Juvenile Delinquency in Britain during the War

Abstract

In Britain, as in other countries, both World Wars have seen a rise in juvenile delinquency. Delinquency figures continued to rise throughout the first World War; a decrease came only with the peace. In the present war, however, despite far more difficult conditions on the home front, a descending curve was achieved at the end of 1941 and is shown in the provisional figures for 1942; that is, as soon as the special conditions created by sustained aerial attack in 1940-41 were for the time over.3 Enough of the problem remains to preclude any relaxation of efforts to deal with it, though the number of delinquents in proportion to the total number of young people under 17 years of age is very small.4 Causes of Delinquency in Peace-Time Juvenile delinquency figures were rising between 1932 and but there was reason to think that much of the rise was due to changes in police procedure and to the fact that improvements in the Juvenile Courts resulted in increased use being made of them. This was confirmed by the report of an investigation carried out at the request of the Home Office by the London School of Economics. The investigators used the records of the first thousand boys brought before the Juvenile Courts in London after October 1, 1938, and matched them by a control group of the same number of children of the same age and from the same school who had never come before the courts. The enquiry was afterwards extended on similar lines to a number of typically industrial cities throughout the country. The report also gave valuable data on the causes of delinquency: 1. 45.4% of the delinquents had parents whose treatment of them was either too strict or too lax, as against 16.3% of the controls. 2. 25.5% of the delinquents as against 8.6% of the controls were below normal in school attainments.