Re-inscribing the boundaries of ‘morality’: juvenile delinquency and family failure

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The Mazengarb Report: (re)claiming the moral high ground

“There is no emotion we feel so at home in as moral indignation”.439 The Mazengarb committee was established in the context of “an alleged mass outbreak of sex among schoolchildren” in the Hutt Valley in 1953.440 Commissioned by the National government, its main raison d’être was to analyse what was perceived as a widespread and growing problem of sexual immorality among adolescents in New Zealand. Anxieties about the behaviour of adolescent youth had begun to (re)surface early in the decade and the Mazengarb report was a response to the increasing stridency of those concerns.441 The commission of enquiry comprised: the chairman, Queen’s Council – and “trusted ally of the Government”- Oswald Mazengarb; a Justice of the Peace; the vice president of the Women’s Auxiliary of the Inter-Church Council on Public Affairs; president of the Catholic Women’s League.

Contextualising the Currie Report: consensus

As I noted in the previous chapter, the Mazengarb committee remained fairly neutral toward suggestions that a relationship existed between liberal education and libertine youth. Its focus was more intently upon ‘failing’ families and their contribution to moral delinquency in young New Zealanders. While the emphasis on moral delinquency faded over time problem adolescents remained a matter of public anxiety in the decade that followed the report, and increasingly their schooling became an important issue. The intensity of these concerns required some form of state response to the ‘problem’. Manning’s (1958) study, which I discussed in the previous chapter, was one outcome of an “interdepartmental committee on juvenile offenders” established by the second Labour government in 1958.

Expertise and Keynesian welfarism

Psychological explanations of delinquency emerging in the interwar years were related to the development of social and developmental psychology in the 20s and 30s which was itself entwined with socio-political and economic changes occurring at the time.562 Social psychology became absolutely enmeshed with the development of welfarism in New Zealand and elsewhere, and thus it became one crucial element of the interlocking network of expertise that underpinned Keynesian social policy. By the 60s welfarist discourses, reliant upon the analysis of these experts, were entrenched and mediated the discursive production of social problems like delinquency in very specific ways.

The Currie Report: maintaining the illusion of consensus

The discursive construction of juvenile delinquency in the Currie Report, and its claims about the role of education in mediating this social ‘problem’, reflects the enmeshed nature of these various expert discourses – criminological, psychological and educational – about deviant youth. These discourses continued to bear traces of the genealogy I recalled above, as well the more immediate history of social and economic Keynesianism that had become thoroughly embedded by the early sixties. In a fairly predictable response to claims that the liberalisation of education had contributed to increasing incidents of juvenile delinquency, the Currie Report (re)located culpability for the problem away from the education system. It attributed the problem to a morally deficient society on the one hand, and inadequate and irresponsible families on the other.

Making democracies: constructing citizens

Deepening concerns with developing democracy internationally were partly mediated by perceived threats to the primacy of the capitalist system following the First World War. From the 1930s, discourses of democracy became both inextricably entwined with the ongoing expansion of industrial capitalism and, through their constitutive link to the development of social psychology, fundamental to the governance of liberal subjects.630 In the first instance the optimal operation and further development of industry required not just the development of a labour-force with a greater diversity of skills, but the mutual co-operation of capitalists and workers. Secondly, in order “to rule subjects democratically it [was] necessary to know them intimately”.631 Social psychology would play an important part in both ‘knowing’ and ‘making’ liberal subjects, understood in terms of their location within groups, not as the atomistic individuals of classical liberalism.

READ Resilience supporting school environment

Global changes

The fourth Labour government, like the first, came to power in 1984 on the promise of fundamental economic reform and this was to be predicated on market modes of resource regulation and ‘rolling back’ the state.678 Policies were introduced to deregulate the economy, ‘downsize’ government, restructure and ‘managerialise’ the public sector, and privatize state owned enterprises.679 As a number of commentators have noted, these polices were implemented with little consultation outside of government and remarkable speed.

TABLE OF CONTENTS :

Abstract
Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
Chapter One:
- Coming to the thesis
- Conceptualising ‘respectability’
- Becoming respectable
- Modernity and masculinity: public men and private women
Chapter Two:
- From outpost to ‘Arcadia’?: settlement and social formation in the colony
- Introduction
  - One: Securing the colony: moral and material imperatives
  - Two: Constructing a Victorian social imaginary
  - Three: Populating the ‘promised land’: the settlement process
  - Four: Arcadia: a “labourer’s paradise”?
  - Five: A haven for the middle classes?
  - Six: Arcadia or Utopia?
  - Seven: Gender and race in the emerging colonial imaginary
- Concluding remarks
Chapter Three:
- Nation building: politics and state formation
- Introduction
  - One: Colonial politics: an overview
  - Two: Politics, property and class
  - Three: Politics, gender and race
  - Four: Constructing a democracy: ‘secularising’ conservatism and embedding liberalism
  - Five: Liberal governance and ‘normalisation’ of the working classes
- Concluding remarks
Chapter Four:
- Vile boys and degraded families: regulating the “antisocial poor”
- Introduction
  - One: Interrogating the social control thesis
  - Two: Moral regulation and the colonial state
  - Three: A Serpent in Paradise: poverty in the colony
  - Four: Pauperism and poverty in the Victorian social imaginary
  - Five: The discourses of ‘larrikinism’: demonising working class boys
  - Six: ‘Problem’ families: constructing the issue of ‘neglected’ and ‘criminal’ children
  - Seven: Industrial Schooling: institutionalising the discourses of ‘neglected’ and ‘criminal’ children
  - Eight: Schooling in the colony
- Concluding remarks
Chapter Five:
- Re-inscribing the boundaries of ‘morality’: juvenile delinquency and family failure
- Introduction
  - One: The ‘prosperity consensus’: economy and society
  - Two: Institutionalizing the standard family
  - Three: Cultural identity in the consensual society
  - Four: The Mazengarb Report: (re)claiming the moral high ground
  - Five: The ‘Expert’ view: psychologising the problem
- Concluding remarks
Chapter Six: Reforming education; remaking the nation
Chapter Seven: Neoliberalising education: recuperating ‘responsibility’
Chapter Eight: Debates? What Debates? Mapping the educational and media discourses about the ‘problem’ of boys’ educational underachievement in New Zealand
Chapter Nine: From the gender gap to “closing the gaps”: mapping state discourses about educational underachievement
Chapter Ten: Third Way/Third Space? Questions of social justice in the knowledge society