childcare-50years

Chapter
5
JUVENILE OFFENDING
Development of the juvenile justice system - pre 1950
In order to understand the juvenile justice system as it was in 1950 it
is important to have an understanding of the key factors that
influenced its development. One of the most important of these was
the Lynn Committee, which was appointed in 1935. The Committee
recommended changes in the law regarding the protection and
welfare of the young and the treatment of young offenders. Its terms
of reference were influenced by many features that had been
introduced in England by the Children and Young Persons Act 1933.
The underpinning ideas of the 1933 Act, which have influenced the
juvenile justice system in Northern Ireland over a long period of time
were:
• that children coming before the courts should be dealt with
separately from adults;
• that concern for their "welfare" should be a major factor in all
proceedings criminal or civil; and
• an acknowledgement that the distinction between children who
offend and children who come from deprived backgrounds is
often an artificial one.
There was also a widely held view that supported the "treatment"
for young offenders in a residential setting. In practice this resulted in
residential sentences for child offenders for sometimes quite minor
offences which could last up to 3 years. They were seen as providing
the child with help and guidance that the child "needed." It is easy
to underestimate how radical this view of childhood actually was.
Readers of Oscar Wilde's collected letters may recollect how Wilde
wrote to the Times newspaper in support of a prison officer who was
dismissed for giving a young child a "sweet biscuit" because the child
was crying and found prison food too hard to digest. Between Oscar
Wilde's time in Reading jail in the 1890s and the 1933 Act something
radical had happened to the collective conscience of public policy
50 YEARS OF CHILD CARE IN NORTHERN IRELAND
105