Youth and the Law

Abstract

Twenty years ago Terence Morris took a careful look at the extent to which British adolescents were involved with the police and the courts, and at the offences with which they were charged. He made no specific distinction between white boys and girls and black ones, but one gathers from certain clues in his published work that his main concern had been with the white community. His general conclusion was, assuming one accepts it, that ‘there has been no growth in teenage delinquents, only a growth in the number of teenagers and in the number of cases brought before the courts’.¹ Teenagers, in other words, were no better or worse than they had always been, but society, for some reason, had come to consider it advisable that youthful misdeeds were better dealt with by the proper process of law, instead of by a cuff and a warning from the local policeman. Morris wrote:

So much attention has been concentrated on juvenile delinquency in particular and teenage misbehaviour in general that for what must be a sizeable proportion of the adult population the term teenager has become virtually synonymous with delinquent, sexually promiscuous, antisocial youth. The postwar period is littered with cast-off pejorative epithets describing successive stages in the development of contemporary youth culture — spiv, coshboy, Teddy Boy, beatnik — each an imprecise, inaccurate or deliberately distorted term used in a wide variety of public contexts and often by those who ought to have known better.²