Inventing Young Offenders: The Legal and Medical Categorization of Juvenile Delinquency in Hashemite Iraq, 1921–1958.

This article examines the emergence of juvenile delinquency as a legal and medical category in Hashemite Iraq (1921–1958), highlighting how state institutions adopted international frameworks to regulate youth, particularly in labor and criminal justice contexts. It emphasizes the gendered and classed nature of juvenile delinquency, noting that mostly lower-class boys accessed reformatories, while young women and girls were excluded from juvenile status and often criminalized through sexualized medical and legal assessments. The development of juvenile delinquency laws culminated in the 1955 Law for Investigating Juveniles, which institutionalized medical, familial, and socio-economic evaluations of youth offenders amid growing political unrest and youth activism. The article situates Iraq's juvenile delinquency policies within broader regional and global trends while underscoring local specificities shaped by social, political, and colonial legacies.