Criminalizing Children
Welfare and the State in Australia

Does the Australian welfare system criminalize children? This book unpacks history and politics to explore the treatment of child offenders.

David McCallum (Author)

9781845658465, Hitachi

Paperback / softback, published 6 December 2018

318 pages
23 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.46 kg

Incarceration of children is rising rapidly throughout of Australia, with indigenous children most at risk of imprisonment. Indigenous and non-indigenous children have been subject to detention in both welfare and justice systems in Australian states and territories since colonization. Countless governments and human rights enquiries have attempted to address the problem of the increasing criminalization of children, with little success. David McCallum traces the history of 'problem children' over several decades, demonstrating that the categories of neglected and offending children are both linked to similar kinds of governing. Institutions and encampments have historically played a significant role in contributing to the social problems of today. This book also takes a theoretical perspective, tracking parallel developments within the human sciences of childhood and theories of race. Applying a social theoretical analysis of these events and the changing rationalities of governing, McCallum challenges our assumptions about how law and governance of children leads to their criminalization and incarceration.

Foreword: criminalizing children. Histories of welfare and the state in Australia
1. Child welfare and the Australian state: an introduction
2. Knowing the 'neglected' aboriginal child
3. Neglected and criminal children
4. Science, race and separations
5. Unstable categories: children in welfare and justice in the early twentieth century
6. The mission station as a correctional institution
7. From mental defectives to the psychology of the family
8. The discovery of the Aboriginal child
9. Government and family.

Subject Areas: Children's, Teenage & educational [Y], Human rights [JPVH], Prisons [JKVP1]