Redefining

Abstract

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.