“Give Him a Doing”: The Birching of Young Offenders in Scotland

Abstract

Beginning in 1850 a series of governmental commissions were struck in Britain to examine the position of children in relation to the law. The purpose of these commissions was to examine the role of judicial punishment in the treatment of juvenile delinquency. The general view adopted reflected many elements of the late-Victorian conception of male-delinquency; hence, the various acts regulating juvenile justice suggested that whipping was an unsuitable penalty for adults, and the corporal punishment of girls disappeared except in reformatories. However, whipping was described as an ideal method of treating boy offenders. But by the early twentieth century, whipping was falling out of favour in England. In Scotland, despite opposition, birching continued to be used alongside probation. This paper examines the battle over the birch in Scotland, where by the 1930s a coalition of anti-birching labour organizations, women’s groups, rural and urban police, magistrates, and social workers were challenging the use of this time-honoured method of punishment.