The Makings and Meanings of Childhood: Parents and the Juvenile Justice System in Interwar Palestine

Abstract

Abstract: Over the thirty years of the British Mandatory government in Palestine, thousands of young people were arrested and tried as juvenile delinquents. This article explores how the parents and families of those "young offenders" confronted the logics of the colonial criminal justice system and argued for their own understandings of the law and their children's places in Palestine's social and political landscape. Studying parental petitions to the government reveals that different groups made fragmented and multidirectional claims on the category of childhood. This article argues that in interwar Palestine, childhood was the political capital through which colonial power was both constructed and contested. In doing so, this article also illuminates the roles that ordinary families and communities played in daily governance in a twentieth-century developmentalist colonial state.