`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.' 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' (delinquance juvenile). 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