Juvenile Organizations Committees and the State Regulation of Youth Leisure in Britain, 1916–1939

Abstract

Following a sharp rise in juvenile delinquency in the early years of the First World War, the British government instituted local juvenile organisations committees to create positive leisure opportunities for young workers in munitions factories. Although intended as a wartime measure, these committees were retained through interwar peacetime, coordinating voluntary youth associations, employers, and the probation service in efforts to promote the use of leisure as a sphere in which to regulate the behavior of adolescents and young adults. Although not statutory, they were the channel through which government grants to voluntary youth associations were made under the Education Acts of 1918 and 1921. These committees symbolized the early twentieth-century shift in emphasis from criminalizing offending youth to befriending and educating them, pioneering the new philanthropy of state-voluntary partnership in the provision of youth welfare. However, the bureaucratic nature of this partnership also involved a surveillance of and intrusion into the private lives of young people. Juvenile organisations committees have received little attention from historians but remain important for their modernizing approach to juvenile delinquency and youth welfare, as well as for their legacy as an operational template for the state youth service that superseded them.