ABSTRACT

The memories of women and men who were inmates of Scottish juvenile reformatories and industrial schools in the early twentieth century reveal a range of confusing and bitter experiences. Such accounts suggest that the historical investigation of “youth” allows us to examine children as both the subjects of culturally constructed definitions and the clients of institutional practices. The late-nineteenth-century child-saving movement was part of a massive intervention into private life whose strategies, institutions and consequences are still being debated by historians and social scientists. Then, as now, children were frequently the targets of theories and practices aimed at the wider regulation of family life.5 Certainly, since the late nineteenth century public interest in children has been the wedge used to prise open families.6 The current public outrage over issues such as domestic violence and child abuse, juvenile crime, homelessness and well-publicized cases of the apparent “failure” of child protection agencies has its roots in the late-nineteenth-and early-twentiethcentury child-welfare ideologies and institutional regimes.