Contemporary Research in and on Approved Schools for Girls

This chapter draws upon reports completed during the late 1960s and early 1970s. An appetite for research within and upon the approved schools, and the children committed to them, and on other equivalent institutions emerged during the late 1950s and the early 1960s, which was consolidated by the establishment of the Home Office Research Unit. These include Richardson’s Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools and Cowie, Cowie & Slater’s Delinquency in Girls, and others were found amongst archive collections. These represent a collection of knowledges about delinquency and demonstrate how approaches to the care of girls in approved schools had become diagnostic and defined in a way which seems entirely distinct from the 1930s, but which echoes the medicalisation of women’s deviance as madness in the nineteenth century. This chapter draws upon a number of reports which were completed during the late 1960s and early 1970s. An appetite for research within and upon the approved schools, and the children committed to them, and on a range of other equivalent institutions emerged during the late 1950s and the early 1960s, which was consolidated by the establishment of the Home Office Research Unit (hereafter the Research Unit). Some of these were published, including Richardson’s Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools and Cowie, Cowie & Slater’s Delinquency in Girls, while others were found amongst the private papers of Julius Carlebach, and within Home Office archives. In considering these sources, it considers the girls as objects of research, and of policy. These reports represent a collection of knowledges about delinquency and demonstrate how approaches to the care of girls and young women in approved schools had become diagnostic and defined in a way which seems entirely distinct from the 1930s, but which echoes the medicalisation of women’s deviance as madness in the nineteenth century. An appetite for research within and upon the approved schools, and the children committed to them, and on a range of other equivalent institutions emerged during the late 1950s and the early 1960s, which was consolidated by the establishment of the Home Office Research Unit (hereafter the Research Unit). This chapter draws upon a number of reports which were completed by academic researchers during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These include Richardson’s Adolescent Girls in Approved Schools and Cowie, Cowie & Slater’s Delinquency in Girls, and two others which were found amongst the private papers of the sociologist Julius Carlebach, and within Home Office archives. In considering these sources, it positions the girls as objects of research, and of policy. These reports represent a collection of knowledges about delinquency and demonstrate how approaches to the care of girls and young women in approved schools had become diagnostic and defined in a way which seems entirely distinct from the 1930s, but which echoes the medicalisation of women’s deviance as madness in the nineteenth century. This chapter will show how “social research” from various sources came to influence and reorientate this knowledge of such girls and young women, and the settings in which they were resident.