Youth ‘in moral danger’: (re)conceptualizing delinquency in post-Civil-War Greece

Abstract

Juvenile delinquency generated strong international anxieties in the 1950s and 1960s. Its purported increase became an important political issue that mobilized a multitude of national public and private agents, as well as the new international bodies established after the end of the Second World War. The wide ‘transnational discourse’ on juvenile delinquency, formed during this period, had two distinctive features: it repeatedly claimed scientific status and it was permeated by strong moralism. This article focuses on the case of Greece. It shows that, although part of this wider discourse, the way in which the category of ‘youth in moral danger’ was constructed, addressed and transformed in the Greek public realm, testified to the particular local cultural, social and political context. It sketches the unstable and fluid content of this category at the level of official and scholarly discourse, and the public interventions of various public and private child-saving agencies and institutions. In the 1960s the concern for ‘youth in moral danger’ left the public domain but continued to permeate policies and discourses surrounding juvenile delinquency. Attempts by psychologists to go beyond moralism, by focusing on self-adjustment rather than moral regulation, remained marginal and were curtailed by the military coup of 1967 and the re-politicization of the ‘youth problem’.