Institute for Juvenile Research

The Institute for Juvenile Research (IJR) is a research, demonstration and training center housed in the Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago. The institute has more than 40 faculty members and 65 professional staff members. IJR programs address pressing issues such as HIV risk, access to effective school services, the epidemiology of drug abuse, services for families in the child welfare system and the training of child mental health providers. The institute also offers child psychiatry clinical services and training programs in child and adolescent psychiatry, psychology and social work.

Before 1871, the year of the Great Chicago Fire, Chicago's population was 300,000 people. Twenty years after the Great Chicago Fire in 1891, Chicago’s population was a little over a million people. By the 1910s Chicago's population had risen to over two million, and by the mid-1920s the population was three million. This growth was driven by European immigration resulting in over 70% of Chicago’s population being either foreign-born or first-generation immigrant. Because times were hard, parents were working overtime to scrape out a living, and children, who had to work to contribute to the family’s livelihood, were “ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clothed, illiterate, and wholly untrained and unfitted for any occupation." The results were that many families were being disrupted by poverty and unfamiliar community circumstances as result of immigration, were not able to properly care for their children. The reality that the new European immigrants were not doing well was also found in the extraordinarily high rates of European immigrant’s domestic violence in Chicago from 1875 to 1920. . Accordingly, in 1889, Nobel Prize–winning social worker, Jane Addams (1860–1935) founded Hull House on Chicago’s Near West Side as a social settlement house “to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city.” She observed “Children over ten years of age were arrested, held in the police stations, tried in the police courts. If convicted they were usually fined and if the fine was not paid sent to the city prison. However, often they were let off because justices could neither tolerate sending children to Bridewell nor bear in themselves guilty of the harsh folly of compelling poverty-stricken parents to pay fines. No exchange of court records existed and the same children could be in and out of various police stations an indefinite number of times, more hardened and more skillful with each experience.” In an effort to distinguish between criminality and juvenile delinquency, in 1899, Jane Addams and her female colleagues helped to start the world's first Juvenile Court in Chicago, Illinois, the Juvenile Protective Association.

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