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Abstract In Nigeria as in South Africa, youth crime is perceived by officials and some academics as a major social and political contemporary concern. The understanding of the origins of youth violence, youth destitution and public policies towards the youth is, however, inadequately informed by academic research. Only a few works have been produced on Nigerian youth crime history while it has become an important subfield of research in the case of South Africa in the framework of the rise of the new social history in this country since the 1980s. In both countries, however, the understanding of youth crime from the point of view of officials remains largely unexplored. It is argued in this article that juvenile delinquency became a central notion popularized from the 1930s onward by officials, politicians, welfare officers, academics and later on by some international organizations, before declining in the 1980s and 1990s. The discovery of ‘delinquents’ by welfare officers or academics actually led to the implementation in both countries of new administrative and judiciary machinery which combined two processes: it legislated ‘juvenile delinquency’ into existence as a clearly identifiable social problem and criminalized a large portion of urban youth. As such the history of the juvenile delinquent in Africa strictly follows state or academic discovery of youth destitution and the setting up of juvenile state institutions rather than it really informs on the history of youth crime. It is thus considered that colonial, post colonial and apartheid policies towards the youth and the children were a central part of the problem of juvenile delinquency not a solution to it.
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