Youth Curfews

Curfew laws, taking affect a hundred of the years ago in Europe, originated among the upper class of society to enforce standards of control upon the lower class. The imposition of a restriction on the hours by which citizens could be out in the public as a way to curb social control is not new. Curfew laws can be traced back more than 1100 years to the rule of Alfred the Great (849-899) in England. It was during this time that the evening bell was rung to signal the residents of Oxford that their fires should be doused and that they should retire to their homes for the night. During William the Conqueror (1066-1087) a ringing bell was also the signal so that the Englishmen would know that it was time for them to retire and retreat to their homes for the night as well. This particular curfew was enforced as a control mechanism to prevent the Anglo Saxons from congregating and causing any problems during the evening hours. The theory behind curfew laws is that crime originates from those in the lower classes and enforcing restrictions upon them will limit the amount of crimes that they have the time and opportunity to commit.

Governments have been imposing curfews for many centuries, and not only against teenagers. In the United States, areas in the pre-Civil War south used curfews to restrict the activities of both slaves and free blacks. The first wave of juvenile curfew laws took hold in the late nineteenth century. In the 1890's, the Boys' and Girls' National Home Employment suggested that children should be required to be in their homes after sunset. This idea gained widespread popularity throughout many communities and by the end of the decade the United States curfew movement emergence, curfew ordinances began to disappear and fall into disuse. The assumption for the decline was that of the national concern including World War 11. It was not until after the Second World War that communities began to reconsider the curfew as a mean to control the youth’s population the prevention of youth crime. O'Neil's article explores the extent to which the recent juvenile curfew ordinances instituted in the United States and the judicial interpretation of those ordinances rely on a concept of the child that defines children in terms of innocence, dependence, and passivity (O'Neil 50).

What is the cultural meaning of a child, on might ask? The United States and its Western components have relied on the cultural characteristics to define a child. The convention of a child defines a child as a person below the age of 18, unless the laws of a particular country set the legal age for adulthood as younger than 18. Though most people believe that dealing with issues surrounding children and their childhood was easy, it has proven to be most difficult. True enough, each adult has had the experience of being a child once, but each experience is unique and different and no one experience can ever be considered the same. One assumes that they know what it is like to be a child and to what extent that the childhood diminishes and the adulthood blossoms. Race, class, gender, their sexuality, and national origin influence the overall general concept of a child. Each of the following factors, according to O'Neil, is an important factor that in some way or another impacts the experiences of children during their adulthood.

In the late twentieth century, we tend to assume innocence to be an attribute of childhood. But inhabitants of Georgian Britain, particularly those in middle and upper class, discussed the basic nature of children with great intensity. Starting from views of the child as a creature of innate evil, philosophers of the period increasingly saw the child as an innocent creature-innocent, at least, until corrupted by society. Beginning with the writings of the English Philosopher John Locke, around 1700 through the publication of the French philosopher Jean Jacques-Rousseau’s influential writings on childhood in the 1760's, a great philosophical shift took place. By the end of the period, the child became allied with the natural world, and childhood, a period of improbably extreme innocence. In order for children to remain at a constant state of innocence, children had to be separated from their adult counterparts until they could make the transition into adulthood maturely.

Human beings are born dependent. In order for a baby to survive and thrive, it needs the constant support of other humans. Yet, as children grow, they do not gradually become independent of others; rather, they become interdependent. During the course of their lives children form many give and take relationships, building a healthy interdependence with family, community, and culture. Children are adept at this because they are biologically designed to live, play, grow and work in groups. They are, at cores, social creatures. Because