Abstract
Children have been ill-treated by adults throughout history, but it is only occasionally that concern about the issue has gathered any momentum.1 In order to assess the significance of recent developments it is important to locate the social reactions to children’s problems in a wider historical context. What will become evident is that the legislative and institutional framework of policies for children has rarely given any substantive attention to children as victims. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1970s concern for children has focused primarily on the protection of society from children and the control of delinquent youth. The primary concern with children has been in terms of the prevention of crime and antisocial behaviour. It is only at certain times in history, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century and immediately after the Second World War, that there has been any explicit concern with protecting children from cruel, neglectful or abusing parents. A major focus in this chapter therefore will be to consider these two periods to see whether there might be common threads with developments in child care in the 1970s and to analyse the forms of the social reactions.
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Notes and References
M. P. Thomas Jr, ‘Child Abuse and Neglect Part 1: Historical Overview, Legal Matrix and Social Perspectives’, The North Carolina Law Review, vol. 50, no. 2, February 1972, pp. 293–349.
See in particular E. Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (Tavistock, 1977).
M. May, ‘Violence in the Family: An Historical Perspective’, in J. P. Martin (ed.), Violence and the Family (Wiley, 1978).
See for example D. Bakan, Slaughter of the Innocents: A study of the Battered Child Phenomenon (Jassey-Bass, 1971);
F. H. Garrison, Abt-Garrison History of Paediatrics, vol. 1 (W. B. Saunders, 1965);
S. X. Radbill, ‘A History of Child Abuse and Infanticide’ in R. E. Heifer and C. H. Kempe (eds), The Battered Child (University of Chicago Press, 1968);
P. J. Resnick, ‘Infanticide’, in J. G. Howells (ed.), Modern Perspectives in Psycho-Obstetrics (Oliver & Boyd, 1972);
S. Smith, The Battered Child Syndrome (Butter-worth, 1976).
Radbill, ‘A History of Child Abuse and Infanticide’, p. 4.
Smith, The Battered Child Syndrome, pp. 7–8.
May, ‘Violence in the Family: An Historical Perspective’, pp. 136–7.
C. Norton, English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854);
C. Norton, A Letter to the Queen on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Divorce Bill (Longman, 1855);
M. Kramnick (ed.), Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Penguin, 1975).
Also G. Mitchell (ed.), The Hard Way Up: The autobiography of Hannah Mitchell, suffragette and rebel (Virago, 1977).
I. Pinchbeck and M. Hewitt, Children in English Society vol. 1 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969).
S. West, ‘Acute Periosteal Swellings in Several Young Infants of the Same Family, Probably Rickets in Nature’, British Medical Journal, vol. 1, 1888, pp. 856–7.
J. S. Heywood, Children in Care: the development of the service for the deprived child (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 3rd edn 1978).
H. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (Methuen, 1969).
E. Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (Collins, 1976);
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J. Donzelot, The Policing of Families: Welfare versus the State (Hutchinson, 1980).
P. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (Penguin, 1962).
Also D. Hunt, Parents and Children in History (Basic Books, 1970);
L. DeMause (ed.), The History of Childhood (The Psychohistory Press, 1974).
See M. Anderson, ‘The Relevance of Family History’ in C. Harris (ed.), The Sociology of the Family: New Directions for Britain (Sociological Review Monograph no. 28, 1979).
See H. Hendrick, Kept from History: Aspects of the Status of Children Part 1 and 2 (Justice for Children nos. 22 and 25, 1981).
P. Thane, ‘Childhood in History’, in M. King (ed.), Childhood, Welfare and Justice (Batsford, 1981).
Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family, p. 256.
Thane, ‘Childhood in History’, p. 11.
Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family, p. 5.
Donzelot, The Policing of Families, p. 55.
W. Norton Grubb and M. Lazerson, Broken Promises: How Americans Fail Their Children (Basic Books, 1982).
Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society vol. 1, ch. 11.
May, ‘Violence in the Family’, p. 139.
May, ‘Violence in the Family’, p. 150
J. Walvin, A Child’s World: A Social History of English Childhood, 1800–1914 (Penguin, 1982).
Walvin, A Child’s World, pp. 21–2.
The increase in concern about the level of violence in the nineteenth century was explicitly expressed in May 1874 when the Government commissioned an inquiry into the law on brutal assaults which revealed a general consensus among police and judicial authorities about the serious level of violent crime, ascribed mainly to drink, and which recommended the need for harsher punishments. See May ‘Violence in the Family’, p. 149.
G. Stedman-Jones, Outcast London (Clarendon Press, 1971).
Walvin, A Child’s World, p. 18.
See G. Pearson, The Deviant Imagination: Psychiatry, Social Work and Social Change (Macmillan, 1975),
and G. Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (Macmillan, 1983).
The work of Mary Carpenter illustrates the increasing concern at the time. She argued that juvenile delinquency usually originated in parental neglect so that in effect pauper, vagrant and criminal children aged under fourteen could all be classed together. Because they were in trouble through no fault of their own they should be trained rather than punished. Mary Carpenter’s reformatory movement shows the increasing attempts to understand delinquency in terms of urban life and parental neglect. It therefore argued for the need for preventive work to forestall delinquency, but focused on the parents.
A. Piatt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (University of Chicago Press, 1969).
Wilson, Women and the Welfare State, p. 23.
See N. Parry and J. Parry, ‘Social Work, Professionalism and the State’, in N. Parry, M. Rustin and C. Satyarmurti (eds), Social Work, Welfare and the State (Arnold, 1979);
R. G. Walton, Women and Social Work (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).
May, ‘Violence in the Family’, p. 154.
Information from May, ‘Violence in the Family’, p. 143.
According to Margaret May in 1982 the society amalgamated with the Associated Institute for Improving and Enforcing the Laws for the Protection of Women to form the Associated Societies for the Protection of Women. After considerable wrangling with the NSPCC it agreed to refer cases of child cruelty and neglect to the latter and concentrate on adult women.
L. G. Housden, The Prevention of Cruelty to Children (Jonathan Cape, 1955) p. 30.
Parry and Parry, ‘Social Work, Professionalism and the State’.
See J. Fido, ‘The Charity Organisation Society and Social Casework in London 1869–1900’, in A. P. Donajgrodski (ed.), Social Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Croom Helm, 1977);
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Donzelot, The Policing of Families, p. 55.
Stedman-Jones, Outcast London, ch. 16.
For example Samuel Barnett and Arnold Toynbee advocated non-contributory pensions for the respectable working class who had maintained themselves outside the workhouse up to the age of sixty, subsidised public housing, free school meals and free education.
J. Eekelaar, R. Dingwall and T. Murray, ‘Victims or Threats? Children in Care Proceedings’, Journal of Social Welfare Law, March 1982, p. 75.
Hey wood, Children in Care, p. 101.
For an account of the origins and history of the NSPCC see A. Allen and A. Morton, This is Your Child: The Story of the NSPCC (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961).
Those attending included Lord Shaftesbury, the Baroness Bardett-Coutts, Cardinal Manning, Dr Barnardo, Lord Aberdeen, Sir Henry Foulter (Mayor of London) and Mr Kegan Paul.
To ensure the Bill’s passage through Parliament the Society circulated 10 000 copies of a pamphlet, ‘Imperial Legislation and Street Children’ to every corporation in the country. As a result 87 corporations representing more than 4 million people petitioned Parliament in favour of the Bill. At the same time a letter running to twelve foolscap pages was sent to every MP.
Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children and English Society vol. 2 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), ch. 20.
Quoted in Pinchbeck and Hewitt, Children in English Society vol. 2 (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 627.
Heywood, Children in Care, pp. 103–4.
Eekelaar, Dingwall and Murray, ‘Victims or Threats? Children in Care Proceedings’, p. 68.
Heywood, Children in Care, p. 93.
Quoted in Housden, The Prevention of Cruelty to Children, p. 36.
May, ‘Violence in the Family’, p. 163.
G. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency (Oxford University Press, 1971).
E.J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (Penguin, 1969) ch. 9.
B. B. Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain (Michael Joseph, 2nd edn 1973).
The material and arguments for this section depend heavily upon C. Parton, Liberal Individualism and Infant Mortality: The Infant Welfare Movement in Huddersfield (MA Thesis, Huddersfield Polytechnic, 1981).
Donzelot, The Policing of Families, p. xxi.
V. MacLeod, Whose Child? The Family in Child Care Legislation and Social Work Practice, (Study Commission on the Family Occasional Paper no. 11, 1982) Part 1.
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R. M. Titmuss, ‘Problems of Social Policy’, UK Civil Histories of the Second War (Longmans Green, 1950).
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See for example Wilson, Women and the Welfare State, chs 3, 4 and 8.
See J. Packman, The Child’s Generation: Child Care Policy from Curtis to Houghton (Basil Blackwell/Robertson, 2nd edn 1981) particularly ch. 1.
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B. Jordan and N. Parton (eds), The Political Dimensions of Social Work (Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 3.
MacLeod, Whose Child? The Family in Child Care Legislation and Social Work Practice, p. 29.
J. F. Handler, The Coercive Social Worker: British Lessons for American Social Services (Rand McNally, 1973), p. 42.
Even prior to the passage of the 1948 Act there were criticisms that the role of the child care service was defined too narrowly and could do little to mitigate deprivation and prevent hardship and admission into care. The stress on the need to keep families together was seen to be legitimated by the work of John Bowlby. It was increasingly argued that the lack of warmth and security that was thought to be characteristic of ‘problem families’ had deleterious implications for the future. Increasingly ideological and scientific legitimation was given to the link between neglect in early life and later problems and the belief that early intervention was important. See for example T. Stephens, Problem Families (Pacifist Service Units, 1946);
The Women’s Group in Public Welfare, The Neglected Child and his Family (Oxford University Press, 1948);
J. Bowlby, Child Care and the Growth of Love (Penguin, 1953).
Ingleby Report, Report of the Committee on Children and Young Persons, Cmnd 1191 (HMSO, 1960).
Eekelaar, Dingwall and Murray, ‘Victims or Threats? Children in Care Proceedings’, p. 76.
Crime — A Challenge to us all (The Longford Report) (The Labour Party, 1964).
The Child, the Family and the Young Offender, Cmnd 2742 (HMSO, 1965).
Children in Trouble Cmnd 3601 (HMSO, 1968).
For example this was proposed in a debate in the House of Commons on 12 May 1949 and by The Times in a Leader article on 22 October 1951 following a number of severe cases. However the Children and Young Persons (Amendment) Act 1952 did modify this criminal approach to cruelty and gave more opportunity to childrens departments to become more involved in cases of cruelty and wilful neglect. It removed the requirement of the prosecution of a parent as a condition precedent for finding a child to be in need of care and protection within the 1933 Act. Under the 1952 (Amendment) Act failure for whatever cause in the parenting function leading to a specified condition in the child became a ground for intervention. Such grounds included that the parent or guardian was ‘unfit to exercise care or guardianship or [was] not exercising proper care and guardianship’ and ‘he was being ill-treated or neglected in a manner likely to cause him unnecessary suffering or injury to health’.
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© 1985 Nigel Parton
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Parton, N. (1985). Children as Victims: Cruelty and Neglect in History. In: The Politics of Child Abuse. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17830-8_2
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