Dr. Tamara Myers, History, UBC: “Morality Squads, Curfews, and the Sports Solution: Policing Youth in Mid-Twentieth Century Canada”
Youth Research Symposium
April 2, 2008
9:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. | St. John’s College Social Lounge
Organized by the Centre for Culture, Identity and Education and sponsored by the University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
This paper speaks to the symposium’s main aims of “rethinking conceptualizations of marginalized youth identity” and of exploring “the history of policing and surveillance of young bodies over time and across national spaces” through an examination of a watershed moment in the history of policing youth in Canada. Faced with a deepening public crisis over youth in the 1940s Canadian police forces invented new technologies of surveillance and discipline and in turn reshaped their role in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Focusing on Montreal, this paper investigates critical developments in urban policing including fresh ventures like the creation of the Juvenile Morality Squad (later the Delinquency Prevention Bureau), a juvenile nocturnal curfew, and the Police Juvenile Club. It charts the work of male and female officers as they enforced juvenile curfew regulations and launched the ‘Sports Solution’. According to the Montreal police, these innovative measures were responsible, by the late 1940s, for cutting in half the juvenile delinquency rate from its wartime high. Shedding an earlier image of cop as disciplinarian, the mid-20th century police officer was intentionally positioned as paternalistic ‘friend’ to youth and the meaning and presence of the police in the lives of youth was transformed. The implications of these new developments, I argue, was that young people – especially working-class, racialized, and those labelled ‘sexually precocious’ – experienced unprecedented intervention from police in the name of protection, prevention, and discipline. Born during the Depression, the Juvenile Morality Squad (Moralité juvénile) initially focused on interrupting immoral relationships between adults and youth. In an effort to protect juvenile morality this small squad targeted the insidious acts of adults. During the Second World War (1939-45) this morality force expanded and refocused its work. Responding to the delinquency panic and the fear over the spread of ‘latchkey’ children, the morality officers focused on the surveillance of youth in public places through “tours of inspection” of restaurants, pool halls, bowling halls, and the like, now targeting the ‘ubiquitous immorality’ of youth. A significant development with the addition of officers to this force was the heightened regulation of youth sexuality. Whereas prior to the war ‘sex delinquency’ was understood as a female status offense, during the war the morality squad ‘discovered’ boys’ bodies and their sexuality. In 1946 the morality squad was renamed the Juvenile Prevention Bureau. In this guise its mandate expanded, as did the definition of who was best suited for work with children and youth. In 1947 police women, who had been summarily fired at the close of the last World War and absent from the Montreal force for decades, were again deemed useful to police work. The advent of the Prevention Bureau also heralded the arrival of new bureaucratic measures of surveillance, leading to the centralization of processing minors and police records on “bad” youth. Women officers and these new bureaucratic measures were not the only innovations: a substantial effort on the preventative front was central to the mission of the 1940s policing. In response to the fear that parents and the community in general had neglected young men and boys, the police established a Police Juvenile Club. Its programs involved “the sports solution” in which policemen acted as instructors and guides for hockey and basketball games, boxing matches, and music lessons.