Processing Juvenile Delinquents at the Salvation Army’s Boys’ Industrial Home in Lagos, 1925–1944

Abstract

This chapter takes up Chris Jenks’s claims set out above about the ways in which institutions designed for children seek to “process the child as a uniform entity.” How were children processed, or not, in the institutions that were established to deal with juvenile delinquency? What did processing mean in the context of Nigeria in the colonial era? How might we extend or critique Jenks’s argument from the historical perspective of the Boys’ Industrial School in Lagos in the 1920s–1940s? After all, this case study reveals British colonial and Nigerian indigenous conventions and discourses on childhood. There is also a need to be cognizant of the class attitudes at play: the upper and upper-middling colonial official class, the urban cosmopolitan elite, and the urban working class and poor. If childhood is characterized as a struggle between an old and a new order, then similarly Nigeria in this period emerges as a struggle between indigenous and colonial orders. Another idea from Jenks that needs investigation is his view that when children display an increasing complexity of “challenging” behaviors then adults respond with increasingly complex and penetrating means of control, conducted through an ideology of care.²

The status of childhood has its boundaries maintained through the crystallization of conventions and discourses into lasting institutional forms like families, nurseries, schools, and clinics, all agencies specifically designed and established to process the child as a uniform entity. Comparative material drawn from cross-cultural contexts reveals divergent sets of conventions and discourses, and thus institutional forms, some utterly different from our own [Western] but others bearing strong resemblances, all bound together through homology. The comparative material… instructs us to think more profitably of childhoods rather than a singular and mono-dimensional status.¹