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The Children Act 1908: Centennial Reflections, Contemporary Perspectives (review)

This two-day conference marking the centenary of the 1908 Children Act was organized by the University of Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, at its Medway campus. The conference was generously supported by the Royal Historical Society and Professor Clare Mackie, Pro-VC for Medway. As its organizer I wanted to take the centenary of this Edwardian legislation as a starting-point to explore the development of youth welfare and justice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A further objective was to bring together researchers from a number of disciplines – history, social policy, social work, criminology and law – to examine the legacy of the Act through different paradigms. Why focus on this Act? The Children Act formed part of the reformist legislation passed by the Liberal Governments of 1906-14. It was a combination of the old and the new – the then Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, used the Act to bring together and simplify a large number of pieces of existing legislation relating to the young. But it also had some innovative features, notably the introduction of juvenile courts. Although there was some differentiation in the ways in which the young were treated before then – being sent to an industrial or reformatory school, for example – the 1908 Act drew upon experimental juvenile courts in Chicago, Denver and Birmingham. The juvenile courts were exceptional in two ways – they dealt only with children and younger teenagers, and they also handled both criminal and civil (often care) cases. The early reformers felt that much youth crime arose from deficiencies in the home or community, and wanted to take a holistic – if often paternalistic – approach to dealing with the young. The Children Act also sought to regulate the behaviour of children and families in the interests of public health, for example, by banning the sale of tobacco to children under sixteen and preventing those under fourteen from entering public houses. Although there have been many subsequent reforms to the juvenile or youth court system in the course of the twentieth century, the state retains a powerful interest in the lives of children and young people. The conference began with two panels exploring the role of the juvenile (or youth) court. In the first, Anne Logan and Kate Bradley looked at the workings of the juvenile court in its historical perspective. Anne Logan considered the development of specialist magistrates for the juvenile courts, whilst I discussed findings from my quantitative work on the Inner London Juvenile Court between 1930 and 1950. This panel was followed by a talk by Chris Stanley and John Fassenfelt of the Magistrates’ Association, who outlined the development of the juvenile or youth court in the course of the century and reflected upon the changes and continuities they had experienced in their work as youth court magistrates. This part of the conference conveyed a sense of the dynamics of the juvenile court as