The Children in the Shadow

# Catalog Note

The Children in the Shadow by Ernest K. Coulter (1913), a sociological study based on the author's decade-long service at New York's Children's Court. The work documents approximately 100,000 cases involving juvenile delinquency, examining what Coulter identifies as three delinquents: the child, the parent, and the community. The book opens with concrete case studies, including two brothers who staged a public fight to attract police attention, hoping to be sent away to institutional care as preferable to parental abuse and street homelessness. Coulter presents thirteen chapters addressing tenement conditions, child labor, parental neglect, immigration effects, and the emerging Big Brother mentorship movement, which he helped found. The introduction by Jacob Riis endorses Coulter's argument that community responsibility and personal neighborly intervention, rather than legal reform alone, can redirect delinquent children. Illustrated throughout with photographs of urban poverty.