Coercive residential care for children and youth. Locking away juvenile disruption and conflicts

Abstract

The paper focuses on coercive residential care for children and youth and thus on a crystallization point for conflicts over social order. Up into the 1970s, juveniles who challenged the given structures of power and social norms were perceived as at risk or themselves posing a danger. Viewed from a perspective of education, morality or medicine, they could be classified for instance as ‘juveniles with developmental or adjustment problems’ (‘Schwererziehbare’) or ‘psychopathological’. The measures arising from this were viewed as protective or coercive and compulsory. The present paper focuses on the coercive measures in Switzerland and raises questions about the so-called ‘children and youth with adjustment problems’ and their compulsory re-education in closed coercive residential care facilities. How did the perception come to be formed of these juveniles as having ‘adjustment problems’ and what role was played in this connection by the concepts developed for specific coercive residential facilities? What attributions were accorded in their classification and what stigmatizations were codified? How did the view of these adolescents change over time, and concomitantly, how also did the measures that were conceived for them change?

The paper is based on an ongoing research project, which on the basis of archival sources investigates the interplay of professional expertise and politics within an umbrella organization operating supraregionally across the whole of Switzerland (1932 – 2000). Through the example of the discussions from the 1950s to the 1970s between administration, professional experts and policy decision-makers concerning the establishment of a special type of institution for juveniles seen as most difficult and disruptive, it proves possible to impressively show how the juveniles were classified and the associated conception of their coercive residential care. It becomes clear that conflicts did not arise just in the stage of implementation of measures; rather conflicts were already present in the processes of how the juveniles were classified and in the conception of their coercive residential care.