Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 15

The nineteenth century was a century of change on an unprecedented scale: industrialization stimulated a dramatic growth in the scale and density of urban life and parallel shifts in rural life. The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic population movements that criss-crossed the globe. If industrialization and urbanization did not necessarily increase poverty they did make it more visible and, in an era of democratic reform, inequality could no longer be legitimated by divine right or natural law. The long nineteenth century is said to have opened with the French Revolution of 1789 and closed with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. In between these epoch-shaping events there were revolutionary outbreaks in Haiti in 1791; Europe in 1848 and again in 1879; and Mexico in 1910. It is in this context of a landscape of revolutionary change of society, politics and economy that the era of social reform that begins in the nineteenth century should be situated.

The upheavals of the nineteenth century produced new problems of government, and the management of childhood poverty became, and has remained, a central problem of modern government. Many themes from this era of social reform can still be traced in how children are depicted by contemporary social reformers working with or on children.

The end of the nineteenth century ushered in what has been referred to as the ‘century of the child’. It is in the late 1800s that most of London’s most influential child charities were launched: Barnardo’s in 1867; the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1884; the Liverpool Society in 1883; the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1889 (Murdoch 2006: 3). England was not unusual in Europe in expanding child welfare institutions in this period; Germany saw the establishment and significant expansion of child welfare charities between 1830 and 1868 (Dickinson 1996: 11). In the case of Germany most of this activity was organized by private philanthropy; state action on child welfare was limited before 1870, although after that date it expanded considerably. In 1878 the German Legal Guardianship Code gave the state responsibility for ‘neglected children’ (Dickinson 1996: 18). In France there was a gradual shift in child welfare from private religious charities in the seventeenth century to the state in the late eighteenth century, and in the early nineteenth the state assumed complete legal responsibility for the care of ‘unwanted children’ (Fuchs 1984: 26). Following the agitation of private, philanthropic child protection agencies from the 1860s through to the 1880s (Fuchs 1984: 59) the state’s powers over families were expanded in a late nineteenth-century law for the protection of the moralement abandonnés which gave the state the right to separate children from ‘immoral’ parents; by the turn of the century judges had the power to remove children from their families and place them in public guardianship.

The concern with child welfare in the nineteenth century was also evident in the United States. What is referred to in America as the ‘Progressive Era’ (1890–1920) concentrated its ‘reform energy on children’ (Katz 1986: 414). Levine and Levine begin their history of Helping Children (1992) by noting that nearly all modern professional community-based services for children were established between 1890 and 1916.

State welfare policies in the nineteenth century addressed poverty by attacking the rights of poor parents (Murdoch 2006: 4). In England the New Poor Law 1834 (the previous law to which it was an amendment – hence it was a ‘new’ law – was enacted in 1601) meant that the workhouse was the only state-administered form of poverty relief. Workhouses separated parents from their children. Initially public opinion was sympathetic to the families separated by the Poor Law, but this diminished by the end of the nineteenth century alongside a ‘growing geographical as well as discursive separation between poor parents and children’ (Murdoch 2006: 6) and reformers ‘continued to assert that poor children needed to be separated from their impoverished parents in order to be fashioned into citizens’ (2006: 7). What Murdoch means by ‘discursive separation’ is the idea that children were targeted as the ‘deserving poor’, the innocent victims of circumstances beyond their control, whilst their parents were typically depicted as neglectful, abusive and addicted to drink and sex. Child-savers were preoccupied with prostitution, nakedness and sexual danger (Murdoch 2006: 20–4). In order to be saved children had to be taken from the close proximity of their parents and neighbourhoods and ‘transplanted to a new kind of domestic space’ (Murdoch 2006: 48). Institutions for children, particularly once the ‘family system’ for children in care was well established, were depicted by reformers as the best place for children to grow up and learn the habits of domesticity and work (Murdoch 2006: 64). George K. Behlmer in his study of the London Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children (SPCC, renamed the National SPCC or NSPCC in 1899), Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870–1908, makes the rather unlikely claim that the SPCC did split families up but did so without regard to class (Behlmer 1982). If this was the case in Britain, and Murdoch’s study would suggest otherwise, it was not the case in America. The American SPCC, as Katz remarks, ‘reflected a major strand in social policy from the 1870s through the mid- or late- 1890s. The only way to eradicate pauperism, argued many reformers and officials, was to break up the families of the very poor; inability to support one’s children had become evidence of parental incompetence’ (Katz 1986: 417).

If the depiction of poor children as geographically or discursively separated from their parents, and the obsessive attention to sexual danger, are familiar from the contemporary landscape of child-rescue, another focus of nineteenth-century reformers is not: the importance placed on ‘discipline and work as the key values that would enable poor youths to escape the fates of their parents’ (Murdoch 2006: 121). This emphasis on the virtues of work for children seems odd to our modern conceptions of childhood. The importance of discipline and learning the habits of work shifted location in the later part of the nineteenth century from the factory to the school. The Education Act 1870 established 10 as the minimum school-leaving age; exactly ten years later another Education Act made full-time school compulsory for under-11s (excluding agricultural workers), and this was raised again in 1899 and again in 1914 (to age 14).

The use of education as a tool of child welfare was partly motivated by the decreasing opportunities for work for children, under the combined impact of successful labour reform campaigns limiting the hours of children’s work and changes in production methods that made children’s labour less attractive to employers. The increases in the urban population, the inadequacy of homes for working-class people and the decrease in children’s employment contributed to a growing visibility of poor children and young people on the streets of the major cities of Europe and North America. Indeed, part of the motivation driving child welfare reforms and interventions was to address a middle-class fear of the criminality of working-class youth (Dickinson 1996: 38). It was this fear of working-class youth, Anthony Platt argues in his now classic text The Child Savers (1969), that stimulated reforms in the administering of juvenile justice. Contrary to a narrative of juvenile legal reform that claims that the separation of adults and children in the legal system protects the child from harm, Platt argues that it created new categories of wrong-doing, status offences that would not be liable to punishment if committed by an adult, and denied children their liberty without the protection of due process. Donzelot (1980) presents a similar case for the pernicious effects of juvenile reform in nineteenth-century France. One of the effects of attempting to decriminalize juvenile justice was that juvenile ‘offenders’ were no longer afforded the protection of due process including representation or legal counsel.

Geoff Ward in his The Black Child-Savers (2012) examines the history of juvenile justice in the USA through an analysis of the campaigns of ‘Black child-savers’ to get Black children and youth the same treatment in juvenile justice as white children were given. Although Platt and Donzelot emphasize the coercive and problematic character of juvenile justice they do not explore its racialized distribution. What Ward shows is that how children and youth were treated in juvenile justice depended on the perception of the authorities of whether or not their characters could be reformed and they could be redeemed. This perception was racialized so that Black children were viewed as more corrupt and less redeemable than white children. Influential Black adults campaigned to undo this racist view of Black children which had significant impacts on their treatment in law, for example their length of detention.

The main focus of Platt’s study, Illinois, was where the first juvenile court in America opened in 1899. The early juvenile reformers advocated that the state should act as a good parent would to an unruly child. In the USA, as in Europe, the conviction that juvenile justice could change the child’s future was based on an optimistic conviction that the application of scientific practice could eliminate or solve social problems. This movement ‘stressed the importance of individualized case-by-case diagnosis and treatment, much as a doctor might do with medical problems’ (Mears et al. 2007: 225).