Looking for Trouble: A Recent History of Girls, Young Women and Youth Justice
| Author | Loraine Gelsthorpe,Anne Worrall |
| DOI | 10.1177/1473225409345100 |
| Date | 01 December 2009 |
| Published date | 01 December 2009 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
A R T I C L E
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Published by SAGE Publications
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ISSN 1473–2254, Vol 9(3): 209–223
DOI: 10.1177/1473225409345100
Looking for Trouble: A Recent History of Girls,
Young Women and Youth Justice
Loraine Gelsthorpe and Anne Worrall
Correspondence: Dr Loraine Gelsthorpe, Institute of Criminology, University of
Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA, UK. Email: lrg10@cam.ac.uk
Abstract
This article summarizes key issues in the historical conceptualization of, and responses to, girls’
delinquency. Drawing on historical material, we tease out distinctive elements of the conception
and perception of girls’ delinquency in England and Wales. We demonstrate some of the
inherent and pervasive myths, muddles and misconceptions in their treatment and outline the
implicit as well as the explicit reinforcement of gender stereotypes which have informed theory,
policy and practice over time. Yet whilst ‘welfare’ perspectives have often brought trouble for
girls in terms of excessive intervention, modern ‘justice’ perspectives have perhaps criminalized
girls’ genuine welfare needs.
Keywords: delinquency, gendered justice, girls, paternalism, welfarism
Introduction
Girls have long been treated differently from boys within the juvenile/youth justice system
although girls’ distinctive experiences have often been overlooked in histories of the treatment
of women offenders. Indeed, theorists and commentators have typically described female
delinquency more in terms of a gender perspective than an age perspective (Hudson, 1984).
Notwithstanding this myopia, early calls for the differential treatment of girls and boys were
based on certain myths, muddles and misconceptions about girls’ delinquent behaviour. Con-
sistently, research in Britain and elsewhere has shown that decisions concerning girls refl ect
concerns about their sexuality and their independence. Until the late 1960s, at least, girls and
young women were often more likely to be caught up in the juvenile justice system as a con-
sequence of gender-inappropriate behaviours such as running away, wilfulness and unsanc-
tioned sexual activity – behaviours that undermine stereotypes of feminine passivity, chastity
and submissiveness (Hudson,1989; Worrall, 2008). We can add to this the fact that girls have
often been seen as a diffi cult group with which to work. This theme of being ‘diffi cult to work
with’ is present in both historical and contemporary accounts of troubled and troublesome girls
(Gelsthorpe, 1989; Kersten, 1990; Alder and Baines, 1996; Baines and Alder, 1996; Alder,
1998). Yet this attitude may betray the double standard that has been applied to girls in that
210
Youth Justice 9(3)
delinquent behaviour is seen to refl ect concerns about breaches of gender-appropriate behav-
iour alongside any concerns about ‘troublesome’ behaviour. Moreover, as Annie Hudson has
persuasively argued, concerns about girls’ welfare – frequently focused on their sexuality – have
often constructed them as risky, rather than at risk from others:
Embedded at the heart of contemporary British welfare practice with adolescent girls is an almost
psychic fear of a predatory female sexuality. The irony of this should be obvious: it is men who
rape and the sexual abuse of children is almost entirely perpetrated by men. Yet, perhaps highest
on the professional agenda is the assumption…that girls in trouble fundamentally have problems
with their sexuality.’
(Hudson, 1989: 197; see also Sharpe, this volume)
And as Christine Griffi n has put it, ‘Girls and young women are generally represented as having
(or being) too little or too much; as too fat or too thin, too clever or too stupid, too free or too
restricted’ (Griffi n, 2004: 42). In other words, they are already subject to critical scrutiny and
surveillance.
At one level, the British story of girls and juvenile/youth justice is one of changing concerns,
from the possibility of girls’ ‘moral contamination’ or ‘moral danger’ by association with adult
offenders, and men, to the ‘risk’ that girls presented by the end of the 20th century. Though
there are historical continuities – especially around ‘gender-related’ expectations of ‘ladylike’ and
‘feminine’ conduct – there are also ‘respectable fears’ of ‘sexual promiscuity’ and more recently
‘violent behaviour’ which cut across these continuities. Moreover, whilst the history of juvenile
justice has been a history of tensions between ‘welfare’ and ‘justice’ concerns (Morris and Giller,
1987) it cannot be assumed that ‘welfare’ has been a uniformly benign intervention. On the
contrary, it is clear that girls have tended to experience both the advantages and disadvantages of
‘welfarism’ to a greater extent than boys, and that this has refl ected broader social and political
concerns to ‘police’ girls in social life and to reinforce gender stereotypes. ‘Welfarism’ has
often become ‘paternalism’ with associated and unwarranted repressive tendencies in the name
of ‘protecting’ girls. At the same time, whilst in some respects refl ecting an improvement on
earlier discourses relating to girls, the more recent justice theme in the youth justice system and
the ‘gender-blindness’ which has come with it, has arguably resulted in the increased criminal-
ization of girls’ behaviour.
An Early Historical Sketch
For most of its history, the criminal justice system has not, it seems, signifi cantly differentiated
between its male and female offenders nor indeed between child and adult offenders. Women
and girls in the 17th and 18th centuries were thrown into gaols in much the same way as men.
As Jacob Ilive, an 18th century pamphleteer, described after a visit to a prison:
I observed a great number of dirty young wenches intermixed with some men, some felons who
had fetters on sitting on the ground against the wall, sunning and lousing themselves; others lying
around asleep; some sleeping with their faces in men’s laps, and some men doing the same by
women. I found on enquiry that these wenches, most of them, were sent hither by the justices as
loose and disorderly persons.
(Ilive, 1757: 11)
Gelsthorpe and Worrall – Looking for Trouble
211
From the mid-18th century there was increasing differentiation between women and girls which
emerged from concerns about both the treatment of children (and the way they had been placed
in prisons designed for adults) and about the ‘irregularities in the moral behaviour’ of girls. Such
differentiation was further developed in what modern scholarship describes as a reconception
of juvenile delinquency in the early-19th century when a distinctive legal discourse relating to
children began to emerge (May, 1973; Hendrick, 1997; King, 1998).
Within what has been termed ‘child-saving’ activity there were numerous missions to save the
souls of girls (see, for instance, Massie, 1758; Hopkins, 1881, 1883; [The] Society for Organ-
izing Charitable Relief, 1888) and frequent and vociferous claims that delinquent girls, like
their older sisters, were worse than boys. Childcare reformer Mary Carpenter quotes a number
of writers on this topic, including Mr Thompson, a philanthropist interested in children in
Industrial Schools, who stated:
A poor half-starved outcast girl, trained up in ignorance and fi lth and sin, is even more painful
and a more degrading sight than a boy of the same description. She seems to have fallen or to have
been forced, into a state farther below her right place in the world than the boy.
(Thompson, cited in Carpenter, 1853: 83)
Another of Carpenter’s working associates, relating details of work in his own institutions, argued:
We fi nd though a wild boy, conscious of his own strength, may resist for a time, he soon yields to
constraint, and probably before long, acknowledges thankfully the benefi ts bestowed on him in
the form of compulsion; or he obeys from fear of a power which he feels to be superior; while the
brutalised girl says decidedly, ‘I will not’, and abides by it; or furiously gnashes her teeth, clenches
her fi st, and stamps with her foot, in vain attempts to give vent to her rage.
(Wichern, cited in Carpenter, 1853: 85).
And Mary Carpenter herself notes that girls were ‘more refractory under imprisonment than
boys’ (Carpenter, 1853: 107–8), a comment which echoes those who wrote about the pains of
imprisonment for adult women. Indeed, whilst the juvenile justice system did not distinguish
between girls and boys in terms of sentencing and provision in its early development, we can
discern different attitudes and perceptions with regard to girls and boys at this time, which
persisted right through to the turn of the 21st century. Practitioners apparently found it more
diffi cult to retain a hold over the girls and to make an impression on them and a curious dual
image of girls has endured. Girls were thought to be more vulnerable than boys and to need a
lot of care, but at the same time, they were seen as more wicked. Nonetheless, despite these ob-
servations and claims that girls were more diffi cult to ‘rescue’ than boys, the main aim of the
missions and societies to help girls was not straightforwardly to punish them, but to instil good
virtues in them, and to ‘rouse a consciousness in them’ (Carpenter, 1853). Inveterate critics of
the penal system adapted...
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