| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.4

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.4 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Gender, Justice and Welfare: Bad Girls in Britain, 1900–1950. By Pamela Cox (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. x plus 228 pp.).
This book explores the development of the juvenile justice system 1900–1950 in England and Wales. Concentrating on girls, Cox maps out and explains how they came to be defined as `problems' and how they were subsequently treated in the child welfare system. Based on a thoughtful and critical assessment of a wealth of sources including government reports, administrative records, case files, letters, autobiographies and contemporary academic studies, Cox establishes that a consideration of gender is essential to understanding the workings of juvenile justice.	1
Cox locates the discovery and treatment of `problem' girls in the context of the redefinition of childhood and adolescence that occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She demonstrates how new ways of understanding youth prompted new ways of classifying girls' behaviour: "child welfare policies... contributed to the construction of new kinds of girls by redefining vulnerability, rediagnosing waywardness and reifying adolescence as a period of dependence" (p.4). The reformed juvenile justice system was, in this context, a response to fears about the conditions of modern girlhood; there were concerns about the effects of poverty and deprivation and, also, anxieties about the working girls' increased independence and affluence.	2
Youth crime has traditionally been seen as a masculine phenomenon because of the low rates of delinquency amongst girls relative to boys—annually, girls accounted for only five per cent of cases in the juvenile courts between 1910 and 1950. Cox argues, however, that the low number of girls in the twentieth-century juvenile justice system should not be interpreted as evidence that the policing of girls was a minor social concern. Prosecution rates do not convey adequately girls' involvement with the juvenile justice system.	. . .

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