Intersections of sexual delinquency and sub-normality: white female juvenile delinquency in Southern Rhodesia, 1930s–c.1950

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis paper explores Rhodesian settler colonial statecraft in response to the economic and socio-cultural problems of the 1930s and 1940s. The Rhodesian state employed eugenics rhetoric to explain white social ‘transgressions’ in the form of female ‘moral’ delinquency and interracial sexual association. In the wake of the Great Depression, colonial officials were concerned about the emergence of white female juvenile delinquency and allegations of interracial sex and miscegenation. St Clare, a ‘moral rescue’ home for white female juvenile mothers, established in 1935, became a symbol of societal solicitude and an example of institutional practice in eugenics. Official reports from the institution pathologised its inmates as inferior with such terms as ‘feeble-minded’, ‘defective’, ‘retarded’ and ‘insane’. St Clare epitomises how concepts of deviance, delinquency and insanity were used in framing youths who lived on the fringes of a white society engulfed by a crisis. Juveniles at the institution were a canker on values of white racial ‘purity’, white ‘infallibility’ and preservation of settler colonial society’s racial binaries. This study analyses white crisis and administrative policy, and highlights some of the practical problems of state social planning initiatives in one of the robust settler colonial societies in the British empire.