“Safeguarding the Interests of the State” From Defective Delinquent Girls

Abstract

The 1911 mental classification, "defective delinquent," was created as a temporary legal-medical category in order to identify a peculiar class of delinquent girls in a specific institutional setting. The defective delinquent's alleged slight mental defect, combined with her appearance of normalcy, rendered her a "dangerous" and "incurable" citizen. At the intersection of institutional history and the history of ideas, this article explores the largely overlooked role of borderline mental classifications of near-normalcy in the medicalization of intelligence and criminality during the first third of the twentieth-century United States. Borderline classifications served as mechanisms of control over women's bodies through the criminalization of their minds, and the advent of psychometric tests legitimated and facilitated the spread of this classification beyond its original and intended context. The borderline case of the defective delinquent girl demonstrates the significance of marginal mental classifications to the policing of bodies through the medicalization of intellect.

‘A troublesome girl is pushed through’: Morality, biological determinism, resistance, resilience, and the Canadian child migration schemes, 1883–1939

“…Specifically, it has been shown how these schemes were presented as moral programmes to rescue children facing poverty or danger, while at the same time they adopted discriminatory selection procedures framed within stereotypical judgements regarding 'bad behaviour' and mental inferiority. Within this, the 'rescued' child or young person was positioned within a lower class/hierarchy and stigmatised as less worthy or able than other children (Sohasky, 2015). Moreover, decisions around child migration were fuelled by deterministic assumptions associated with biological determinism, namely that a child's moral character was irretrievably shaped by heredity, condemning child migrants as degenerate 'slum kids'.…”

“…Notions to do with 'morality' and 'behaviour' are highly influential in past and present conceptualisations of childcare and child protection (bearing in mind that current social work and social care practice were also born of the child rescue movement that gave rise to the child migration schemes in the 1800s) and are often used to refer to a relationship of mind, body, and social environment (Fong et al, 2018;Jones et al, 2018;Sohasky, 2015). The focus here is largely on a reductionist or isolated notion of the individual, who is blamed for their 'bad' behaviour and 'inherited tendencies', rather than on large-scale social structures (Dagnan, 2007;Toms, 2012).…”

“…Specifically, I will show how child migration schemes were presented as moral programmes to 'rescue' children facing poverty or danger, on the one hand, while adopting discriminatory selection procedures framed within stereotypical judgements regarding 'bad behaviour' and mental inferiority, on the other. Here, the 'rescued' child/young person was positioned within a lower class/ hierarchy and conceived as less worthy/able than other children (Sohasky, 2015). Fuelled by biological determinism and eugenics, the assumption was that a child's moral character was irretrievably shaped by heredity, resulting in child migrants being condemned as degenerate 'slum kids' (Buss, 1976;Partridge, 1912;Stewart, 2009).…”

Child safeguarding practices in light of the Deserving/Undeserving paradigm: A historical & contemporary analysis

“…For example, historically bio-medical theories of inheritance and biological determinism in relation to 'mental deficiency', encouraged the belief that some individuals were biologically degenerate without hope of reform (Pilgrim, 2014). One example of a common mental classification used in relation to heritability in the early 1900s was 'feeblemindedness', which was often linked to 'moral incompetence' (Sohasky, 2015).…”

“…Child support with a focus on mental health and wellbeing was influenced by the development of Child Guidance clinics from the early 1900s in the USA and the 1930s in the UK, consisting of members of three professions, namely psychiatry, psychology and psychiatric social work (Polat, 2016;Stewart, 2015). The focus was very much on parenting, interpersonal relationships and emotional disturbance and issues such as 'maladjustment' and 'truancy' were located in family dysfunction and perceived as outward manifestations of inner psychological processes (Sohasky, 2015). The institutions of Britain's welfare state were consolidated in the aftermath of the second world war, culminating with the establishment of the NHS (National Health Service) in 1948.…”