Inventing Young Offenders: The Legal and Medical Categorization of Juvenile Delinquency in Hashemite Iraq, 1921–1958

Abstract

This article traces the emergence of juvenile delinquency as a legal and medical category in Hashemite Iraq (1921–58). We argue that as children and youth became increasingly visible through actions and inactions that highlighted the weaknesses of political and social structures, state institutions adopted international frameworks and vernaculars concerning the participation of youth in labor. Medicine played a key role in defining the “juvenile” and determining young people’s physical abilities and, by extension, their productive potential. Focusing on children and youth who were for the most part unaffiliated with organized political groups, the article demonstrates that Iraq’s correctional facilities, including reformatories, were integral to the Hashemite state’s attempt at crafting and regulating citizens. Juvenile delinquency was also a uniquely gendered and classed category. Gender in particular became a distinguishing marker that in effect deprived young women and girls of the juvenile status that allowed mostly lower-class young men and boys to access reformatories rather than adult prisons. While defiant young men and boys who were considered as potentially redeemable gained access to judicial and social institutions that aimed to rehabilitate the juvenile delinquent, the crimes of young women and girls were often sexualized and assessed according to interpretations of maturity determined by the onset of puberty rather than legal age.