Child Savers

Social movements during the 19th and 20th centuries led to the establishment and development of autonomous juvenile justice systems and other child welfare reform in the United States and elsewhere. These movements, led by civic actors who would come to be called “child savers,” resulted in numerous reforms and institutions that collectively extended greater state authority over families and youth, on the premise of rescuing or protecting young people from “deviant” socialization and thus, by extension, regulating societal development. These were especially pressing concerns in 19th- and early-20th-century United States, where industrialization, rapid urbanization, emancipation and reconstruction, mass immigration, and internal migrations, among other developments, were reconfiguring the face of the nation.

To a significant extent, “child saving” was conceived and carried out as a nation-building movement, focused on the tributaries of child welfare, socialization into adulthood, and ultimately civil society. The child saving movement actually involved numerous civic actors, drawing upon as many inspirations, and should therefore be understood as a reference to several, and in some ways, competing civic initiatives. These reformers had much in common, such as their shared interests in addressing what came to be called “delinquency” and “dependency,” their belief in the rehabilitative potential youth, and tendencies to attribute problems in young people's lives to family dysfunction, urbanization, faith, and other factors. However, child savers also varied significantly in their social identities, outlooks, and interests and developed movements that were often quite distinct and at times at odds with each other, as initiatives expressing the aspirations of a nation divided.

This entry provides a brief review of scholarship on the historical development of juvenile justice, focusing on the common accounts of who were these reformers, what motivated them, and how we should understand their historic significance. After highlighting several major arguments and limitations of the existing research literature, the review considers emerging research on child saving in the Black American experience, a movement that challenges and expands our perspective on the protagonists, their agendas, and the significance of child saving initiatives in U.S. history.