Sara Alaica: You have written a number of books concerning the criminal justice system. How is Girl Trouble different?

Joan Sangster: The previous material that I have written covered a more limited timeframe, concerning adult women. Girl Trouble focuses on child delinquency and encapsulates the whole period from the passage of the 1908 Juvenile Delinquents Act to the 1960s and Federal government attempts to create a new law. It also creates links from the past to the present by drawing on current trends and problems that are relevant today, such as the Young Offenders Act. Girl Trouble is also meant for a more general audience, and does not draw on a large amount of theoretical work but focuses on specific stories of girls and families caught up in the system.

SA: Which of these stories stands out most in your mind?

JS: There is one story of two First Nations sisters from the North that I will never forget. They couldn't have been any more than thirteen. They were originally caught stealing groceries from a house with their little brother in tow. Other things came into play during their trial so that they were accused of sexual immorality and were deemed mentally retarded because they were so withdrawn.

SA: To me this story summed up what was wrong with the criminal justice system.

JS: They were obviously destitute since they were not only caught stealing food, but were taking care of their younger brother. The girls also had no English language skills, and the man from whom they stole acted as their interpreter. They were then sent to an Ontario training school, where they were culturally isolated and misunderstood. It was so appalling that none of this was considered. And this was only one case! There were so many like this.

SA: Why were public perceptions of youth crime important?

JS: Public perceptions may not reflect reality but they have an effect on policing, law making and public opinion. They definitely alter the way we see youth crime. This is not to say that youth crime is imagined, but it does affect the way we understand and define crime. This then determines action and incarceration.

Many girls were sent to training schools because their actions broke expected social mores rather than federal laws. Sexual promiscuity, for example, was deemed immoral and incorrigible and required punishment as "treatment." Native girls were another good example. The experts did not understand how the girls coped with being in court where they were often quiet and withdrawn. Because their behaviour was unusual, they might be deemed mentally retarded and sent to schools for such children.

SA: How has the child welfare system influenced female delinquency?

JS: Child welfare groups encouraged the discussion of issues surrounding the criminal justice system that consequently lead to the growth of experts in this field. During the 1930s, for example, they helped open up research on environmental factors, such as poverty and lack of housing that they thought lead to delinquency, although many still saw the family itself as the major cause. Unfortunately, the activists didn't have many resources or much money at the time and could not do much. They really had band-aid solutions. For some girls, these band-aids helped, but it didn't get to the root of the problem.

SA: How did the media help foster these ideas?

JS: The media relied heavily on these experts and wrote many stories with the help of psychologists, social science experts, and criminologists discussing the state of child delinquents and how they should be dealt with. They replicated what they had to say and created a fear and anxiety about delinquency, especially during the Second World War. This encouraged stereotypes and generalizations about delinquents that created a push for further punitive action.

SA: What stereotypes were attached to girls and boys?

JS: Both boys and girls could be deemed incorrigible, and were investigated if sexual "abnormality" or promiscuity was suspected. The difference was that girls were sent to training school for these actions while boys were not. While there were far more boys in the criminal justice system, the proportion of girls sent to training school was far higher. Boys were more likely to be incarcerated for theft.

SA: You stress reform schools and the impact they created. Why do you believe they were central to your arguments?

JS: Actually, the minority of children went to training schools. Probably the most important aspect of the criminal justice system was probation, because it kept the kids out of the training schools. But the schools are symbolic of the definition of the worst-case scenario, of the problem-child.

Sometimes the schools gave children a sense of security, especially to those who were very young, but the isolation felt like a severe punishment. And although people knew about training schools, they never realized how heavily girls were policed for sexual misconduct. They also didn't realize that many girls were sent away because parents, especially those from marginal backgrounds, had few other resources to control their daughters. The schools were symbolic of how biased the criminal justice system could be.

SA: How did perceptions of delinquency change over those years?

JS: By the 1950s, experts started using psychoanalysis to get to the origins of the problem and began to see that difficulties at home as well as poverty influenced delinquency. Unfortunately, there were more continuities than differences. Girls' immorality was consistently defined as delinquency and sexual promiscuity was always stressed.

SA: In your book you devote an entire section to defining delinquency. How did you use the term for the context of your book?

JS: Generally, I drew both on the legal definition and that developed by experts such as criminologists. Throughout the whole book, I wanted to put "delinquency" in quotes not only because of its many connotations, but because it is a pejorative term, which I don't think we should attach to the teens of the past.

SA: Girl Trouble investigates two issues: one, dealing with gender and delinquency, and two, dealing with race and delinquency. How do these topics overlap?

JS: The two are directly connected because race, like gender, has always been prevalent in the justice system. People's opinions on both are constantly changing and are forever variable. For example, you can see more discussion on race, and indeed more racism, after the 40s and 50s when more Native girls were sent to training schools. Prior to this, delinquency was defined more predominantly by class and poverty, though many experts claimed that children of immigrants were more likely to end up delinquents.

SA: You write that the present has an "excessively punitive political atmosphere." What do you see as the problem in our present system? What should be altered?

JS: Currently there is a certain amount of surface reaction against so-called soft treatment of criminals. This comes from an understandable fear and anxiety over violence that is sometimes escalated by the media. The earlier era had a strong wish to cure the violence, but after so many unsuccessful decades people are now more pessimistic and some demand punishment. But a recent study at University of Toronto shows that if people with surface stereotypes are given more information they opt for prevention over punishment.

More radical criminologists are talking about giving more real, financial, resources to help children adjust to their surroundings while working with the social causes such as alienation. If our society says it values children, we should be trying some of these methods. We don't really value our children if we don't have many ways to help them get off the streets.

SA: Your book includes a historical and critical approach that will appeal to professionals in the field. What do you hope the general public will get out of your book?

JS: I hope people would read parts of it so they can see how some things have changed and how others still need to. They should see how loaded the terms "delinquent" and "young offender" really are, and how they are affected by biases and racism. There has to be some kind of critique of the criminal justice system and I hope this book will encourage discussion. We should know that the actions of a teenager today would have had her incarcerated in 1932. I hope that the true stories of the children in this book will leave people more compassionate about youth crime. The stories give a human face to replace the statistics that we are constantly bombarded with.

Joan Sangster is a professor of History and Women's Studies at Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario.