Juvenile Delinquency and the Limits of Western Influence, 1850–2000 ed. by Heather Ellis (review)

Juvenile Delinquency and the Limits of Western Influence, 1850–2000, a volume in the Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, featuring works by younger scholars, is wide in scope and contains some comparative discussions of, and new insights into, the problem of juvenile delinquency. All of the chapters were originally presented at a conference entitled “Juvenile Delinquency in the 19th and 20th Centuries: East-West Perspectives,” organized by the Centre for British Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in March 2011.

The editor, Heather Ellis, who is senior lecturer in education at Liverpool Hope University, organized the conference and explains in her introduction that “it is a basic theoretical assumption underpinning all the essays in this volume, that notions of juvenile delinquency, both in the West and in non-Western contexts, are constructed and understood within and through cross cultural encounters” (5). Later she adds that “this volume does not set out to abandon the comparative in favor of a global history approach, but rather to combine the best of the two approaches”(7). The essays themselves present a wide variety of approaches, and each of them offers new perspectives on the ways in which societies and cultures have addressed the question of juvenile delinquency.

The essays are grouped into five categories: “Colonial Contexts,” “Juvenile Delinquency and Transnational Migration,” “Juvenile Delinquency and War: Early Twentieth Century Perspectives,” “Cold War Contexts,” and “Juvenile Delinquency and the Post-War State.”

As is often the case with collected essays, not all of them are of equal value. Thus space limitations preclude the discussion of every essay. Three of the essays merit specific notice. In “Adolescent Empire: Moral Dangers for Boys in Britain and India, c.1880–1914,” Stephanie Olsen, a predoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Center for the Study of Emotions in Berlin, explains that a Christian concept of morality applying only to boys was transplanted without change to India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This process, she emphasizes, “stopped short of encouraging a juvenile Indian citizenry; imperial subject-hood was stressed; representations of the superiority of British ideals of morality and education remained constant” (26). Thus in the period Olsen discusses, cultural imperialism regarding the moral education of boys held sway in England as well as in British India in the period studied.

One of the most unusual and striking of the essays is “Empire’s Little Helpers: Juvenile Delinquents and the State in East Asia, 1880–1945” by Barak Kushner, who is senior lecturer in modern Japanese history in faculty at the University of Cambridge. Kushner documents the activities of bands of Japanese youth who tried to join a peasant rebellion in Korea, a rebellion that led ultimately to the Japanese seizure of Korea in 1910. Many of these young men were delinquents in Japan, but once overseas, they were seen as promoters of empire. A similar process of disruption took place in Manchuria prior to Japan’s seizure of that province and the creation of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1931.

Another essay worthy of note is Nazan Çiḉek’s “Managing the Turkish Republican Notion of Childhood and Juvenile Delinquency: The Story of Children’s Courts in Turkey, 1940–1990.” Çiḉek is assistant professor in the faculty of political sciences at the University of Ankara. The 1971 incarceration of a British boy, Timothy D., aged fourteen, for selling a substantial amount of hashish, which he had obtained in Afghanistan before entering Turkey with his mother, provides a lens through which the history of Turkish dealings with youthful offenders can be understood. A campaign to free the boy along with extreme statements on both sides touched off a major international incident. As Çiḉek explains, the British were outraged by the way the boy was treated. “The Turkish media was at pains to explain that they were not discriminating against Timothy. They...