INTRODUCTION

Children have had since the earliest days of the Scottish legal system a status different from and subservient to adults, certainly within the context of their own families. However, it was not until the nineteenth century that children, in their relations with the external world, came to be seen as requiring special treatment different from that accorded to adults. One of the earliest manifestations of the recognition that children, due to their physical weakness, ought to be dealt with differently from adults was in the realm of employment. As early as 1819 the Cotton Mills and Factories Act prohibited the employment in factories of children under the age of nine years and limited the working hours of nine to 16 year olds to 12 hours a day. The Factories Act, 1833 set up a system of factory inspectors to ensure the rules were adhered to. The introduction of compulsory education of children later in the century also recognised the special position of children, though that was predicated less on the need to recognise the limitations to children's physical capacities and more on the notion that children could and should be given the chance to develop their full capacities and that the state itself had a role in ensuring this.

The same thinking was applied to the legal process itself in the early years of the twentieth century. The idea that children who are brought to court as subjects of the process – as opposed to being the object of some dispute, typically between the parents – needing to be dealt with differently from adults grew out of a belief, increasingly accepted in the latter half of the nineteenth century, in the specialness of children, that they were “corruptible innocents” who required to be protected from baleful influences. The science of child development was then in its infancy, but that specialness was assumed to encompass three separate but related ideas: that children, due to their inexperience and physical immaturity, were particularly vulnerable to the harmful influences of others, that notions of “guilt” played out differently with underdeveloped minds, and that children, much more so than adults, were capable of being “saved”, that is of being moulded into good and productive citizens who obeyed the laws of man, and of God.