Winlaton: The story of a noxious weed

Winlaton is a section excerpt from The Little Mongrel- free to a good home, taken from the third section of the book and titled, A Noxious Weed. It takes the reader inside the institution, established in 1956 as the main state-run institution for adolescent girls. Due to changes in child welfare legislation and, fundamentally, moral and control panics about juvenile delinquency in the 1950s and 1960s, the number of girls increased throughout the 1950s and 1960s. However, the suitability of new inmates for a maximum security facility declined. Increasingly, the young women and girls sent to Winlaton had been detained, not for criminal offences, but had been made wards of the state under the Children's Welfare Act for either being "exposed to moral danger" or "likely to lapse into a life of vice or crime". Young women who had been made wards of the state to protect them from abuse at home soon found themselves living in overcrowded facilities with young women under sentence from the courts. Many female juvenile offenders were committed to Winlaton by the courts; however, throughout its history Winlaton housed many girls and young women who had not committed a crime.