Youth ‘in moral danger’: (re)conceptualizing delinquency in post-Civil-War Greece

AbstractJuvenile delinquency generated strong international anxieties in the 1950s and 1960s. Its purported increase became an important political issue that mobilized a multitude of national public and private agents, as well as the new international bodies established after the end of the Second World War. The wide ‘transnational discourse’ on juvenile delinquency, formed during this period, had two distinctive features: it repeatedly claimed scientific status and it was permeated by strong moralism. This article focuses on the case of Greece. It shows that, although part of this wider discourse, the way in which the category of ‘youth in moral danger’ was constructed, addressed and transformed in the Greek public realm, testified to the particular local cultural, social and political context. It sketches the unstable and fluid content of this category at the level of official and scholarly discourse, and the public interventions of various public and private child-saving agencies and institutions. In t...