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knudsen’s now recently declassified registry reveals that the police, with
relatively few exceptions, had no proper evidence for their sweeping accusations.
While the Morality Committee’s report did temporarily awaken something
akin to mass hysteria, this article shows that both the Committee and the police
were far more strongly criticised by men and women alike than has hitherto been
described in historical accounts.
Late in 1941, a draft legislation on juvenile supervision was presented by
Hermann Jónasson to members of parliament from the coalition parties. The draft
had been composed by a committee consisting primarily of prominent women.
Despite these preparations, the all-male Althing rejected the draft.
In December 1941, the Minister issued a provisional law based on the draft
legislation, after having amended it in the hope of securing a parliamentary
majority. This law allowed the authorities to supervise young people up to the age
of 20, even though the age majority was 16, and established both reformatory
institutions and juvenile tribunals to deal with promiscuity and various other
delinquencies.
When in 1942 the Althing discussed the provisional law, the Coalition’s own
members toned it down, for instance by reducing the maximum age of
supervision to 17. While Hermann Jónasson felt these amendments were making
the law ineffective, his attitude seemed quite isolated and his government was
collapsing.
From April 1942 to October 1943, a juvenile tribunal in Reykjavík sent 14 girls
to a rural reformatory school, while 26 girls were assigned to stay at separate farms,
mostly due to promiscuity. The court rulings were mostly based upon police reports
from a recently founded juvenile supervision department, which was di rected by
Jóhanna knudsen and resembled a secret service. However, treating these girls like
criminals was ill-advised, because their problems were in many cases of a social
nature and sometimes resulted from sexual abuse by Icelanders as well as foreign
soldiers, though the men themselves do not seem have been prosecuted.
einar Arnórsson, now the Minister of Justice in a non-parliamentary govern-
ment, decided to dissolve the reformatory school in October 1943, as it seemed to
be harming rather than helping the girls involved. The juvenile tribunal was also
abolished, relieving all of the girls of its rulings against them. This Minister, who
was a judge of the Supreme Court and one of the country’s most respected legal
authorities, appears to have felt that the juvenile supervision law was in essence
nationalistic, patriarchal and discriminatory, as it was almost solely directed
against girls involved with allied troops. In any case he did not agree with the
belief of his predecessor and many others that women were threatening the
Icelandic nation or culture by their relations with troops.
Having effectively invalidated the juvenile supervision law, the Minister of
Justice charged the municipal child protection committee of Reykjavík with the
main responsibility for handling the city’s juvenile delinquency problems. In turn,
the committee demanded the dissolution of the police’s juvenile supervision
department. Moreover, leading committee members, both on the left and right,
accused Jóhanna knudsen of having abnormal motives in applying harsh, illegal
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