Institutional Abuse: Reformatory Schools and the Use of Physical Force.

• In Event: EHC-WG Panel 2: Histories of Race, Gender and Vulnerable Groups

Abstract

Understanding how offending children in the first government-run youth institutions were disciplined, and how that was framed by the institution, and responded to outside of it, allows us to question contemporary ideas and practices. Exploring the deep historical roots of such practices will enable new lines of enquiry to begin to challenge the way ‘we’ think about ‘offending’ juveniles. This historical criminological project will investigate the use of physical force in disciplining and controlling institutionalised offending children within reformatory schools. This research will also uncover how institutions justified the use/extent of physical force used, and how the views were reflected, or differed, at the political and public level. This will be done by consulting regional reformatory records (institutional level), parliamentary reports (political level), and newspapers (public level). The period under study is 1854-1933. This is because Reformatory schools were certified by government legislation at this time; these were the first government-run youth institutions in England and Wales and set a precedent for confining children and young people in separate specialised institutions. The reformatories were later merged with Industrial Schools to form Approved Schools in 1933. This will be taken as the logical end point for the comparative study of three reformatory schools.

Author

• Emma Deborah Watkins, University of Birmingham