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Individual philanthropists and the organizations they established are often referred to as ‘child-savers’ and referred to themselves in similar terms (Katz 1986: 413; Levine and Levine 1992: 191); but what were they saving children from – poverty, disease, their families, their neighbourhoods, immorality? In fact ‘child-savers’ collapsed together poverty and immorality, physical hygiene and moral hygiene, and cast their work as a religious duty. The central strategy of nineteenth-century child-savers was to save the child by rescuing them from their families, whose moral degeneracy, in the view of social reformers, was the cause of their impoverishment. Discourses of child-saving were animated by a sense of moral duty which began to be substituted after 1910 by a discourse of social rights (Dickinson 1996: 68). Reformers argued for ‘an expansion of the powers and prerogatives of the state precisely in the interests of securing the rights of the child’ (Dickinson 1996: 77; emphasis in the original).

The shift from child-saving to child rights as discourses of public responsibility may be traceable to the failure of the strategies of early child-saving movements to rescue children. Separation of children from their parents and their placement in institutional care did not rescue children but placed them in frequently more dangerous, exploitative conditions; at the same time their parents lost the benefits of the ‘civilizing influence’ of their children. If children were to be left with their parents this was not because reformers and public officials trusted working-class parents with the care of their children. Instead, ‘the strategy of family preservation led inexorably to increased public responsibility and intervention’ (Katz 1986: 423).

The era of social reform moved from the provision of private charity to public support and intervention and, in moving child welfare from the private to the public, it changed the status of the child from a subject to a citizen, from a dependant to a semi-legal person. The language of philanthropy and helping children is a language of moral duty and concern or ‘moral economy’ (Ansell 2005: 226); the language of state intervention and provision is a political language of civic rights and civic responsibilities.