Delineation of a politico-scientific complex to govern the “abnormal” child: mental hygiene, vocational curriculum, and Republican imaginations of re/productive citizenry, Turkey (1930–1950)

Abstract

The two decades following the establishment of the Turkish Republic witnessed the growth of the pervasive fear that vagrant and homeless children and child delinquents presented a threat to the physical, mental, and economic well-being of the nascent Turkish nation. Newspapers of the period regularly touched upon the issue, alerting the public and state officials to the increase in the number of vagrant and homeless children on the streets of Istanbul, and to the crime and other troubles caused by these küçük sefiller (“little miserables”), as a deputy from Istanbul called them. The language of these newspaper articles was an amalgam of both humanitarian sentiments such as showing charity and mercy to these groups and fears that necessitated their social and moral control in order that they become re/productive citizens of the new Republic. In this paper, I explore how certain child populations gained visibility and intelligibility during the first few decades of the Turkish Republic. I particularly focus on a modern child rescue institution, Çocukları Kurtarma Yurdu, founded in this period as an amalgam of numerous – at times competing – discourses that fixated on the bodies of “street children”, a colloquial term that referred to a heterogeneous group of children including child delinquents, vagrant, homeless, and destitute children. The institution blended modern mental hygiene principles derived from psychology/psychiatry with progressive vocational education and humanitarianism, with the ultimate goal of fabricating mentally and physically sound and economically productive republican citizens out of these “abnormal bodies”.