Girl Trouble: Female Delinquency in English Canada (review)

The concept of juvenile delinquency has a relatively short history. Young people were not singled out for special consideration in the justice system until the nineteenth century, and even then it was the conduct of boys rather than girls that attracted official and public concern. This concern persisted in twentieth-century Canada, and Girl Trouble has as its primary goal the retrieval of girls' experience with the juvenile justice system. The book attempts to uncover the 'underlying material structures, social conditions, and ideological norms' that shaped the definition of delinquency under the Juvenile Justice Act of 1908; to identify the legal and social remedies prescribed for female juvenile delinquents and evaluate the success of those remedies; and, finally, to reveal the way in which the girls on the receiving end understood their designation as delinquent and their experiences of both trial and punishment. Sangster's focus is on the period between the passage of the 1908 act and the 1960s, when the utility of that statute was subjected to a sustained critique. Her evidence is drawn from Ontario.

'Law,' in this study, is construed not narrowly but as 'a product of social life, an arena of political struggle, a means of constituting class, colonial, and gender relations.' Female criminality is firmly located within 'both the political economy and the moral culture of the times.' Definitions of delinquency are attributed to ideology, power relations, and the legitimation of particular social behaviours, with 'deviant' behaviour defined as that which contradicts the 'norm' of a white, middle-class, patriarchal society. Sangster argues that class relations, economic marginality, gender norms, and, in the post-Second World War period, racist ideology determined who was labelled delinquent, who was apprehended, and the nature of the punishment meted out. Class, race, and gender coloured experience of the juvenile justice system.

Comparison of entries in York County family court records for the 1940s, and the statistical record of the Ontario courts more generally (explored in chapter 4), support Sangster's argument that, to understand the criminalization of girls, we must first understand contemporary constructions of femininity, sexuality, and the family. Where a boy is brought to court for 'stealing fishing rods, bikes, then smashing them up,' a girl is 'found with cigarettes and contraceptives in her purse.' 'Boys broke the law,' Sangster writes, 'girls violated gender and sexual conventions.' Girls were far less likely to appear in court at all, and when they did, they were typically charged with truancy and 'incorrigibility,' 'an elastic term that for girls often involved sexual nonconformity or endangerment.' Charges against boys, in contrast, usually involved theft of some sort.

Well-written and thoroughly researched, Girl Trouble is clearly inspired by presentist concerns with understanding women 'whose conflicts with the law continue to place them in closed-custody environments.' Thus, while a relatively small number of convicted girls were incarcerated in industrial or training schools, an entire chapter is devoted to their experience of these institutions - which included involuntary gynecological exams - and the emphasis within that chapter is on strategies of resistance. But Sangster's study further testifies to a number of depressing continuities where criminal justice is concerned - in this regard Girl Trouble might usefully be read alongside Lucia Zedner's Women, Crime, and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Victorian constructions of appropriate female behaviour, a focus on the surveillance and control of the working classes, and 'band-aid support for women in conflict with the law' predominate in both studies. Sangster wryly acknowledges that certain current feminist endeavours are 'not completely unlike' the efforts of early twentieth-century Big Sisters. In applying band-aids at Elizabeth Fry, however, she and her colleagues try 'not to lose sight of a more utopian desire to change the workings of the law entirely.' Girl Trouble ends on a subdued note that reflects the extent...