`Corrupting and Uncontrollable Activities': Moral Panic about Youth in Post-Civil-War Greece

Abstract

In the 1950s, as the Cold War was setting in, dividing the world, a new spectre was rising, reuniting it against a common threat: the 'youth who have strayed' and their 'criminal' proclivity. Governments, legal professionals, the press and the public in a host of countries throughout the world agonized over the new danger. The problem of 'juvenile delinquency' seriously preoccupied the World Health Organization and the Council of Europe, which organized meetings and conferences, and funded and published research studies by experts. 1 During the second half of the decade, in Austria, Britain, Germany and Italy, as well as in Australia and Japan and even in the Soviet Union, governments instituted measures aimed at protecting young people from 'immoral influences' and restoring those who had strayed from the rules of 'proper behaviour', either capitalist or socialist. Their goal was to stamp out the violence attributed to groups of youths, largely male: the British 'Teddy boys', the Italian teppisti, the German Halbstarken, the French blousons noirs, the American 'rockers', as well as the Soviet stiliagi, the Japanese tokyo yakou or the South African tsotsis, in addition to the Greek tediboides. These young people, often identified with a particular manner of dressing, automobile worship and loud rhythmic music, group amusement and boisterous and violent behaviour, were considered one of the most negative outcomes of postwar economic development and advancing capitalism.This phenomenon, which German analysts called 'prosperity criminality', 2 is related to -among other things -the introduction of two important sociological terms. First, research on this phenomenon soon after it appeared led to the international adoption of the term 'juvenile delinquency' (délinquance juvénile). This term characterizes actions of young people which, while against the law in one way or another, or at least on the legal fringes, were considered

Racialism and Eugenics in Greek Criminology

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Gender in modern Greek historiography

“…She shows that the spread of novel forms of youth leisure from the 1950s, emanating from elsewhere in the west and, especially, the USA, caused rancorous debates around whether and to what extent they jeopardised dominant gender norms: a wide array of so cial and political subjects, both on the right and the left, claimed that these flows made girls repudi ate the "advantages of purity" and rendered boys violent. 100 In doing so, Avdela appropriates a notion introduced by Passerini, namely that youth serves as a metaphor for social change. 101 In a recently published work, Avdela examines the Greek juvenile justice system in the 1950s and 1960s and the gendered approach towards sexuality in its treatment of young people of differing gender.…”

Conductas juveniles y autoritarismo en México: Internado del Instituto Politécnico Nacional en contextos de movilización estudiantil, ca. 1950-1956

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