth

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8

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10 11 12 13

14

15 16

centuries may be explained by the rise of new forms of capitalist patriarchy, under which women were more intensely regulated in the home and in the workplace, and the rise of new social interventions around poor relief, mental hygiene and public health which diversified the social policing of women across a range of disciplinary institutions. The latter view is also supported by Zedner’s work. See M. Feeley and D. Little, ‘The Vanishing Female: The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process 1687–1912’, Law and Society Review, 25 (1991) 719–57; M. Feeley, ‘The Decline of Women in the Criminal Process: A Comparative History’, Criminal Justice History, 15 (1994) 235–74; L. Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). However, the decline in women’s prosecution for indictable offences needs to be considered alongside a broader continuity in women’s prosecutions for summary offences. Criminal Statistics, 1910 and 1935. Fourth Report on the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1928, table 5, pp. 115–18. Of the county police districts, only those with large urban centres (Durham, West Yorkshire, and Glamorgan, and the London Metropolitan area) recorded more than 600 cases per year in the mid-1920s. In the same period, borough police districts in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester recorded more than 300 cases, while the majority recorded less than 50. ERO.D/BC/1/1/13/1–6 Southend Borough Magistrates Courts 1918, 1921, 1924, 1927 and 1930, analysing court appearances for January, May and September of each of these years. ERO.P/HaR 2–6 Halstead petty sessional court records 1906, 1910, 1916, 1917, 1921 and 1928. The girls’ cases took place in 1906, 1910 and 1917. The boys’ cases were more evenly distributed across the six selected years, though concentrated in 1916, 1917 and 1921. LMA.MCC/CL/SJ/5/1 Survey compiled for the Clerk of the Peace of the Joint Committee of Middlesex, 1912. Ibid. Feltham and South Mimms recorded no girls, and less than 5 per cent of Acton, Highgate, Edgware and Uxbridge cases involved girls. PRO.HO45.10790.301145 Liverpool police also used to conduct such hearings. In 1916, these additional cases added an extra 4,168 to the total number of persons under 16 appearing in court. This fell to 4,134 in 1920, to 3,458 in 1925 and to 3,156 in 1930. Girls accounted for 240 of these cases (6 per cent) in 1916, 158 (4 per cent) in 1920, 130 (4 per cent) in 1925, and 168 (5 per cent) in 1930. Source: Criminal Statistics, 1916, 1920, 1925, 1930. Ch Soc 84/22/10j St Mary’s Cold Ash, annual report 1908; LMA.EO/PS/12/ SP/172/1 LCC inspector’s report on County Industrial Home, Stafford, 4 June 1918. Criminal Statistics 1916 and 1920. For example, the 1910 criminal statistics present two very different figures for admission to industrial schools. The main table detailing the outcome of all juvenile cases records 1,004 industrial school committals, whereas the table detailing industrial school numbers records 4,154 children admitted by court order in 1910 – a difference of 3,150. This pattern was consistently repeated into the 1920s. In 1920 the difference between the two figures was over 1,400, and in 1925 it was nearly 500. A significant point here is that the proportion of girls among the second, inflated industrial school admission

180

17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Notes figures, is very much higher than the general proportion of girls appearing before the juvenile court (around 5 per cent). In 1910, over 900 or 23 per cent of the total 4,154 recorded as being admitted to industrial schools were girls, which means that the proportion of girl voluntary cases was higher than the proportion of girl committed cases. The Children’s Branch chose the lower of the two figures when compiling comparative tables illustrating juvenile court disposal patterns (see, for example, the appendices of its 1928 report which offer a rare quantification of girls’ regulation at the margins of the law). On the ‘under-use’ of the juvenile courts, see Anon., ‘The Children’s Branch of the Home Office’, Howard Journal 2:4 (1929) 348–51. See Cox, ‘Rescue and Reform’. By 1960 there were seven, though only two of these, East Sutton Park in Maidstone and the Moor Court in Staffordshire, were purpose-built and not attached to women’s prisons. Home Office, Prisons and Borstals: Statement of Policy and Practice in the Administration of Prison and Borstal Institutions in England and Wales, 2nd edn (London: HMSO, 1950). Blythe, ‘The Borstal System for Girls, 1908–1948’. See Gelsthorpe and Morris, ‘Juvenile Justice 1945–1992’. C.H. Rolph, Women of the Streets: A Sociological Study of the Common Prostitute (London: Secker and Warburg, 1955), p. 160. Heidensohn, Women and Crime, p. 137. Criminal Statistics, 1905 and 1946. The 1905 summary, assize and quarter sessions court records and 1946 juvenile court returns seem to be unique in this period in that they show both the age and gender of offenders. Here published statistics are contradictory: for example, the 1946 Criminal Statistics record that 90 per cent of admissions of 14–17-year-old girls to senior approved schools were property related, yet other sources, notably successive Home Office Children’s Branch reports, record that around 50 per cent of total girls’ approved schools admissions after 1933 were ‘care and protection’ cases. Ch Soc case 9. Application for the admission of a child, 26 March 1908; correspondence, February 1909 and 31 March 1911. Ch Soc case 11. Application for the admission of a child, December 1908; correspondence, 13–18 May 1915. Ch Soc case 17. Application for the admission of a child, c.August 1912; correspondence, 16 December 1914, 22 March 1920. Ch Soc case 29. Application for the admission of a child, November 1915; correspondence, 22 July 1922. J. Bowlby, Forty-Four Juvenile Thieves: Their Characters and Home-Life (London: Baillière, Tindall and Cox, 1946), pp. 8–11. H. Mannheim, Juvenile Delinquency in an English Middletown (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1948), pp. 93–4. LMA.LCC/CH/D/4/8 Metropolitan Police District analysis of arrests of persons under 21 years for indictable offences in 1935. Liverpool City Police, The Police and Children (Liverpool: Office of the Chief Constable, 1956). T.C.N. Gibbens and J. Prince, Shoplifting (London: ISTD, 1962), p. 99 and table 50. Actual numbers of young people charged with larceny from shops

Notes 181

35

36

37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44

45

46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54

and stalls in 1959 were: 8–14 years old, 3,534 boys and 796 girls; 14–17 years old, 1,636 boys and 679 girls; 17–21 years old, 605 boys and 505 girls. T.C.N. Gibbens, ‘Female Crime in England and Wales’, in F. Adler (ed.), The Incidence of Female Criminality in the Contemporary World (New York: New York University Press, 1981), p. 104. Anon., ‘Are the Displays of Some Modern Stores a Temptation To Shoppers?’, Daily Telegraph, 2 March 1937, report of Marks and Spencer’s shoplifting case in which a judge remarked that ‘modern methods do put temptation in the way of thousands and thousands of people’, and advised that the store should take more care. Gibbens and Prince claimed that ‘multiple stores’ and department stores accounted for 81.7 per cent of all charges brought against children in their later study of London juvenile courts, Shoplifting, p. 103. For an American account, see E. Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Mrs C. Chesterton, Women of the Underworld (London: Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd, 1928) pp. 21–2. C. Burt, The Young Delinquent (London: University of London Press, 1925) pp. 85–6, 133. See his Table 1 ‘Classified list of juvenile offences’, p. 16, for a full list of the ‘offences’, committed by his referrals. Chesterton, Women of the Underworld. B. Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 152–9. E.T. Bazeley, Homer Lane and the Little Commonwealth (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1928) p. 32. Burt, The Young Delinquent, pp. 135–6. Prison Commissioners, Annual Reports 1909–47, though note there are no records of the offences committed by those admitted between 1915 and 1927. Campbell, Girl Delinquents and The Girls in the Gang. See also Burman and Brown, ‘Discussing Violence’ and Burman, Batchelor and Brown, ‘Researching Girls and Violence’. Davies, ‘These Viragoes are no less Cruel than the Lads’ and ‘Youth Gangs, Gender and Violence, 1870–1900’. See also Shore, Artful Dodgers, pp. 10–11; C. Nilan, ‘“Crimes inexplicables”: Murderous Children and the Discourse of Monstrosity in Romantic-Era France’, in P. Cox and H. Shore (eds), Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). R. Fabian, London After Dark (London: The Naldrett Press, 1954) p. 103. Ibid. Daily Telegraph, 8 December 1938, cited in H. Mannheim, Social Aspects of Crime in England between the Wars (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1940) p. 263. M. Size, Prisons I Have Known (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1957) p. 48. Burt, The Young Delinquent, p. 47. Ibid., pp. 217, 385–91, 443. Ibid., pp. 443–6. Davies, ‘These Viragoes are no less Cruel than the Lads’. G. Sereny, Cries Unheard. The Story of Mary Bell (London: Macmillan, 1998) pp. 73, 79. See also her The Case of Mary Bell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972).

182

Notes

55 Chesterton, Women of the Underworld, pp. 38–9. 56 C.C.H. Moriarty, Police Law: An Arrangement of Law and Regulations for the Use of Police Officers, 8th edn (London: Butterworth and Bell and Co., 1945) p. 88. 57 See ibid., ch. 10 ‘Offences against females’. 58 Criminal Statistics, 1910, 1915, 1920, 1925, 1930, 1935. 59 In a departure from previous policy, the 1914 Criminal Justice Amendment Act allowed those young people convicted of non-indictable offences to be committed to borstal. As a result, many more girls convicted of soliciting and vagrancy were sent to Aylesbury. 60 Figures here vary, depending on what is being measured, but all point to a decline: Criminal Statistics, 1922, p. 8 record a decline in ‘prostitution’ from 10,629 cases (1913) to 5,013 (1922); S. Neville-Rolfe, ‘Economic Conditions in Relation to Prostitution’, in Poverty and Prostitution [a pamphlet comprising these two articles] (London: British Social Hygiene Council, 1934), pp. 11–12 records a decline in ‘solicitation offences’ from c10,600 (average for 1900–4), to c3,100 (average for 1925–9), and a fall in the number of prostitutes ‘apprehended and dealt with in London’ from 3,191 in 1927 to 695 in 1930, a pattern repeated in Manchester and Liverpool; see also H. Mannheim, Social Aspects of Crime in England between the Wars (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1940) ch. 11 and esp. p. 352. 61 Prosecutions for defilement of girls under 16 averaged 300 per year between 1897 and 1916, falling to 200 cases per year during the first world war. Numbers tried for indecent assault of girls under 16 were higher; there were 415 summary cases in 1910 and 874 in 1923. Source: Second Report on the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1924, p. 47. On sexual abuse, see Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse. 62 T. James, Prostitution and the Law (London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1951) p. 46. 63 Juvenile prostitution was discussed at the European Penitentiary Congress in Paris in 1895 – I am grateful to Chris Leonards for this information; on the Ladies’ Associations, see Bartley, Prostitution; League of Nations, Report on Traffic in Women and Children (Geneva, 1927); on the International Bureau, see Neville-Rolfe, ‘Economic Conditions in relation to Prostitution’ and F. Sempkins, ‘Unemployment and Prostitution of Young Girls’, in Poverty and Prostitution. See also, A. Flexner, Prostitution in Europe (USA: Bureau of Social Hygiene Publications, 1914); T. Gibbens, ‘Juvenile Prostitution’, British Journal of Delinquency 8 (1957) 3–12. On the late nineteenth century, see Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; Mahood, The Magdalenes; B. Littlewood and L. Mahood, ‘Prostitutes, Magdalenes and Wayward Girls: Dangerous Sexualities of Working Class Women in Victorian Scotland’, Gender and History 3 (1991) 160–75; Gorham, ‘“The Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon” Re-examined’. 64 The Report of the Street Offences Committee, 1928, Cmnd 3231, p. 25 praised the efforts of women police officers to deter ‘young girls’ from prostitution but did not discuss the issue further. The Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (Wolfenden Committee), 1957, Cmnd 247, pp. 92–4, 116 also praised this aspect of women police officers’ work and recommended that young women arrested for prostitution be cautioned and referred to a ‘moral welfare worker’. Notably it suggested that the ‘age for “care or protection” [be] raised to at least eighteen, and if it were practicable . . . even

Notes 183

65 66 67 68

69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76

77

78 79 80 81

82

83 84 85 86

higher’ as a means of dealing with the ‘young prostitute’ in the juvenile rather than the adult courts. This recommendation was supported by T.C.N. Gibbens, long-time psychiatrist to the LCC remand homes and witness called by the Wolfenden Committee; see Gibbens, ‘Juvenile Prostitution’. Neither report discussed in any depth the involvement of those under the age of 16 in prostitution. PRO.HO45.10567.175147 Registration of voluntary homes, 1909–18. G. Hall, Prostitution: A Survey and a Challenge (London: Williams and Norgate, 1933) p. 26. C. Bishop, Women and Crime (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931) p. 14. L. Wyles, A Woman at Scotland Yard (London: Faber and Faber, 1952) p. 137. Wyles took statements from all the girls involved with a view to prosecuting the men involved but they were apparently ‘promiscuous pick-ups, complete strangers, who appeared and vanished, leaving no trace behind them’. Rolph, Women of the Streets, pp. 50–1. Fabian, London After Dark, p. 54. See L. Jackson, ‘The Child’s Word in Court: Cases of Sexual Abuse in London, 1870–1914’, in M. Arnot and C. Usborne (eds), Gender and Crime in Modern Europe (London: UCL Press, 1999). Children and Young Persons Act 1908, section 58; Children and Young Persons Act, 1933, sections 61–4. PRO.HO45.10790.301145, S. Hey (Director of Education, Manchester), ‘Juvenile Crime’ (1916), p. 5. Ibid., City of Leeds report on the proceeding of the city juvenile courts, 1915, p. 4. Liverpool City Police, The Police and Children. Fifth Report on the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1938, pp. 38 and 142; Parliamentary Papers Session 1964–1965, vol. 29, ‘Statistics relating to approved schools, remand homes and attendance centres in England and Wales, 1964’. See also Carrington, ‘Feminist Readings of Female Delinquency’, for criticism of earlier feminist criminologists’ failure to consider the differences between girls in their analysis of status cases or the experiences of boys. Ch Soc case 26. Application for the admission of a child, 23 July 1915. PRO.MEPO2.6632 West End Central Station, C Division Detective Inspector’s report, 6 September 1944. PRO.MEPO2.6632 Witness statement, Caledonian Rd Station, N Division, 3 January 1952. LMA.PS/HAM/A/26. Hampstead Petty Sessions, Minutes of Evidence, 19 October 1918. I am grateful to Matt Houlbrook for this reference. For fuller discussion of this issue, see M. Houlbrook, ‘“A Sun among Cities”: Space, Identities and Queer Male Practices, London 1918–57’ unpub. PhD thesis, University of Essex (2002). Mahood, Policing Gender, pp. 112–15; Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, pp. 100–6. Cases involving boys made up 7 per cent of Jackson’s sample of child sexual abuse cases tried in Middlesex and Yorkshire, 1830–1914. Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, p. 103. Fifth Report on the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1938, p. 50. Ch Soc case 6. Application for the admission of a child, March 1905. Ch Soc case 14. Application for the admission of a child, 11 December 1911.

184

Notes

87 Hartley MS173.2/8/4 Montefiore House General Committee Minutes 1912–1916, 23 February 1916. Montefiore House records show that in some other cases children were deported with their parents, as in 1922, when a girl described as ‘a Poor Law case’ was required to leave the country with her mother, General Committee Minutes 1922–1926, 5 October 1922. 88 Hartley MS173.2/8/11 Montefiore House admissions register 1919–1938, 1921, case 167. 89 Gibbens, ‘Female Crime in England and Wales’, p. 103. 90 This matter was raised in the Commons in 1936 by an MP who demanded to know why no firm action was being taken against parents ‘for dragging young children through the country without any adequate means of education or supervision’, Parliamentary Debates, vol. 318, col. 2163–4, 10 December 1936. See also Anon., ‘How to Deal Positively with Vagrant Children’, Our Waifs and Strays, March (1907) p. 54; PRO.MEPO2.4266 Vagrant Children under the 1933 Act. Putney Station V division, 12 March 1938; PRO.MEPO2.4239 Vagrant Children 1935–6, Recommendations arising from multi-agency conference, 25 March 1938. 91 PRO.MEPO2.6630 Memo prepared by the Chief Clerk of the Metropolitan Juvenile Courts on Care and Protection Cases, 16 April 1936. The police identified three classes of case: first, those who were exposed to moral danger, beyond control or falling into bad associations and who, in addition to this, lacked proper parental control; second, those who had had offences committed against them; and third, those of school age whose parents deprived them of education. In addition to this, parents themselves could initiate ‘beyond control’ charges against their own children. 92 PRO.MEPO2.4269 Legal aid in care or protection cases, 1938. 93 PRO.MEPO2.6631 Memo by Peto on the impact of the Children Act, 26 October 1934. 94 PRO.MEPO2.6632 Children and young persons in need of care or protection. 95 Fifth Report on the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1938, p. 38. 96 Ibid., p. 41. 97 LMA.LCC/CH/D/2/1 notes of Home Office conference on older girls, 19 July 1934.

3

Policing

1 Liverpool City Police, The Police and Children; see Anon., Liverpolitan, 1 May 1953, p. 12 on the impact of the scheme. 2 PRO.MEPO2.4256, 4259, 4289 public juvenile offences, 1907, 1924, 1938. See M. Lee, Youth, Crime and Police Work (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 7–30 on transitions in the policing of juveniles. 3 PRO.MEPO2.6631 juvenile courts and the police, 1930s. 4 LMA.LCC/CH/D/13/11 London County Council education agencies accounted for 40 per cent of charges against girls appearing in the juvenile courts in 1917, 46 per cent in 1925 and 34 per cent in 1932, and for just 14 per cent, 12 per cent and 9 per cent of charges against boys in the same years. 5 P. Gardner, ‘“Our Schools”: “Their Schools”. The Case of Eliza Duckworth and John Stevenson’, History of Education 20 (1991) 163–86; F. Patterson, Out

Notes 185

6 7 8

9 10

11

12

13 14

15

of Place: Public Policy and the Emergence of Truancy (Brighton: Falmer Press, 1989); D. Beer and F. Coombes, The Long Walk from the Dark: School Board Man to Education Social Worker (London: NASWE, 1984); D. Rubinstein, School Attendance in London 1870–1904: A Social History (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1969). PRO.MEPO2.6631. PRO.MEPO2.4238 Policing developments since 1933 Children Act. D. Peto to Captain Davidson, of City of London Police, July 1936. PRO.MEPO2.6630 Changes in juvenile courts and police work within them. Extract from Report of the Committee on the Organisation of Juvenile Courts in London, c1930. PRO.MEPO2.4256 Police moral lectures to schools, 5 July 1937. LRO.Hq791.41.GAV ‘Violent Playground’ Souvenir Programme, Charity Premiere in aid of Liverpool Society for Mentally Handicapped Children, c1953. The Women’s Police Service was initially formed as the Women Police Volunteers in September 1914 by Damer Dawson and Nina Boyle, a suffrage campaigner and leading member of the Women’s Freedom League. This early organisation split in November 1914 over the issue of female curfews: followers of Damer Dawson had agreed to help enforce night-time curfews on women living around Grantham’s military camps and followers of Boyle condemned this move. On early women police, see J. Carrier, The Campaign for the Employment of Women as Police Officers (Aldershot: Avebury/Gower, 1988); J. Lock, The British Policewoman: Her Story (London: Hale, 1979); F. Heidensohn, Women in Control? The Role of Women in Law Enforcement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), ch. 2; P. Levine, ‘Walking the Streets in a Way No Decent Woman Should: Women Police in World War One’, Journal of Modern History 66 (1994) 34–78; A. Woolacott, ‘Maternalism, Professionalism and Industrial Welfare Supervisors in World War One Britain’, Women’s History Review 3 (1994) 29–41; A. Woolacott, ‘“Khaki Fever” and its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Home Front in the First World War’, Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994) 325–47; A. Woodeson, ‘The First Women Police: A Force For Equality or Enfringement?’, Women’s History Review 2 (1993) 217–32; L. Bland, ‘In the Name of Protection: the Policing of Women in the First World War’, in J. Brophy and C. Smart (eds), Womenin-Law: Explorations in Law, Family and Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1985); D. Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998). PRO.MEPO2.6163 Recruiting women police during the war. D. Peto, ‘Voluntary Women Patrols 1914–18’, 3 April 1938. PRO.HO45.10790.301145 Home Office circular to Chief Constables, 9 March 1916, and replies from 17 forces; Board of Education Juvenile Organisations Committee, Report on Juvenile Delinquency, 1920. See also D. Smith, ‘Juvenile Delinquency in Britain in the First World War’, Criminal Justice History 11 (1990) 119–45; Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship, ch. 1. See M. Houlbrook, ‘The Private World of Public Urinals: London 1918–57’, London Journal 25 (2000) 52–70 and ‘“Lady Austin’s Camp Boys”: Queer Social Networks in 1930s London’, Gender and History 14 (2002).

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16 PRO.MEPO2.1710 Woolwich Police correspondence, 2 December 1916. 17 PRO.MEPO2.1708. 18 PRO.MEPO2.1710 NUWW London Women’s Patrols Committee report on Woolwich, October 1917. 19 A. Marwick, Women at War, 1914–1918 (London: Croom Helm, 1977) p. 125. Other formal investigations into waywardness included the Report of Joint Select Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment Bill and Sexual Offences Bill, 1918 and the Report of the Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences against Young Persons, 1925, Cmnd 2561. 20 PRO.MEPO2.1710 Report on drinking conditions among women and girls in Woolwich and District, observations undertaken 4 April–1 May 1918. 21 PRO.MEPO2.1710 NUWW London Women’s Patrols Committee report on Woolwich, October 1917. 22 ERO C/MMd1 Minutes of the [Essex] Committee for the Care of the Mentally Defective, 1913–46. 23 ERO (Colchester) Royal Eastern Counties Institution annual report, 1919. On the workings of the 1913 Act, see M. Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency: Eugenics, Democracy, and Social Policy in Britain c.1870–1959 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 24 Their rival organisation, Damer Dawson’s Women’s Police Service, was disbanded after the war though continued to assist the military police in Britain and abroad throughout the 1920s and 1930s, working as the Women’s Auxiliary Service and commanded by Mary Allen. During the second world war, they were again enlisted to assist in the policing of women and girls in British cities and around military camps. A recent history of the organisation stresses its fascist orientation, R.M. Douglas, Feminist Freikorps: The British Voluntary Women Police, 1914–1940 (Westport, Connecticut/London: Praeger, 1999). For a contemporary account of their work, see M.S. Allen, The Pioneer Policewoman (London: Chatto and Windus, 1925) and Lady in Blue (London: Stanley Paul and Co. Ltd, 1936). 25 Police Chronicle, 11 October 1918. See also Report of the Committee on Employment of Women on Police Duties, 1921, Cmnd 1133. 26 PRO.MEPO2.6153 ‘It’s a Woman’s Work. The Metropolitan Police. A Career for Women’ recruitment leaflet, June 1939. 27 In 1939 there were only 108 women officers in the Metropolitan Police. PRO.MEPO2.6163 Letter from Peto to Metropolitan Police Commissioner, 11 April 1939. 28 PRO.MEPO2.6166 Foreign visitors to accompany women patrols, 1944–45. 29 Wyles, A Woman at Scotland Yard, pp. 82–3, my emphasis. 30 Fabian, London After Dark, pp. 53–5. One such list of descriptions of missing girls survives in PRO.MEPO2.5097. 31 Ibid., p. 54. 32 Wyles, p. 34. See also her further discussions of girls’ ‘trashy’ appearance, pp. 66–7, and 158–9. 33 Fabian, London After Dark, p. 102. 34 H.D. Willcock, Mass Observation Report on Juvenile Delinquency (London: Falcon Press, 1949) p. 40. 35 Fabian, London After Dark, pp. 53–5. 36 Eileen, letter to author, 1994. See chapter 5 for more details of her case.

Notes 187 37 See Mrs C. Chesterton, In Darkest London (London: Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd, 1926); Women of the Underworld (London: Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd, 1928); I Lived in a Slum (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936); Women of the London Underworld (London: Queensway Press, c1940); and M. Banton, The Coloured Quarter: Negro Immigrants in an English City (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955) pp. 156–8. 38 For fuller discussion, see P. Cox, ‘Race, Delinquency and Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain’, in Cox and Shore (eds), Becoming Delinquent. 39 M.E. Fletcher, Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports (Liverpool: Liverpool Association for the Welfare of HalfCaste Children, 1930). The research was prompted by a similar investigation undertaken by Rachel Fleming for the Eugenics Society and was carried out on behalf of Liverpool University’s School of Social Science and the local Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children, an organisation supported by the Liverpool University Settlement. 40 Ibid., p. 22. 41 Banton, The Coloured Quarter, p. 168. 42 Ibid., p. 158. 43 Ibid., p. 156. 44 Rolph, Women of the Streets, pp. 152–3, 162–3, 166–7. 45 Wyles, A Woman at Scotland Yard, p. 64. 46 Ibid., p. 70. 47 L. Reid Banks, The L-Shaped Room (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960). See also L. Davidoff, ‘The Separation of Home and Work? Landladies and Lodgers in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century England’, in S. Burman (ed.), Fit Work for Women (London: Croom Helm, 1979). 48 LMA.LCC/CH/D/12/10 VD and vulvo-vaginitis in remand homes and approved schools, 1935–45. 49 Ibid., LCC investigation of VD in Holloway Prison, 31 December 1935. 50 Ibid., correspondence between LCC and HO, May 1945. 51 PRO.MEPO2.4276 Lavatory seats and conveyance of juveniles, 1938. 52 Eileen, letter 1994. 53 Commons debates, 23 May 1928, p. 1890, speech by W. Thorne, MP. 54 Savidge was apparently asked by officers in an interrogation lasting over five hours to show the length and colour of her petticoat and to re-enact the events in the park. The case, which was widely publicised, prompted the Home Secretary to order an inquiry into Scotland Yard tactics. During this enquiry, further cases of police abuse (including the Coleford case above) were raised by MPs. See The Times, 18 May 1928, p. 8; Commons debates, 17 May 1928, pp. 1303–39; Wyles, A Woman at Scotland Yard, pp. 184–203. 55 S. Slater, Approved School Boy (London: William Kimber and Co., 1967) p. 33. 56 The physical and sexual abuse of suffragettes, including force-feeding via the anus and vagina, is detailed in J. Purvis, ‘The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain’, Women’s History Review, 4 (1995) 103–34. 57 LMA.A/FWA/C/D44/1 London Female Preventive and Reformatory Institution annual report 1916–17, p. 6. 58 LMA.A/FWA/C/C6/1 Charity Organisation Society rescue work, 1904–18. 59 Most work on informal justice has focused on formal diversionary and community remedies, organised crime networks and resistance movements

188

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61

62

63

64

65 66

67

68

69

Notes (often in colonial or quasi-colonial settings). See R. Abel (ed.), The Politics of Informal Justice. Volume 1 The American Experience (New York: Academic Press, 1982); R. Matthews (ed.), Informal Justice (London: Sage, 1988). Work on censure is also relevant here, see Sumner (ed.), Censure, Politics and Criminal Justice; P. Roberts, ‘Social Control and the Censure(s) of Sex’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 19 (1993) 171–86. For discussion of nineteenth-century rescue homes of various types, see Mahood, The Magdalenes and Policing Gender; Bartley, Prostitution; Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse, and ‘Singing Birds as well as Soap Suds’. Anon., ‘Interview with Miss Mary Rudge (House of Good Shepherd, Eastbourne)’, Seeking and Saving (October 1921) pp. 221–2; Anon., ‘Interview with Miss Percival (Superintendant, V.D. Hostel, Highbury)’, Seeking and Saving (November 1921) pp. 236–8; Chesterton, Women of the Underworld, pp. 40–1. See M.J. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity: The State, the Catholic Church and the Education of the Irish in Britain (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995); R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939 (London: Pinter, 1989); D.G. Boyce, ‘The Marginal Britons: The Irish’, in R. Colls and P. Dodd (eds), Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (Kent: Croom Helm, 1986). See L. Marks, ‘“The Luckless Waifs and Strays of Humanity”: Irish and Jewish Immigrant Unwed Mothers in London 1870–1939’, Twentieth Century British History, 3 (1992) 113–37. On Jewish welfare organisations, see D. Feldman, Englishmen and Jews Social Relations and Political Culture 1840–1914 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994); E. Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry 1880–1920 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); S.L. Tananbaum, ‘Making Good Little English Children: Infant Welfare and Anglicization among Jewish Immigrants in London 1880–1939’, Immigrants and Minorities 12:2 (1993) 176–99; V. Lipman, A Century of Social Science 1859–1959: The History of the Jewish Board of Guardians (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959). Hartley MS173.1/2. See L. Montagu, My Club and I: The Story of The West Central Jewish Club (London: Herbert Joseph Ltd, 1944); S. Gold, ‘“Loyal English Gentlewomen of the Jewish Faith”: Gender, Class and Ethnicity in the Jewish East End’, unpub. MA thesis, University of Essex (1998); L. Gordon Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause: The Jewish Woman’s Movement in England and the United States 1881–1933 (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1990) pp. 84–7. P. Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984) pp. 327, 331, 349–51; R.J. MacDonald, ‘Dr Harold Arundel Moody and the League of Coloured Peoples, 1931–47: A Retrospective’, Race XIV (1972–3); M. Sherwood, Pastor Daniels Ekarte and the African Churches Mission, Liverpool 1931–64 (London: The Savannah Press, 1994). Fletcher, Investigation into the Colour Problem; C.E. Wilson, ‘A Hidden History: The Black Experience in Liverpool, England, 1919–45’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1992); S. Rose, ‘Sex, Citizenship and the Nation in World War II Britain’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998) 1147–76. LMA.Acc2201/B5/1/1–22. See Cox, ‘Race, Delinquency and Difference’ for discussion of these meetings.

Notes 189 70 Fifth Report of the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1938, pp. 103–4. 71 Anon., ‘Social Welfare of Girls in London’, Social Service Review (March 1930) p. 55. 72 T. Gibbens, ‘Supervision and Probation of Adolescent Girls’, British Journal of Delinquency, 10 (1959) 84–103. 73 G. Pailthorpe, What We Put in Prison (and in Preventive and Rescue Homes) (London: Williams & Norgate, 1932) p. 133. 74 Charcroft House, a hostel for young unmarried mothers, and later for girls on probation or newly released from prison, was set up in Mile End in the late 1880s (and a second hostel established later in Mile End). In 1893 it was renamed Sara Pyke House and from 1910, it took girls leaving the Norwood Orphanage and served as an auxiliary home to Montefiore House. Between 1910 and 1923, it may have moved to Aldgate East, though in 1923 definitely moved to Highbury Quadrant. Black, The Social Politics of Anglo-Jewry, p. 235, also mentions an Intermediate Home at Aldgate which also served as a remand home and Highbury Home for Orphans. 75 Hartley MS173.2/7 JAPGW annual report, April 1935–March 1936, pp. 54–5. 76 PRO.HO45.10662.214153 correspondence between Rev Cree of CPA and HO, 24 December 1913. 77 LMA. A/FWA/C/D44/1 London Female Preventive Institution annual report, 1916–17. 78 Wyles, A Woman at Scotland Yard, pp. 85 and 243. 79 Ibid., Chief Constable of Luton’s testimonial for Winifred Ellis, head of the South Bedfordshire Branch of St Albans Diocesan Girls’ Aid Association, written in support of her application for the position of matron of the Metropolitan Police Home, 2 November 1932. 80 PRO.MEPO2.5561 Metropolitan Police Home for Women annual report, 1913. The Home was in part supported by the Mary Leaf Fund, a charity managed by the police. 81 Ibid., Metropolitan Police Home correspondence. 82 The separate ‘special’ registration was formally phased out after the 1933 Children Act, although in practice girls continued to be divided along similar lines. By the 1950s, teenage mothers were admitted to some approved schools without their babies, see J. Cowie, V. Cowie and E. Slater, Delinquency in Girls (London: Heinemann, 1968) pp. 50–1. 83 On the twentieth-century history of lone motherhood, see K. Kiernan, H. Land and J. Lewis, Lone Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Britain: From Footnote to Frontpage (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); J. Fink, ‘Condemned or Condoned? Investigating the Problem of Unmarried Motherhood in England 1945–1960’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Essex (1997) and ‘Natural Mothers, Putative Fathers and Innocent Children: The Definition and Regulation of Parental Relationships Outside Marriage in England, 1945–59’, Journal of Family History, 25 (2000) 178–95. 84 C.M. King and H. King, ‘The Two-Nations’: The Life and Work of Liverpool University Settlement and its Associated Institutions (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press/Hodder and Stoughton Ltd, 1938) pp. 128–9. 85 Fletcher, Investigation into the Colour Problem p. 35. 86 Ibid., p. 37. 87 Ch Soc case 6, correspondence 12 August 1912.

190

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88 LMA.Acc2201.H11/1/1/9–10 Southwark Diocesan Association for Preventive and Rescue Work (Battersea Branch) minutes 1911–1919, February–March 1917. 89 Houlbrook, ‘A Sun Among Cities’, chapter 7. 90 Mrs C. Neville Rolfe, ‘Sex Delinquency’, in H. Llewellyn Smith, The New Survey of London Life and Labour: Volume IX: Life and Leisure (London: PS King and Sons, 1935). 91 E. Hanmore, The Curse of the Embankment: And the Cure (London: PS King and Sons, 1935). See also S.F. Hatton, London’s Bad Boys (London: Chapman Hall, 1931). I am grateful to Matt Houlbrook for these references. 92 Mannheim, Juvenile Delinquency, pp. 74–6. 93 Liverpool City Police, The Police and Children, pp. 10–11. 94 S.K. Ruck (ed.), Paterson on Prisons. Being the Collected Papers of Sir Alexander Paterson MC MA (London: Frederick Muller, 1951) p. 71. 95 LMA.A/FWA/C/C6/1 COS rescue work, 1904–18. NUWW Rescue and Preventive Sectional Committee, 20 November 1917 and results of CPA survey. The ten charities were the Salvation Army, Church Army, West London Mission, London Female Preventive and Reformatory Institution, Society for the Rescue of Young Women and Children, Jewish Association, Lock Hospital, All Saints Sisterhood Home, Wantage Sisters Home, Walsham How Home. 96 Mannheim, Juvenile Delinquency, pp. 96–8. 97 The 1908 Children Act (section 25) had authorised statutory inspection of any institution housing children or young persons, even if it was supported wholly by voluntary contributions. The care of poor law children in voluntary homes was regulated by the state from 1862, and in foster homes from 1872. Some voluntary groups subscribed to their own monitoring organisation, the Inspection of Homes Association. See PRO.HO45.10567.175147 for more details. 98 M. Allen (Lady Allen of Hurtwood), Whose Children? (London: Simpkin Marshall 1945); Report of the Committee on the Care of Children (Curtis Committee), 1946, Cmnd 6922. 99 PRO.HO45.10567.175147. The two homes concerned were an ‘orphanage’ run by a ‘Pastor’ Black and his Liverpool Charity Relief Mission, and the Bethesda Home for Girls, run by a single woman. 100 Howard Journal, 2:3 (1928) p. 182, report on a 1928 Home Office circulation to magistrates of a practical guide to the recommendations of the 1927 Departmental Committee on Young Offenders. 101 Fifth Report on the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1938, pp. 104–5. 102 PRO.MEPO2.5889 After-care of children involved in sexual cases, 1935–9. 103 M. Spensky, ‘Producers of Legitimacy: Homes for Unmarried Mothers in the 1950s’, in Smart (ed.), Regulating Womanhood; Fink, ‘Condemned or Condoned?’. 104 Wyles, A Woman at Scotland Yard, p. 84.

4

Reforming 1 Sources: Home Office, Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ Directories, 1915–33; Report of the Committee on the Care of Children (Curtis Committee), 1946,

Notes 191

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10

11 12 13

Cmnd 6922; Parliamentary Papers Session 1964–1965, vol. 29, ‘Statistics Relating to Approved Schools, Remand Homes and Attendance Centres in England and Wales, 1964’ p. 65, table 1. For general histories of Home Office schools and youth custody, see J. Hyland, Yesterday’s Answers: Development and Decline of Schools for Young Offenders (London: Whiting and Birch Ltd, 1993); G. Rose, Schools for Young Offenders (London: Tavistock, 1967); B. Kelly, Children Inside; Rhetoric and Practice in a Locked Institution for Children (London: Routledge, 1992); J. Carlebach, Caring for Children in Trouble (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970); J. Heywood, Children in Care: The Development of the Service for the Deprived Child (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); J. Stack, ‘Reformatory and Industrial Schools and the Decline of Child Imprisonment in mid-Victorian England and Wales’, History of Education, 23 (1994) 59–73; J.S. Hurt, ‘Reformatory and Industrial Schools before 1933’, History of Education, 13 (1984) 45–58; D.H. Thomas, ‘Three Certified Day Schools in the North East’, History of Education Society Bulletin, 35 (1985) 28–37, ‘The Certified Industrial Schools for Catholic Boys and Girls in the North of England 1882–1933’, Northern Catholic History (autumn 1981) 25–31. On gender and the certified schools, see Cox, ‘Rescue and Reform’; M. Cale, ‘“Saved From a Life of Vice and Crime”: Reformatory and Industrial Schools for Girls, c1854–1901’, unpub. PhD thesis, University of Oxford (1993); Mahood, Policing Gender. J. Stroud, The Shorn Lamb (London: Longmans, 1960) p. 8, cited in Hendrick, Child Welfare, p. 220. M. Simmons, Making Citizens: A Review of the Aims, Methods and Achievements of the Approved Schools of England and Wales (London: HMSO, 1945). Ibid., p. 16. First Report on the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1923, p. 14. Ibid., pp. 17–19. PRO.HO45.10567.175147 Inspection of Homes Association annual report, 1914, p. 19. Cited in Our Waifs and Strays (December 1907) pp. 223–5. M. Carpenter, ‘Reformatories for Convicted Girls’, Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences (1857) 338–51. See also her Red Lodge Reformatory School Bristol: Its History, Principles and Working (Bristol: 1857), and J. Manton, Mary Carpenter and the Children of the Streets (London: Heinemann, 1976). F. Driver, ‘Discipline without Frontiers? Representations of Mettray Reformatory Colony in Britain, 1840–1880’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 3 (1990) 272–93, p. 273. See also T. Ploszajska, ‘Moral Landscapes and Manipulated Spaces: Gender, Class and Space in Victorian Reformatory Schools’, Journal of Historical Geography, 20 (1994) 413–29. Interview with L. Wilson, aftercare mistress at Dr Guthrie’s Girls Approved School, Edinburgh, 1939–1941 (1994). M. Cale, ‘“Working for God?” Staffing the Victorian Reformatory and Industrial School System’, History of Education, 21 (1992) 113–27. Interviews with L. Wilson (above) and J. Line, teacher at Rowley Hall Approved School for Girls, Staffordshire, 1945–50 (1994). See also First Report of the Work of the Children’s Branch 1923, pp. 45–7 for staff conditions.

192

Notes

14 Home Office Reformatory and Industrial Schools Department, Account of the Reformatory and Industrial Schools of Great Britain, 1904, p. 18. 15 LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/177/1 LCC inspector’s report on Sunderland Girls’ Reformatory, 1918. 16 R. Adams, Careers in Approved Schools (London: HMSO, 1966) p. 5. 17 PRO.MH102.144 letter from Secretary of the Stafford Girls’ Reformatory to Chief Inspector of Certified Schools, 24 October 1918. 18 LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/107/1-2 LCC inspector’s reports on Bath Girls’ Industrial School, 24 May 1918 and 28 August 1918. 19 Ch Soc, Anna, personal account, 1979. See chapter 5 for more details of her case. 20 Ch Soc 86/20.2 St Michael’s, Shipton, general correspondence, 1910–25. 21 J. Hitchman, The King of the Barbareens (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) p. 71. 22 Ch Soc, Stella, personal account, 1993 (see chapter 5 for more details of her case); interview with L. Wilson, 1994. 23 LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/174/2 Chief Inspector’s report on Stockport Girls’ Industrial School, February 1921. 24 LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/127/1 LCC inspector’s report on Elm House, 13 December 1918. 25 Sixth Report on the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1951, pp. 81–2. The school in question is not named. 26 See Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship on boys’ schools. 27 LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/181/1 LCC report on Werrington Boys’ Industrial School, 16 December 1921. The Dalton Plan was an innovative style of education developed in the United States by Helen Parkhurst and Maria Montessori in the progressive era. The first school opened in 1919 in Dalton, Massachusetts and encouraged students to work together towards individualised goals. 28 On attempts to introduce sport into girls’ certified schools, see Home Office Reformatory and Industrial Schools Department, Account of the Reformatory and Industrial Schools of Great Britain (1904) p. 18; Ch Soc 84/22/10j St Mary’s, Cold Ash annual report, 1908, p. 8; PRO.HO45.10723.250838 Games and competitions for girls, 13 December 1913 and 24 March 1914. On the ‘problem’ of girls’ continuing lack of interest in sport in the late twentieth century, see Gelsthorpe, Sexism and the Female Offender. 29 LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/179/1 LCC report on Warwickshire Boys’ Reformatory, 1 September 1920. 30 PRO.HO45.10734.260199 Certified schools and war service, August 1914. 31 LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/164/1 HMI report on St John’s Reformatory School for Boys, Ongar, 11 October 1918. 32 LMA.EP/PS/12/SP/167/1 HMI report on St Nicholas Industrial School, Ilford, 29–30 October 1919. 33 Report of the Committee on the Care of Children (Curtis Committee), 1946, Cmnd 6922, p. 96. 34 Third Report of the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1925, table 6, ‘Occupations entered by boys and girls on discharge from certified schools, 1922–24’. Boys were recorded as entering over 20 manual and skilled trades, where over 70 per cent of girls entered just one, domestic service. 35 Hartley MS173.2/8/4 29 correspondence between Montefiore House managers and LCC Education Officer, February 1916. See also S. Tananbaum, ‘Biology

Notes 193

36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45

46 47 48 49 50

and Community: The Duality of Jewish Mothering In East London 1880–1939’, in E.N. Glenn et al. (eds), Mothering, Ideology, Experience and Agency (London and New York: Routledge, 1994) p. 323. LMA.LCC/CH/M/8/4 After-care of girls. Report by LCC Education Officer, 13 February 1934. A woman superintendent of a Coventry industrial school was exceptional in her 1906 call for schools to prepare girls for the ‘great temptations’ they would be exposed to in service, see Miss Goulding, ‘What Should the Girls be Taught in the Schools?’, Seeking and Saving (August 1906) p. 129. Further, at least one Waifs and Strays girl had to leave her situation in 1924 after her employer’s father had ‘petted her and treated her too familiarly for a pathetic and rather attractive child’, and according to her employer, she had ‘made great mischief by telling very exaggerated and untruthful tales in the village’ about his behaviour, Ch Soc case 26, correspondence, 29 October 1924. On nineteenth-century aspects of this, see J. Gillis, ‘Servants, Sexual Relations and the Risks of Illegitimacy in London, 1801–1900’, in J.L. Newton et al. (eds), Sex and Class in Women’s History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). Ch Soc case 33, St Jude’s, Selhurst, correspondence, 12 July 1934. Report of the Departmental Committee on Reformatories and Industrial Schools, 1913, Cmnd 6838, evidence of Fanny Townshend, p. 238, answer 6759. In 1915 there were eight such homes, in 1920 six, and in 1923 only four: Home Office, Reformatory and Industrial Schools’ Directories, 1915–23. On Howard houses, which were named in recognition of the work of the Howard League, see Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship, pp. 257, 263–4; P. Cox, ‘A House Michael Howard Could Never Call Home’, The Guardian, 16 September 1994, p. 22. Anon., ‘Those Unreformed Reformatories’, Howard Journal, 1:1 (1921) pp. 48–9. Ch Soc 86.20/1 Maurice Girls’ Home, House Committee Minutes, 28 December 1915. A fascinating debate took place in a series of nearly 30 letters in The Sun on the subject of girls and whipping in November and December 1905, with many of the correspondents arguing that only whipping would bring modern girls into line. See also Evening News, 21 April 1914. PRO.HO45.10790.301145. On corporal punishment see Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship; D. Thom, ‘The Healthy Citizen of Empire or Juvenile Delinquent? Beating and Mental Health in the UK’, in M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and H. Marland (eds), Cultures of Child Health in Britain and the Netherlands in the Twentieth Century (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2002). LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/126/1 HMI report on Duxhurst Girls’ Reformatory, 6 January 1919. See Bazeley, Homer Lane and the Little Commonwealth, pp. 38–9, 45. See Burt, The Young Delinquent, pp. 615–17 for details of girls’ complaints about boys’ behaviour at Riverside Village, described by Burt, p. 91, as ‘a Leicestershire colony for London delinquents’. Ch Soc, Stella, personal account, 1993. Vera, letter to author, 1994. See chapter 5 for more details of her case. Ch Soc, Stella, personal account, 1993. Ch Soc, Stella and Anna, personal accounts, 1993 and 1979. Interview with L. Wilson, 1994.

194

Notes

51 Cale, ‘Girls and the Perception of Sexual Danger’, p. 212. See also Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, p. 54 for brief discussion of lesbianism. On certified school boys, masturbation and homosexuality, see Mahood, Policing Gender, p. 114. 52 E. Gore, The Better Fight. The Story of Dame Lilian Barker (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965); Prison Commissioners’ Annual Report, 1938, p. 54; News Chronicle, 20 July 1945. See also Blythe, ‘The Borstal System for Girls’, p. 23. 53 Ch Soc 86.13/1 St Michael’s Girls Home, Shipton, correspondence, 23 October 1901. 54 Hartley MS173.2/8/12 Montefiore House punishment book, 1944 entry. 55 Ibid. 56 See Blythe, ‘The Borstal System for Girls’, p. 25. 57 PRO.MH102.422–434 Knowle Hill School, 1939–48; PRO.MEPO2.6633 Escapes from remand homes, 1945–6. 58 LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/177/2 LCC report on Sunderland Girls’ Reformatory, 1918. 59 Report of the Committee on the Care of Children (Curtis Committee), 1946, Cmnd 6922, p. 99. 60 Ch Soc case 3, correspondence, 8 and 10 November 1909. 61 Ch Soc case 7, correspondence, 16 December 1914. 62 Ch Soc case 34, correspondence, 25 August 1923, 13 September 1924. 63 Ch Soc case 10, correspondence, 15 February 1912. 64 Ch Soc case 25, correspondence, August 1915–August 1916. 65 See P. Cox, ‘Girls, Deficiency and Delinquency’, in D. Wright and A. Digby (eds), From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities (London: Routledge, 1996). See also Zedner, Women, Crime and Custody, and N. Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997) pp. 179–82 for discussion of ways in which disruptive women inmates in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British and US prisons were labelled feeble-minded and psychopathic. 66 Ch Soc case 4, correspondence, March 1910. 67 Ch Soc case 15, correspondence, 1912–18. 68 Report of the Departmental Committee on Reformatories and Industrial Schools, 1913, Cmnd 6838, evidence of Fanny Townshend p. 238, answers 6758–59. 69 Ch Soc case 12, correspondence, September and November 1915. 70 LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/124/1 LCC report on Dovecot School, 26 January 1918. 71 Report of the Committee on the Care of Children (Curtis Committee), 1946, Cmnd 6922, p. 99. 72 LMA.LCC/CH/D/1/3 LCC Education Department Special Schools Branch draft evidence to the Departmental Committee on Industrial and Reformatory Schools, 1911. 73 Ch Soc case 8, report on Ellen sent to Brackley Union by the Society, July 1916. This also happened in cases 14 and 12. 74 Hartley MS173.2/8/4 Montefiore House General Committee Minute Book, circular from Home Office to all industrial school managers, 21 August 1914. 75 A. Aichhorn, Wayward Youth (London: Putnam, 1936 trans.) pp. 224–5. 76 On changes in domestic service, see P. Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant (Stroud: Allan Sutton, 1995); C.V. Butler, Domestic Service: An Enquiry by the Women’s Industrial Council (London: 1916); P. Taylor, ‘Daughters and Mothers – Maids and Mistresses: Domestic Service between the Wars’, in

Notes 195

80

J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds), Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1979); M. Harrison, ‘Domestic Service between the Wars’, Oral History 16:1 (1988) 48–54; L. Davidoff and R. Hawthorn, A Day in the Life of a Victorian Domestic Servant (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976). ‘Statistics relating to approved schools, remand homes and attendance centres in England and Wales 1964’, Parliamentary Papers Session 1964–65, vol. 29, p. 7, table 11. Report of the Committee on the Care of Children (Curtis Committee), 1946, Cmnd 6922, p. 171. Fifth Report of the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1938, pp. 137–8, table 8, ‘Results of training in Home Office schools, 1928–33’. The figure for ‘unsatisfactory’ boys was 17 per cent for both types of school; Parliamentary Papers Session 1964–65, vol. 29, ‘Statistics relating to approved schools, remand homes and attendance centres in England and Wales, 1964’ (see also Report on the Work of the Children’s Department 1961–3, published March 1964). Success rates for boys in approved schools 1950–1961 ranged between 38 and 68 per cent. Ch Soc case 20 [Rose]; case 30 [Daisy].

5

Writing

77

78 79

1 Important exceptions here for the period 1900–60 include: Burt, The Young Delinquent; Pailthorpe, What We Put in Prison; Rolph, Women of the Streets; Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls (published in 1968 but based on earlier research); Richardson, Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools (published in 1969 but based on earlier research). Girls’ stories from this period are also featured in Mahood, Policing Gender; Abrams, The Orphan Country; P. Cox, ‘“Home Girls”: Writing Delinquency and Neglect in Early Twentieth Century Britain’, in K. Reynolds (ed.), Childhood Remembered (London: Roehampton Institute National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature, 1998) pp. 64–76; Jackson, ‘The Child’s Word in Court’ and Child Sexual Abuse; E. Atkinson, ‘“Strict but not Cruel”: Living in Children’s Homes 1903–1943’, Journal of Oral History, 15 (1987) 38–45. For discussion of adult women’s criminal justice stories, see P. Carlen (ed.), Criminal Women: Autobiographical Accounts (Oxford: Polity, 1985); Heidensohn, Women and Crime, pp. 23–30. Early US studies that used girls’ stories as key sources include: W.I. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1923 and New York London: Harper Torchbooks, 1967); G. Konopka, The Adolescent Girl in Conflict (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966). However, girls tended to be ignored by those who pioneered the use of case histories and personal stories as a sociological research method in the US in this period: see C. Shaw, The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930) and ‘Case Study Method’, Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, 21 (1926) 149–57; F. Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927); W.F. Whyte, Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1943).

196

Notes

2 S. Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representations (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987); S. Benstock (ed.), The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (London: Routledge, 1988); E.C. Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988); J. Swindells (ed.), The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995). 3 In chronological order, C. Rook, The Hooligan Nights, Being the Life and Opinions of a Young and Impertinent Criminal Recounted by Himself and Set Forth by Clarence Rook (London: Grant Richards, 1899 and Oxford University Press, 1979); Shaw, The Jack-Roller; E. Browne, Road Pirate (London: John Long, 1934); B. Behan, Borstal Boy (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1958); R. Graef, Living Dangerously: Young Offenders in Their Own Words (London: HarperCollins, 1993). This is a very small selection of available literature on male stories. For historical overview of this kind of writing in general, see J. Bennett, Oral History and Delinquency: The Rhetoric of Criminology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); P. Rawlings, Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992); T. Hitchcock, P. King and P. Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 4 See Davin, Growing up Poor, pp. 271–3 for comprehensive list of published and unpublished (auto)biographies by working-class writers. See also J. Burnett et al. (eds), The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography vol. 2 1900–1945 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987); J. Burnett, Destiny Obscure: Autobiographies of Childhood, Education and Family from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1982). 5 Note on these three sources. All names and case file numbers have been changed. A full list of Waifs and Strays material referred to here is held by the archivist of the Children Society. (A) Case file material is drawn from 37 cases admitted between 1900 and 1926 to three industrial schools run by the Waifs and Strays Society: St Michael’s in Shipton, St Ursula’s in Teddington and St Mary’s in Cold Ash, all of which admitted girls from across the country. Some of the girls featured lived in other institutions before and after their time in these particular schools. Case files contain various reports on the girls and personal letters written by and to the girls. (B) Letters fall into three main groups: those written by and to girls during and shortly after their time in institutions and mostly found in the above case files; those written by relatives to the Waifs and Strays Society, also found in the above case files; detailed letters written to me by two elderly women, Eileen and Vera, in response to a public appeal for such stories. (C) Autobiographical accounts were written by three women, Anna, Nancy and Stella, who had lived in Waifs and Strays homes between the 1910s and the 1930s. Discussion of these unpublished accounts (held by the Children’s Society) is supplemented with references to two published accounts, J. Hitchman, King of the Barbareens (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981); E. Smith, A Cornish Waif’s Story: An Autobiography (London, 1954) – see also R. Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) ch. 1 for discussion of this book.

Notes 197 6 See the influential debate between Joan Scott and Linda Gordon on this; J. Scott, ‘Review of Linda Gordon’s Heroes of Their Own Lives’, Signs, 15 (1990) 848–51, and in the same volume, L. Gordon, ‘Reply to Joan Scott’, 852–3. See also J. Scott, ‘The Evidence of Experience’, Critical Inquiry, 17 (1991) 773–97. 7 Steedman, Strange Dislocations, p. 88. 8 W.I. Thomas and D. Swaine Thomas, The Child in America (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1928) p. 572. 9 Shaw, The Jack-Roller, p. 3. 10 See, for example, K. Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London: Routledge, 1994); G. Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994); S. Leydesdorff, L. Passerini and P. Thompson (eds), Gender and Memory. International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); M. Chamberlain and P. Thompson (eds), Narrative and Genre (London: Routledge, 1998); P. Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); T.G. Ashplant, G. Dawson and M. Roper (eds), The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (London: Routledge, 2000). 11 Ch Soc, Anna, personal account, 1979. On shame, see J. Braithwaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and ‘Shame and Modernity’, British Journal of Criminology, 33 (1993) 1–18. Drawing on Elias, Braithwaite has argued that crime rates are lowest in cultures when shaming has the greater social power. He does not, however, analyse the gender of shame, even though this was and remains crucial to the dynamics of girls’ delinquency. See also P. Fox, Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945 (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1994); S. Horvath, ‘Towards a Historical Sociology of Shame’, History of European Ideas, 17 (1993) 615–38. 12 Ch Soc, Anna, personal account, 1979. Anna’s account was written in response to an appeal by the Society for the stories of former Waifs and Strays in 1979, and is a 12-page account of life in St Mary’s in Cold Ash 1926–30 and at St Laurence’s Home in Exeter 1930–33. 13 Ch Soc, Stella, personal account, 1993. Stella was born in 1904 and her 39-page account, written in 1993 and divided into six chapters, describes the four Waifs and Strays homes (St David’s, Queen Bertha’s, St Ursula’s and St Edith’s) where she lived between the ages of 8 and 17. 14 Ch Soc, Nancy, An Old Girl’s Appreciation, 1987. Nancy’s 16-page account was written in 1987 after ‘many happy childhood memories’ were brought back by receiving the Centenary Magazine of the Church of England Children Society. It describes life in St Mary’s, Cold Ash, 1915–21. 15 Hitchman, Barbareens, p. 20. 16 Eileen, letter to author, 1994. 17 Vera, letter to author, 1994. 18 Ch Soc case 27. Application for the admission of a child, 3 September 1915. Letters from Sister Winifred of All Hallows Mission House to the Society, 11 August, 4 September, 7 September 1915. 19 Ch Soc case 25. Application for the admission of a child, 6 March 1915, ‘Account of the child’ by Eversdon Sharpe, Willesden School Attendance Officer.

198

Notes

20 Ch Soc case 17. Application for the admission of a child, August 1912. LCC report on the girl, 17 August 1912. 21 Ch Soc case 34. NSPCC complaint form, 5 June 1923. 22 Ibid. 23 Ch Soc case 34. NSPCC report, addressed to Hull Ministry of Pensions, 23 June 1923. 24 Ch Soc case 34. ‘Account of the Child’ by officer from Hull Ministry of Pensions, 14 August 1923. 25 Ch Soc case 36. Letter from Mr Fowell Swann to Miss Thompson, 10 December 1923. 26 Ch Soc case 36. Letter from Miss Thompson to Mr Fowell Swann, 7 December 1923, and Application for the admission of a child, completed by Miss Thompson, 13 December 1923. 27 Ibid. 28 Ch Soc case 36. Letter from Miss Thompson to Mr Fowell Swann, 7 December 1923. 29 Ch Soc case 36. Letter from Miss Thompson to Mr Fowell Swann, June 1924. 30 C. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986) p. 74. 31 L. Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence: Boston, 1880–1960 (London: Virago, 1989) p. 128; C. Lasch, Haven In a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977). 32 J. Donzelot, The Policing of Families (London: Hutchinson, 1980); M. Thomson, ‘Family, Community and State: The Micro-Politics of Mental Deficiency’, in D. Wright and A. Digby (eds), From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities (London: Routledge, 1996); Mahood, Policing Gender. 33 Eileen, letter to author, 1994. 34 The Door of Hope was founded in 1885 by Emma Whittemore and operated rescue and maternity homes on America’s east coast. See R. Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalisation of Social Work 1890–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) pp. 114–15. 35 Burt, The Young Delinquent, p. 384. 36 Bazeley, Homer Lane and the Little Commonwealth, pp. 124–6. 37 J. Martin, ‘“Hard-Headed and Large-Hearted”: Women and the Industrial Schools, 1870–1885’, History of Education, 20 (1991) 187–201, p. 196. 38 Ch Soc 86/20.2 visiting regulations, 26 January 1931, and Report of the Departmental Committee on Reformatory and Industrial Schools, 1913, Cmnd 6838, evidence of The Rev. E. de M. Rudolf, p. 178 answer 5425. 39 Ch Soc 86/20.2 visiting regulations, 1931. 40 Ch Soc case 30, October 1918. 41 Ch Soc case 23, 17 December 1920. 42 PRO.HO45.10734.260199 Certified schools and war service, 1914–1918. 43 According to A.G. Scholes, only 131 certified school children, mainly industrial school boys, were emigrated in 1900 and 247 in 1914. See his Education for Empire Settlement: A Study of Juvenile Migration (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1932) p. 26. See also L. Abrams, The Orphan Country. Children of Scotland’s Broken Homes from 1845 to the Present Day (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1998) on twentieth-century forced migration of children.

Notes 199 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Ch Soc case 7, correspondence, 5 March, 9 March, 20 March, 24 March 1909. Ch Soc case 34, correspondence, 7 June 1927. Ibid., correspondence, 21 October 1927. Ch Soc case 35, Application for the admission of a child, 6 November 1923; correspondence, July 1929. Ch Soc case 30, 3 July 1917. C. Urwin and E. Sharland, ‘From Bodies to Minds in Childcare Literature: Advice to Parents in Inter-War Britain’, in Cooter (ed.), In the Name of the Child. Ch Soc case 29, correspondence, 31 October 1917 and 1918. V.A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985) pp. 3 and 12. Ch Soc case 21, correspondence, January 1918. Ch Soc case 13, correspondence, July 1913. Ch Soc case 23, correspondence, 15 July 1924. Ch Soc case 6, correspondence, 12 November 1911. Ch Soc case 16, correspondence, June 1919. LMA.EO/PS/12/SP/177/2 LCC report on Sunderland Girls’ Reformatory, 1918. Ch Soc case 20, correspondence, November 1920. A starting salary could be as little as £8 per year. Report of the Departmental Committee on Reformatory and Industrial Schools 1913, Cmnd 6838, evidence of Miss Fanny Townshend, p. 237, answer 6755. See Ch Soc cases 13, 19 and 21. Report of the Departmental Committee on Reformatory and Industrial Schools, 1913, Cmnd 6838, evidence of The Rev. E. de M. Rudolf, p. 178. Ch Soc case 26, correspondence, 7 February 1921. Ch Soc case 2, correspondence, March 1907. Ch Soc case 20, correspondence, 5 November 1920. Ch Soc case 11, correspondence, January 1915. Ch Soc case 19, correspondence, 27 September 1917. Ch Soc, Nancy, An Old Girl’s Appreciation. Ch Soc case 16, correspondence, 14 July 1916. Ibid., May 1918. Ch Soc case 20, correspondence, July 1920. Ch Soc, Stella, personal account. Hitchman, Barbareens, p. 216. Smith, A Cornish Waif, p. 133. Ch Soc, Nancy, An Old Girl’s Appreciation. Ch Soc, Stella, personal account. Ch Soc, Nancy, An Old Girl’s Appreciation. Ch Soc, Stella, personal account. Ch Soc 86.20/1 Maurice Girls’ Home Ealing, House Committee minutes 1913–25, entry for 9 January 1920 records that five of the service girls sent a gift of 12 shillings to the Home in January 1920, which the Committee ‘much appreciated’. LMA.HO45.10734.260199 Certified schools and war service, 1914–18, contains details of an old boy of the Devon and Exeter school who was killed at the Front in 1917 aged 21, and who made out his will in favour of the school. The superintendent set up a memorial in his honour.

200

Notes

79 80 81 82

Eileen, letter to author, 1994. Ch Soc, Anna, personal account, 1979. Ibid. A. Giddens, ‘Structuration Theory: Past, Present and Future’, in C. Bryant and D. Jary (eds), Giddens’ Theory of Structuration: A Critical Appreciation (London: Routledge, 1991) p. 203. 83 A. Young, Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations (London: Sage, 1996).

6

Diagnosing

1 S. and E. Glueck, Five Hundred Delinquent Women (New York: Knopf, 1934). 2 Longer published studies of girls include Pailthorpe, What We Put in Prison; Gibbens and Prince, Shoplifting; Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls; H. Richardson, Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). Shorter studies include R. Fowler, ‘A Study of Delinquency among School Girls’, Social Service Review (1921–22) 6; C. Burt, ‘The Causes of Sex Delinquency in Girls’, British Journal of Social Hygiene (1926) 251–71; E. Castendyck, ‘Juvenile Delinquency among Girls’, Social Service Review 17 (1943) 253; British Medical Association, The Problem Girl (London: BMA/Magistrates’ Association, 1947); P. Epps, ‘A Preliminary Survey of 300 Female Delinquents in Borstal Institutions’, British Journal of Delinquency 1 (1951) 187–97; T. Gibbens, ‘Juvenile Prostitution’, British Journal of Delinquency 8 (1957) 3–12 and ‘Supervision and Probation of Adolescent Girls’, British Journal of Delinquency, 10 (1959) 84–103. 3 See, for example, H. Adam, Women and Crime (London, 1914); Bishop, Women and Crime; Flexner, Prostitution in Europe; Hall, Prostitution; Rolph, Women of the Streets; K. Duer, The Girl (London: 1920); E. Saywell, The Growing Girl, Her Development and Training (London: Methuen, 1922); H. Powell, ‘The Problem of the Adolescent Girl’, in M. Scharlieb (ed.), Sexual Problems of Today (London: Williams and Norgate, 1924); P. Blanchard, The Adolescent Girl (Mead: Dodd, 1926); P. Blanchard, ‘Sex in the Adolescent Girl’, in V.F. Calverton and S.D. Schmalhausen (eds), Sex in Civilization (New York: Garden City, 1929); W. Richmond, The Adolescent Girl (New York: Macmillan, 1930); (Mrs) N. Rolfe, ‘Sexual Delinquency’, in H. Llewellyn-Smith (ed.), The New Survey of London Life and Labour, vol. XI (London: PS King, 1935); M. Paneth, Branch Street: A Sociological Study (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1944); P. Jephcott, Girls Growing up (London: Faber, 1942); P. Jephcott, Rising Twenty (London: Faber, 1948); J. Hemming, Problems of Adolescent Girls (London: Heinemann, 1960). 4 Lombroso and Ferrero, The Female Offender. For a review of some of these early texts, see Smart, Women, Crime and Criminology, ch. 2 and ch. 3; Heidensohn, Women and Crime, ch. 6 and ch. 7; Klein, ‘The Aetiology of Female Crime’. 5 Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, pp. 166–7. 6 Burt, The Young Delinquent, p. 227. 7 Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, p. 169. 8 Burt, The Young Delinquent, p. 432.

Notes 201 9 Ibid., pp. 224–5. Observing 18 girls aged 14–19 over a prolonged period, Burt found that 34 per cent of the thefts they committed ‘occurred during what might be termed the menstrual week’. 10 Ibid., pp. 227–8. 11 Ibid., viii. 12 Burt makes a number of references to Freud’s work in The Young Delinquent, citing a 1910 translation of Three Contributions to Sexual Theory (p. 533), a 1913 translation of The Interpretation of Dreams (p. 442), a 1922 translation of his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (pp. 433 and 569) as well as earlier essays in German (p. 483). 13 Aichhorn, Wayward Youth, pp. 76–7. 14 Burt, The Young Delinquent, p. 430. 15 Ibid., p. 428. 16 Cotton, The Defective Delinquent and Insane, p. 174, and foreword by A. Meyer. 17 L. Grimberg, Emotion and Delinquency: A Clinical Study of Five Hundred Criminals in the Making (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd, 1928) vii. 18 Ibid., pp. 109, 63, 124. 19 Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, pp. 170–2; E. Otterström and G. Dahlberg, ‘Delinquency and Children from Bad Homes; A Study of Their Prognosis from a Social Point of View’, Acta Pædiat 33:5 (1946). 20 Burt, The Young Delinquent, p. 58. 21 See Cox, ‘Race, Delinquency and Difference’; S. Rose, ‘Sex, Citizenship and the Nation in World War II Britain’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998) 1147–76. 22 J. Salter, The East in the West or Work among the Asiatics and Africans in London (London: SW Partridge, 1896) p. 17. 23 Banton, The Coloured Quarter, pp. 156–8. 24 J. Huxley, in Eugenics Review, 28:1 (1936–7) p. 18, cited in Wilson, ‘A Hidden History: The Black Experience in Liverpool, England, 1919–45’, p. 267. 25 King and King, ‘“Two Nations”’, p. 132. 26 Fletcher, Investigation into the Colour Problem, pp. 34–5. 27 King and King, ‘“Two Nations”’, p. 127. 28 K.L. Little, Negroes in Britain: A Study of Racial Relations in English Society (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1947) pp. 175–6. 29 Referred to in J. Solomos, Black Youth, Racism and the State: The Politics of Ideology and Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) pp. 75–7. 30 Burt, The Young Delinquent, p. 321. 31 Manchester Education Committee Report ‘Operation of the Children and Young Persons Act from its inception to Sept 1936’; Southend Observer, 24 February 1937 coverage of report by Director of Education for Southend; both cited in W. Elkin, English Juvenile Courts (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1938) p. 16. 32 Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, p. 12. 33 Ibid., p. 64. 34 Lombroso and Ferrero, The Female Offender. 35 Richardson, Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools, pp. 58–9, 65. 36 Ibid., p. 59. 37 Ibid., p. 65.

202 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

47

48 49 50 51

52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Notes Ibid., pp. 61, 65. Ibid., p. 58. Burt, The Young Delinquent, p. 137. Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, p. 162. Ibid., p. 45, drawn from their summary of their survey of previous researchers’ findings. Richardson, Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools, p. 104. P.M. Smith, ‘Broken Homes and Juvenile Delinquency’, Sociology and Social Research, 39 (1955) 307–11, discussed in Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, p. 91. F. Nye, Family Relationships and Delinquent Behaviour (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1958). A.M. Carr-Saunders, H. Mannheim and E.C. Rhodes (eds), Young Offenders: An Enquiry into Juvenile Delinquency (London: Cambridge University Press, 1942), cited in Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, p. 94. The most infamous examples of the use of ‘defective family trees’ were Dugdale’s The Jukes: A Study in Crime and Heredity (1877), and Goddard’s The Kallikak Family (1912), both discussed in Hahn Rafter, Creating Born Criminals. See also Burt’s use of such graphics and descriptions in The Young Delinquent, pp. 46–7. Richardson, Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools, p. 147. See Poovey, Making a Social Body, on these early processes of abstraction and reification. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl, p. 72. See, for example, Smart’s view that, for Thomas, ‘any challenge to existing social values was perceived not only as dysfunctional but as morally questionable’, Women, Crime and Criminology, p. 45. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl, pp. 230 and 229. Ibid., pp. 255–6. J. Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health (Geneva, 1951); J. Bowlby et al., ‘The Effects of Mother–Child Separation: A Follow-up Study’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, 29 (1956) 211–47. Bowlby, Forty-four Juvenile Thieves, p. 53. D. Winnicott, leading article in the British Medical Journal, 16 June 1951. Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, pp. 178–82. R.K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (New York, 1949); A.K. Cohen, Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (New York: Free Press, 1955); Cloward and Ohlin, Delinquency and Opportunity. Cohen, Delinquent Boys, p. 138, cited in Campbell, Girl Delinquents, p. 75. R. Morris, ‘Female Delinquency and Relational Problems’, Social Forces, 43 (1964) 82–9, cited in Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, p. 39. Thomas, The Unadjusted Girl, p. 109. Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., p. 109. Gibbens and Prince, Shoplifting, p. 120. Hall, Prostitution, p. 30. Bishop, Women and Crime, pp. 14–15. Burt, The Young Delinquent, pp. 467–8. Campbell, Girl Delinquents, p. 74.

Notes 203 69 A. McRobbie and J. Garber, ‘Girls and Subcultures: An Exploration’, in S. Hall and T. Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1976). 70 Campbell, Girl Delinquents, pp. 82–3. 71 Ibid., p. 91. 72 See F. Adler, Sisters in Crime: The Rise of the New Female Criminal (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975). For an early critique, see C. Smart, ‘The New Female Criminal: Reality or Myth?’, British Journal of Criminology, 19 (1979) 50–9. 73 Rose, The Psychological Complex, pp. 173–4. See Cox, ‘Girls, Deficiency and Delinquency’, for wider critique of this position. 74 LMA.LCC/CH/D/1/3 LCC Education Department Special Schools Branch evidence to be presented to the Departmental Committee on the Treatment of Young Offenders, 1925. 75 Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship, pp. 85–8. 76 LMA.LCC/CH/D/12/8 notes of a conference, Stamford Remand Home, 25 June 1942. 77 See Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship, pp. 32–5. On the development of child guidance and child development theory, see D. Thom, ‘Wishes, Anxieties, Play and Gestures: Child Guidance in Interwar England’, in Cooter (ed.), In the Name of the Child; G. Keir, ‘A History of Child Guidance’, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 22 (1952) 5–29; C. Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret Macmillan 1860–1931 (Cambridge: Virago, 1990). On the ISTD, see E. Glover, The Diagnosis and Treatment of Delinquency, 1934–46 (London: ISTD, 1946). 78 D. Smith, ‘Juvenile Delinquency in Britain in the First World War’, Criminal Justice History, 11 (1990) 119–45. 79 PRO.HO45.10566.173881 Establishment of the London juvenile courts, 1908–18. 80 H. Waddy, The Police Court and its Work (London: Butterworth, 1925) pp. 148–9. 81 E. Glover, The Roots of Crime: Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, vol. 2 (London: Imago Publishing, 1960). 82 D. Russell, In Defence of Children (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1932) p. 266. 83 Healy’s The Individual Delinquent was drawn from his experimental work at the Chicago Institute of Juvenile Research (later renamed the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute). Grimberg’s Emotion and Delinquency presented the results of psychological experiments and interviews with young women patients at the New York Neurological Institute in the 1920s. Cotton based his The Defective Delinquent and Insane on his work as the Medical Director of the New Jersey State Hospital and Director of the Psychiatric Clinic for Correctional Institutions of New Jersey, published. Aichhorn based Wayward Youth on observations of the young inmates of his reformatory institutions in Ober Hollabrunn and at St Andrä in Austria. 84 Richardson, Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools, p. 221. 85 Hartley MS173.2/8/4–6 Montefiore House Committee Minutes, February 1914 and 1926. 86 Pailthorpe, What We Put in Prison, p. 87. 87 Mannheim, Juvenile Delinquency, pp. 93–4. 88 LMA.LCC/CH/D/12/8 correspondence between LCC Education Officer and Hilde Himmelweit February–March 1943, and Lydia Jackson, 18 July 1946.

204

89 90 91 92

93

94

95 96

97 98 99

7

Notes At the time Himmelweit was working under F.C. Bartlett at the Cambridge Psychological Laboratory and went on to teach at the LSE and to write on children, film and television. LMA.LCC/CH/D/12/8 correspondence between Chief Officer of the LCC Mental Hospitals Department and LCC Education Officer, 7 June 1938. Cowie et al., Delinquency in Girls, p. 64. Simmons, Making Citizens, p. 29. For example, from 1933 the LSE ran a mental health course for social workers wanting to specialise in child and adult psychological problems. Social Service Review (February 1933) p. 30 reported a growing demand for such courses. On the wider development of social work training, see E. Younghusband, Report on the Employment and Training of Social Workers (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable, 1947); N. Timms, Psychiatric Social Work in Great Britain, 1939– 1962 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964) and Social Casework: Principles and Practice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964); J. Lewis, The Voluntary Sector, the State and Social Work in Britain (Aldershot: E. Elgar, 1995); E. Midwinter, The Development of Social Welfare in Britain (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1994); H. Soydan, The History of Ideas in Social Work (Birmingham: Venture Press, 1999). H.C. Miller, The New Psychology and the Teacher (London: Jarrolds, 1921) and The New Psychology and the Parent (London: Jarrolds, 1922); H. Lane, Talks to Parents and Teachers (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928); BBC radio series, Crime and the Criminal (1929), featuring Cyril Burt and others, reviewed by the Howard Journal, 2:4 (1929) p. 288. Donald Winnicott also made radio broadcasts. See, for example, the following government reports: Board of Education Juvenile Organisations Committee, Report on Juvenile Delinquency, 1920; Report of the Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences against Young Persons, 1925, Cmnd 2561; Report of the Departmental Committee on the Treatment of Young Offenders (Molony Committee), 1927, Cmnd 2831; Report of the Committee on the Metropolitan Police Courts and Juvenile Courts, 1929; Report of the Committee on the Care of Children (Curtis Committee), 1946, Cmnd 6922. LCC reports included School Children and Cinema, 1932; Juvenile Delinquency, 1937. Fifth Report on the Work of the Children’s Branch, 1938, p. 50. E.R. Rich, Juvenile Delinquency, 1937, reported in numerous national and local papers and specialist journals, see LMA.LCC/CH/D/4/8 Press cuttings and letters on juvenile delinquency. D. Bardens, ‘The Decline of Manners’, Social Service (December 1947) 124–7. Sixth Report on the Work of the Children’s Department, 1951, pp. 50–1. B. Howard, ‘Juvenile Delinquency in Perspective’, Social Service, March–May (1950) 158–61.

Redefining

1 See, for example, Bailey, Delinquency and Citizenship; J. Pitts, The Politics of Juvenile Crime (London: Sage, 1988); D. Farrington, ‘Trends in English Juvenile Delinquency and Their Explanation’, International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice, 16 (1992) 151–68.

Notes 205 2 In this it has sought to extend the arguments presented in Harris and Webb, Welfare, Power and Juvenile Justice. 3 Rose, Powers of Freedom. 4 Report of the Committee on Children and Young Persons (Ingleby Committee), 1960, Cmnd 1191; Labour Party, Crime: A Challenge to Us All (London: Labour Party, 1964); Home Office, The Child, the Family and the Young Offender (London: HMSO, 1965); Home Office, Children in Trouble (London: HMSO, 1968). 5 Chesney-Lind, ‘Juvenile Delinquency: The Sexualisation of Female Crime’, and ‘Judicial Paternalism and the Female Status Offender: Training Women to Know Their Place’, Crime and Delinquency, 23 (1977) 121–9; L.S. Smith, ‘Sexist Assumptions and Female Delinquency: An Empirical Investigation’, and D. Wilson, ‘Sexual Codes and Conduct: A Study of Teenage Girls’, both in Smart and Smart (eds), Women, Sexuality and Social Control; Ackland, Girls in Care; Gelsthorpe, Sexism and the Female Offender; Hudson, ‘Justice or Welfare?’. 6 See Gelsthorpe, Sexism and the Female Offender; and Cox, ‘Defining and Controlling the Female Juvenile Delinquent: Burford House 1950–1970’. 7 See A. Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). 8 See Cox, ‘Futures for Feminist Histories’ for further discussion of these issues.

Bibliography

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Subject Index adolescence, 4, 11, 48, 59, 105, 135, 137–8 after-care, 94–5, 105, 159 age of consent, 38 age of criminal responsibility, 19 alcohol, see drunkenness appearance, 3–4, 59–60, 91, 143–6 approved schools, 5, 81; see also industrial schools and reformatory schools attendance centres, 25, 105, 162 Aylesbury borstal, 24, 33–4, 35, 38, 97, 98, 99 bicycling offences, 26 black communities, 62, 69, 141–3 body, see appearance borstals, 6, 24, 162 ‘care or protection’ proceedings, 37–50, 162–3, 167, 170 cautions, 25, 52, 169 certified schools, see industrial schools and reformatory schools child guidance, 30, 158 child sexual abuse, 8, 9, 38–9, 71–2, 77, 99, 106, 116–17, 163 child welfare measures, 5–7, 14–16, 42, 159, 162, 165 Children Act (1908), 5–6, 38, 41, 52, 84, 92, 95, 124, 162, 166 Children and Young Persons Act (1933), 19, 24, 38, 41, 45, 46, 70, 76–7, 83–4, 159 Children and Young Persons Act (1948), 7, 19, 83, 169 children’s homes, 25, 67, 70 cinema, 60, 149, 160 citizenship, 14–16, 66, 104, 166–7 corporal punishment, 24, 96

Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), 38 criminal networks, 32–3, 61 criminology, 5, 8, 9, 12, 15, 52, 107, 149, 169; see also feminist criminology Curtis Committee (1945), 77, 105 detention centres, 25, 105, 162 difference, concept of, 12–13, 166, 171 domestic service, 86–7, 94, 100, 104, 128, 163 drugs, 61, 63 drunkenness, 25, 34, 42, 55, 57 emigration, 124 family, the, 3, 6, 41, 42, 43, 79, 87, 94, 113, 120, 137, 146–56, 166 feminist criminology, 8, 11, 150; see also criminology First World War, 8, 20, 21, 24, 55–7, 60, 90, 93, 115, 118, 124, 140 gangs, 2, 34 ‘girl power’, 2 Gipsy communities, 47 girlhood, concepts of, 3–4, 8, 10–11, 86–7 governmentality, 13–14, 51, 168, 170 heredity, 141–3 Home Office Children’s Branch, 17, 70, 76, 158, 163 homeless girls, see ‘runaways’ homosexuality, 44, 74 illegitimacy, see pregnancy immigrants, 39, 40, 46, 61–3, 68–70 industrial schools, establishment and reform of, 5, 24, 80–1, 84, 87–90 Irish communities, 62, 68 224

Subject Index 225 Jewish girls, 10, 46, 68, 71, 94, 158 juvenile court appearances, 19–20 creation of, 5, 162, 166 disposals, 23–5, 80 reform of, 169 lesbianism, 97 liberalism, 6, 79, 165 licence, 86, 92, 94, 99, 100, 105, 126, 128 local authorities, expanding responsibilities of, 7, 46, 77, 78, 105, 163 local education authorities, 51, 53, 90–1 masturbation, 45, 97, 99 medicalisation, 140–6, 157 melodrama, 13, 167 mental defect, 57, 100–4, 106, 142, 143, 157 Mental Deficiency Act (1913), 57, 103, 118 Ministry of Pensions, 111, 115, 117, 124 ‘missing girls’, see ‘runaways’ ‘mixed race’ children, 69, 73, 141–3 ‘modern girls’, 3–5, 8, 10, 85, 153–4, 161, 163, 168 moral welfare work, see voluntary sector motherhood, 14, 86, 104, 117, 129–30, 151, 164 motoring offences, 26 ‘new female criminal’, 151, 156 ‘new penality’, concept, of 12–13 NSPCC, 110, 114, 115, 116, 124 patriarchy, concept of, 16, 70, 171–2 philanthropy, see voluntary sector police, 51–66, 63–4, 71–2, 77, 164 Poor Law Guardians, 45, 53, 102, 116, 119 pregnancy, 48, 72, 118, 159, 163 Prevention of Crime Act (1908), 24 prison, 22, 24, 38, 45–6, 64, 99

probation, 24, 74, 159, 162, 164 Probation of Offenders Act (1907), 6 property crime, see theft prostitution, 8, 9, 38–40, 59, 61, 63, 71, 73, 142, 146, 154 psychoanalysis, 139, 149, 158 psychology, 12, 32, 64, 121, 135, 149, 157–9 puberty, 137, 140 reformatory schools, establishment and reform of, 5, 24, 80–1, 87–90 remand homes, 25, 98, 159 reputation, 45, 56, 112, 166 rescue homes, 13, 49, 64, 67–79, 162, 164 rescue work, see voluntary sector ‘runaways’, 40, 46, 47, 58, 59, 68, 72 Second World War, 10, 39, 43, 51, 58, 69, 78, 81, 87, 92, 95, 98, 104, 141, 151, 157, 159, 160 sexual delinquency, 3–4, 9, 15, 37–49, 71–3, 76, 79, 99, 137–41, 153–4, 164–5, 170 sexually transmitted disease, 48, 64, 72, 163 shame, 78, 109, 141, 166–7, 172 shoplifting, 31–3 ‘social, the’, 14, 51, 165 social work, 42, 58, 66, 157, 164, 169 sociology, 5, 9, 108, 135, 152, 169 space, 58–9, 63, 81, 87, 89 statistics, 1, 17–25, 149 ‘status offences’, see ‘care or protection’ proceedings subcultures, 59, 154–5 theft, 26–33, 50, 73–4 time, senses of, 10, 82–5, 108, 161–2, 172 truancy, 43, 46, 53 underworld, 61, 63; see also criminal networks vandalism, 26 ‘venereal disease’, see sexually transmitted disease

226

Subject Index

violence, 33–7, 100–2 voluntary sector, 7, 9, 13, 49, 51, 55, 64, 66–79, 163–4 Waifs and Strays Society application procedures, 111–20 case files, 107, 111, 115 network of homes, 67

‘waywardness’, see ‘care or protection’ proceedings ‘welfare policing’, 9, 12, 15, 46, 49, 53, 134, 165, 168 ‘white slave trade’, 39, 68 women police, 55–9, 63, 164 workhouse, 30, 100–2, 106, 115, 118 youth clubs, 56, 67, 69

Name Index Adler, F., 156 Aichhorn, A., 103, 139 Allen, M., 55 Bailey, V., 8, 12 Banton, M., 62, 142 Bartley, P., 8 Bell, M., 36–7 Bishop, C., 39, 154 Bowlby, J., 30, 151, 160 Bulger, J., 16 Burt, C., 32, 33, 35, 122, 137–41, 146, 154, 158 Cale, M., 8 Campbell, A., 34, 154–6 Carr-Saunders, A., 148 Carpenter, M., 87 Chapman, C., 158 Chesterton, A., 32, 37, 61, 68 Clarke Hall, W., 157 Cloward, R., 152 Cohen, A., 152 Cotton, H., 140 Cousins, M., 11 Cowie, J. et al., 136, 138, 141, 143, 146, 148, 151, 158 Daly, K., 11 Damer Dawson, M., 55 Davies, A., 8, 34, 36 Donzelot, J., 120 Driver, F., 87 Elkin, W., 143 Fabian, R., 34, 40, 58–9 Fleming, R., 142 Fletcher, M., 62, 69, 73, 142 Foucault, M., 9, 16, 52, 171 Freud, S., 139 Fry, M., 157

Garber, J., 155 Garland, D., 12 Gibbens, T., 31, 46, 153, 158 Giddens, A., 134 Glover, E., 158 Glueck, S. and E., 136, 144 Grimberg, L., 140 Hall, G., 39, 154 Heidensohn, F., 26 Hitchman, J., 91, 111, 132 Houlbrook, M., 44, 74 Huxley, J., 142 Jackson, L., 8, 44, 45 Kimmins, C., 157 Lane, H., 33, 96 Lasch, C., 120 Little, K., 142 Lombroso, C., 8, 37, 136, 144, 145 Maher, L., 11 Mahood, L., 8, 44, 120 Mannheim, H., 30–1, 35, 76, 158 Marshall, T.H., 15 Martin, J., 122 McRobbie, A., 155 Merton, R., 152 Morris, R., 153 Newman, G., 14 O’Neill, D., 77 Ohlin, L., 152 Otterstrom, E., 141 Pailthorpe, G., 70, 158 Pearson, G., 8 Peto, D., 47, 55 Pollak, O., 18 227

228

Name Index

Reid Banks, L., 63 Reiner, R., 12 Richardson, H., 144–8, 158 Rolph, C.H., 40, 62 Rose, N., 12, 157, 168 Rudolf, E., 129 Russell, D., 158 Sereny, G., 37 Shaw, C., 108 Stead, W.T., 38 Steedman, C., 108, 120

Thomas, W., 108, 150, 153 Thomson, M., 120 Waddy, H., 158 Wiener, M., 12 Winnicott, D., 151, 160 Wyles, L., 39, 58, 63, 71, 78 Zelizer, V., 126