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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Child abuse casts a long shadow over the history of childhood. Across the centuries there are numerous accounts of children being beaten, neglected, sexually assaulted, or even killed by those closest to them. This book explores this darker side of childhood history, looking at what constituted cruelty towards children in the past and at the social responses towards it. Focusing primarily on England, it is a history of violence against children in their own homes, covering a large timeframe which extends from medieval times to the present. Undeniably, the experience of children in the past was often brutal, and children were treated with, what seems to contemporary mores, callousness, and cruelty. However, historians have paid far less attention to how the mistreatment of children was understood within its contemporary context. Most parents, both now and in the past, loved their children and there have always been widely shared understandings of the boundaries that separate the acceptable treatment of children from the intolerable and morally wrong. This book will examine how these boundaries have changed and been contested over time and, in doing so, provides a context to the many forms of violence experienced by children in the past.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Personal Reflections and Disciplinary Perspectives
Anthropological and historical perspectives
A nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken?
Key arguments of the book
Notes
1 Infanticide
Massacre of the innocents
An Act to prevent the murdering of bastard children
Hard choices
Infanticide panic
Burial insurance
Notes
2 Abandonment, Parish Nursing and Baby Farmers
Accessories to the murder of poor children
Abandoned with love
Baby farmers
Notes
3 Neglect
Bad custodians
The infant conceived in gin
Neglect and parental failure
The stench of neglect
Notes
4 Discipline, Socialization and Physical Abuse
Spare the rod and spoil the child
Correction and restraint
‘Better whipt, than damned’
Flogged for nothing
Reasonable chastisement
Notes
5 Incest and Child Sexual Abuse in the Home
‘Let him not touch me’
Criminalizing incest
Incest would be less frequent if people knew more about it
The patriarchy in crisis
Notes
6 Intervening, Prosecuting and Preventing Abuse
Reasonable severity
Protecting the innocent
Child rescue
The horribleness of hidden evils
Lessons will be learned
Notes
7 The Rise and Fall of Child Abuse Experts
Medicalizing child abuse
Ambroise Tardieu and the classification of abuse
Battered babies
‘One sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder until proved otherwise’
Contesting abuse
Notes
Conclusions: Child Abuse Now and in the Future
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series list
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Personal Reflections and Disciplinary Perspectives
Begin Reading
Conclusions: Child Abuse Now and in the Future
Index
End User License Agreement
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History of Violence
Heather Montgomery, Familiar Violence
FAMILIAR VIOLENCE
A History of Child Abuse
Heather Montgomery
polity
Copyright © Heather Montgomery 2024
The right of Heather Montgomery to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5293-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023939515
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
In loving memory of Titus Small, a prince among lurchers, 2011–2023
Acknowledgements
No one wants a book about parental child abuse dedicated to them – especially not my son or my parents. So, rather than embarrass anyone, I have dedicated it to Titus Small, a much-loved dog who died the day before I handed over the manuscript. He will be very much missed. What follows instead is a profound thank you to all the people who have helped, encouraged and supported me, and to whom I am immensely grateful.
At the Open University I work in the interdisciplinary field of Childhood and Youth Studies. I therefore have enormous expertise to draw on from my colleagues in psychology, sociology, youth studies, criminology and cultural studies. Dr Victoria Cooper, Dr Anthony Gunter, Dr Naomi Holford, Professor John Oates, Professor Mimi Tatlow-Golden and Professor Kieron Sheehy have all read parts of the book, heard about it at length, and shared their perspectives and knowledge with me most generously. I am grateful to be part of such a team.
The History of Childhood group at Oxford University has always been very welcoming to non-historians, and I have learnt a great deal from them. I may not be a historian, but they have let me be a history groupie and I have very much enjoyed it. I am also grateful to others at Oxford, including Professor Helena Hamerow and Dr Sally Crawford for their translation help with Anglo-Saxon and Middle English and Professor Clare Harris for pushing me into doing the book when I had my doubts and cheerleading for me ever since.
At Polity, I have been fortunate to have two brilliant editors. Pascal Porcheron and Julia Davies have both been assiduous in providing support and feedback, and they have been very ably supported by Lindsey Wimpenny. Gail Ferguson has been an always constructive and eagle-eyed copy-editor. Thank you all.
I owe an exceptionally large debt to those who read the whole book (several times, in some cases) and improved it enormously through their detailed feedback, perspicacious comments and intolerance of too long a sentence. Thank you to Professor Laurence Brockliss, Dr Paul Ibbotson, Dr Virginia Morrow, High Sheriff Amelia Rivière and Professor Peter Rivière. The four external reviewers of the manuscript were also unfailingly constructive and supportive, and I am grateful to them for sharing their expertise so liberally. It goes without saying that any faults or misinterpretations are my own.
I am lucky to be part of several wonderful families by birth, marriage and inclination, and I am indebted to all the following. My parents, Ian and Tessa Montgomery, my sister, Claire, and my nephew, Antonio, have always been there to help and support me. As have several generations of the Rivière family who welcomed me so warmly when I married their father. Thank you to Peregrine, Amelia and Arabella, and their families. In Cambridge, Ginny Morrow and Pete Towers, Jack, Georgia, Letty and Edie Orwell and Musti, Ella, River and Gus Towers have always provided wonderful hospitality and entertainment. In Charlbury, Helen Small and Tim Gardam and, of course, Titus have over the years all listened patiently and provided excellent advice over tea, gin and ear rubs. My husband, Peter, and son, Raffie, are both, in their own ways, wonderful sources of wisdom and advice, as well as excellent critics. I have learnt a lot from them, am lucky to have them and love them dearly.
Introduction: Personal Reflections and Disciplinary Perspectives
Child abuse is an emotive topic. There are no easy or straightforward ways of understanding or framing it, and it is difficult, and arguably undesirable, to think about it dispassionately or without judgement. It defies easy definitions, changes according to context and depends on intention – something hard to judge now and almost impossible to have done in the past. Ideas about what is right and beneficial for a child and what is wrong and abusive are highly unstable and have shifted dramatically over both time and place. Few children in twenty-first-century England are sent to bed hungry as a punishment, made to stand in a corner at school, or rapped on the knuckles with a ruler by their teachers. None are caned at school and increasingly few are smacked at home. Yet as a child in the 1970s none of these were uncommon or especially remarkable in my experience. I remember one friend’s very loving parents keeping a small paddle over the oven in the kitchen. On it was written ‘Heat for the Seat’, and every Sunday it would be taken down and applied liberally to her or any of her siblings’ bottoms. While considered somewhat over the top at the time by my friends and I, we also saw it as eccentric rather than abusive (although I recognize, of course, that my friend may well have seen it differently).
My more academic interest in children’s experiences of abuse was prompted in the early 1990s when I began a PhD in social anthropology. Focusing on South East Asia, I had become interested in how children were thought about cross-culturally, how their roles and responsibilities were perceived, and how ideas about nurturance and child rearing differed in places and contexts vastly unlike my own. I was heavily influenced by the idea of ‘child-centred research’, a new way of theorizing and working with children that had come to prominence throughout the social sciences in the 1980s. This emphasized the need for research to be focused on children’s own experiences and explanations and to be conducted ‘with’ rather than ‘on’ children. Inspired by this new way of thinking, I started to research child labour in Thailand. I quickly discovered that while there was a problem of children working in sweatshops, a more pressing concern, and source of national and international scrutiny, seemed to be the numbers of foreign men who were buying sex from children.
In the mid-1990s, the international and English-language media in Asia were full of stories of western men travelling to South East Asia, particularly Thailand and the Philippines, if they wanted young girls, or Sri Lanka if they desired young boys, and buying sex. These articles would usually go on to tell the heart-rending story of a child who was either cruelly duped, or sold by her impoverished and greedy parents, into a life of prostitution. She would be taken to a brothel, forced to have sex with up to twenty foreign clients a night and then be rescued by a kind-hearted charity worker, or journalist, only to discover she was HIV-positive and had a limited time left to live. There seemed to be no repercussions for the perpetrators and, on the rare occasions they were caught, they were often able to leave the country without penalties. Such stories left little room for nuance – and indeed how much nuance was needed? These were western men travelling the world, violating children and abusing the financial, social, gender and ethnic privileges that being relatively well-off white men conferred on them. The only matter for debate was around terminology. Terms like ‘child prostitution’ or ‘child sex work’ were suggested but quickly discarded in favour of ‘the commercial sexual exploitation of children’ or even simply ‘the commercial sexual abuse of children’ to make the exploitation and violence explicit.
Fired up with ideas of child-centred research, I felt that long-term anthropological fieldwork could provide a deeper and richer account of these children’s lives. Between 1993 and 1994, therefore, I spent fifteen months working in a small informal settlement in Thailand where western tourists bought sex from both boys and girls aged between six and fourteen. I lived alongside the children, talked to them daily and tried as best as I could to understand their worlds, their ideas and their everyday experiences. I had not been in the community for long, however, before I discovered my theories, ideas and personal morality simply did not ‘fit’ the context I was describing. I found listening to children’s accounts of their lives deeply problematic because they did not say what I expected and – indeed – wanted them to say.
I had assumed that the children sold sex because they had no choice, that it was the worst possible option and that they would rather do anything else. They told me something different. They said that there were other jobs available, such as scavenging on rubbish tips for scrap metal, begging or selling food in the street, but they did not want to do these. The rats in the rubbish dump frightened them, as did the thought of being mugged by older street children who would take any money they earned from begging. In contrast, selling sex, despite its drawbacks, was lucrative and seen to have other benefits, such as the chance to eat well and stay in good hotels or apartments. I was expecting rage and anger against the men who abused them. Yet the children expressed no such feelings. Instead, they resisted my assertions that their involvement with foreign clients was a form of abuse which violated their rights. They claimed that they were not abused. Rather, they told me that they were ‘being supported by a foreigner’ or that they ‘had guests’. Sometimes they claimed that these men were ‘friends’ because they came back regularly to visit them. Occasionally they would ask me to help them write letters saying how much they loved them. A child once snapped at me while I was carefully, and no doubt patronizingly, explaining her abuse to her: ‘He is so good to me; he gives me and my family money whenever we need it. How can he be bad?’ She later stopped talking to me altogether because I would not stop referring to ‘such ugly things’.
Significantly, the children were still living with their parents who knew what they were doing. They implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, encouraged it, claiming to see no harm. Again, I had taken it for granted that parents would protect, nurture and make sacrifices for their children. That parents had duties and responsibilities to their children but not necessarily the other way round. Neither parents nor children agreed, and within the community I found that the sense of duty I anticipated was reversed. Children were thought to owe a debt of gratitude to their parents for giving them life. They were expected to look after their parents, to go to work so that their parents did not have to, and to support their parents in whatever way they could. These obligations were lifelong. Drawing on culturally valued traditions of filial piety and family obligations allowed these children to present themselves as dutiful sons and daughters. I was constantly told that being ‘supported by foreigners’ was a means to an end and a way of fulfilling their perceived obligations and duties. When I asked one 13-year-old about selling sex, she replied, ‘It’s only my body, but this is my family.’ Both parents and children were working within a vastly different framework of what was acceptable or unacceptable. Within that context, I was the odd one out, identifying and condemning abuse where they claimed to see none.
It seemed self-evident that what was occurring was a form of violence. The western clients, despite occasional acts of self-serving generosity, were abusing their power to take advantage of poor children who had none of their privileges. To label their behaviour as anything other than horrific abuse would provide a justification for things which should never be condoned. But I also found it deeply frustrating that the children and their parents could not see this, would argue with me about it and get angry with me when I kept, as they were fond of pointing out, ‘going on about it’. Even after her eight-year-old son returned to her injured after spending time with a western client, another mother told me, ‘It’s just for one hour. What harm can happen to him in one hour?’
It would have been easy enough to dismiss the children’s accounts as straightforwardly wrong. I could rightly have pointed out that they lacked the wider economic, social or political understanding which would have allowed them to see that they were being exploited by both their parents and their clients. Or I could have argued that they were victims of a form of false consciousness, unable to see their own oppression or, knowing it, refusing to acknowledge it. The alternative would be to take on a position of extreme relativism and claim it was accepted and acceptable within that community and, therefore, if these children did not see abuse, then it was not my place to identify or condemn it.
In the end, I tried to make sense of what I saw through the well-worn but possibly clichéd defence that understanding is different from condoning and that to intervene successfully we need to know how the problem is viewed from the inside. I am aware, however, that this argument might fall short, and there is a very thin line between acknowledging children’s viewpoints and explanations and justifying abuse. There have certainly been trenchant criticisms of my work. I have been robustly challenged in conferences and in correspondence by others who felt that in emphasizing the children’s agency and resilience, or indeed analysing how they drew on wider cultural ideas of reciprocity and filial obligations, I was minimizing child abuse or somehow arguing that ‘Thai culture’ encouraged prostitution. I accept some of these criticisms. The longer I am away from fieldwork, and the older I have become, the more doubts and dilemmas I have about the ethics of this fieldwork, and the less certain I am about my interpretations and ideas about the children I encountered there.
Many years after I completed this research, my home city of Oxford was the site of one of the United Kingdom’s ‘grooming’ scandals where girls, mostly under the care of social services, were being sexually abused by gangs of older men. As it became increasingly clear how badly these girls had been let down by those who should have cared for them, I reflected on the work I had done in Thailand, and the conclusions I had drawn, and saw some shaming parallels. Social workers talked about prostitution as a ‘lifestyle choice’, cited differences in cultural understandings and cultural meanings between the abusers and the abused. The girls themselves talked of the abusers as ‘boyfriends’ and of having no one else to look after them. This all sounded both horribly familiar and horribly wrong and made me question, once again, the entire basis of my findings. Was what I had chosen to see as agency and resilience under terrible circumstances nothing better than a refusal to fully acknowledge and condemn abuse?1
Anthropological and historical perspectives
The past, as L. P. Hartley reminded us, is a ‘foreign country’ and ‘they do things differently there.’2 I hope that bringing an anthropological viewpoint to a historical study of child abuse will allow for an examination of parental behaviours which seem puzzling, bizarre or even harmful, but are practised and valued elsewhere or at different times. It is no great conjecture to say that most parents, wherever they live, love their children and want what is best for them, and always have done. Inevitably, a book about violence against children is not going to discuss the millions of caring and loving parents who do (or did) the best they could for their children, whatever their situations, and who nurtured and raised children to be valued and valuable members of society. It is bound to focus on more visible instances of parents who were cruel and violent. Nevertheless, the idea that adults in earlier centuries, or in other places, were consistently and deliberately unkind, could treat children as they wished or could not distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable treatment of children, is nonsense.
The term ‘child abuse’ was not regularly used in academic literature before the late 1970s and today is often seen as being synonymous with the sexual abuse of children. I see it more broadly and use the term interchangeably with ‘violence against children’ and ‘child cruelty’. These are terms with a longer and wider currency, including all forms of child maltreatment, cruelty, deliberate injury, abandonment, intimidation, sexual offences and avoidable death. However, in drawing the contours of this book, I have deliberately prioritized violence towards children in the home, rather than covering the more familiar ground of child exploitation in the workplace (economic abuse), the long history of corporal punishment and bullying in schools (educational abuse), wider issues of discrimination, marginalization and exclusion (structural abuse) or abuse in institutions. Public inquiries in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland and Australia have all revealed that generations of children have been sexually abused in various institutions, including the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches, boarding schools, national broadcasters, the Boy Scouts, local and national governments and political parties. The abuse these children endured deserves a more detailed and through examination than I have space for here. I have also avoided discussing children’s violence against themselves in the form of self-harm. Each of these forms of abuse has a long and painful history and, given contemporary anxieties, deserves a whole book in itself. The focus of this book is parental violence against children in England, but this particular emphasis should not detract from the fact that violence against children exists in many forms and on individual, institutional and wider social levels.
Child abuse does not occur in a vacuum. Nor is it simply the result of a few parental bad apples. It is important to look at the power differentials between adults and children and to acknowledge that children are entangled in multiple sets of power relations which overlap and reinforce each other. These include the power of men over women and of elders over juniors (both of which are further complicated by external differentials in terms of class and race). The household is a microcosm of these power imbalances and, as violence is usually inflicted by the strong on the weak, anthropologists have claimed that children’s powerlessness within the family has always placed them in a uniquely vulnerable position.3 Their physical immaturity, limited legal rights, socialization into deference to adult authority, receptiveness to intimidation and normative orientation (children’s belief that some forms of behaviour must be acceptable because most adults practise them) combine to perpetuate unequal and possibly abusive relationships between family members.4 Anthropologist Judith Ennew has asserted that, ‘Adult power over children is so absolute in most societies, including our own, that in a sense all children are abused and all adults are abusers.’5 A history of violence against children must, according to this viewpoint, conclude that parents (both past and present) routinely deployed violence to enforce their own position in familial hierarchies. Even if they did not see this or acknowledge it as wrong, with the benefit of hindsight such behaviour should be identified and condemned as child abuse.
Yet this is not, I contend, the full picture, and I find this interpretation of parent–child relations a bleak and somewhat depressing analysis of children’s experiences. The abuse of children, particularly by their parents is, after all, a fundamentally odd thing for humans, or indeed any species, to do. Any species which routinely damaged their offspring to such an extent that they were infertile or dead before reproductive age would only exist for one generation, suggesting that while abuse has always occurred, it should be seen as the exception. Love, compassion, shared understandings of parental authority, and investment in children were more likely the norm.6 While believing that the question of power relationships between parents and children has been under-explored, I do not believe that all adults, or all parents, are abusers, that their power is absolute or that what power they do have is necessarily used illegitimately.
Ideally, parents have both power and authority, and their authority comes from the legitimate use of their power. One of the fundamentals of parenthood is socializing the young and shaping them to be future adults, drawing on shared social understandings of what constitutes good parenting and the sorts of adults it should ideally produce. At times, this has often been predicated on the use of force and can seem, to modern eyes at least, unnecessarily violent. The question remains, however, over whether this use of force was understood as legitimate in its own context. There are often understandable ‘reasons’ why parents behave as they do and why, at particular times or in certain places, some actions pass without comment while others are strongly condemned.
The problem therefore is one of nuance and perception. As an anthropologist, when I look back over the thousands of ethnographies written over the past 150 years, it is possible to see many examples of socializing practices which seem cruel and even violent – but which I cannot condemn as abusive or illegitimate. Elongating babies’ heads, scarification, neck stretching, foot binding, tattooing, ear and septum piercing, or infant male circumcision are all practices which make me queasy but, seen in terms of indigenous child-rearing practices and beliefs about children, are harder to label as abusive. Even though I recognize them as painful and having the potential to cause long-term damage, I do not see them as acts of violence against children. They are done to incorporate a child into a community, and within that setting they are culturally sanctioned, even though outsiders may regard them very differently. My relativism, however, has its limits. I too am a product of my own time and place and have my own conscious and unconscious biases. I find female genital mutilation abhorrent, for example, even if I can understand it anthropologically and recognize that it remains a culturally valued practice in more than thirty countries, often strongly supported by women and sometimes actively chosen by girls, even against their parents’ wishes.7
I find similar limits on my understandings of physical discipline. One study of Chaga parents (in what is now Tanzania) from the 1940s, for example, tells us that they had ‘a well-thought-out pedagogics of punishment’.8 They recognized that an infant was small and vulnerable and should not be hit, that a toddler could be both naughty and wilful and might deserve a smack, and that older children could be beaten more severely but less often. What constituted severity, however, is problematic and there are accounts of Chaga children being punished by being tied up in uncomfortable positions for hours, of being severely beaten and then having fat rubbed into their wounds in order to make them hurt more, or being suspended over fires while their parents pinched them, slapped them or even throttled them until they urinated or defecated with fear.9 In Amazonia, there are descriptions of children being punished by being beaten with nettles, given strong hallucinogenic drugs that put them into a trance and being placed in a rack over a fire of burning peppers until they became unconscious.10 There are also reports of children being scraped with dogfish teeth to make them strong and to teach them to bear pain without flinching.11 They make for difficult reading, even for a cultural relativist.
Other ethnographic accounts are equally astonishing, less for their descriptions of violence but for what I see as the failure of anthropologists to recognize what is clearly visible. British anthropologist Colin Turnbull (1924–1994), for example, wrote a well-received ethnography of Mbuti families living in the Congolese forests. He describes them as peaceful, loving, relaxed in their attitudes to parenting and rarely using corporal punishment. Yet the description of their idyllic lives contains the surprising comment that, for ‘children, life is one long frolic interspersed with a healthy sprinkle of spankings and slappings. Sometimes these seem unduly severe, but it is all part of their training.’12
In other cases, this refusal by anthropologists to publicly acknowledge cruelty is a deliberate choice. Pearl and Ernest Beaglehole (1910–1979 and 1906–1965, respectively) wrote in their field notes about family life in Pacific Island culture that mothers would sometimes beat their children ‘with thwarted fury that seems nine parts pure sadism and one-quarter part altruistic-disciplinary. To us, as we watch the scene, these child beatings seem to exceed all that is reasonable and just.’ Their published work, however, contains only the bland statement, ‘The child who disobeys or who is thought to be lazy in carrying out a command is generally severely beaten by the mother. The beatings … appear to be village practice in enforcing discipline.’13
Such brief examples tell us far more about the anthropologists themselves, and their own attitudes to child rearing, than they do about the line between the acceptable and unacceptable treatment of children in other places or at other times. They do, however, emphasize the importance of context in understanding both the norms of the society under discussion and the ideas, feelings and even prejudices of the modern reader. We need to acknowledge that different societies have differing ideas at various times about childhood, and that childhood is a social construction. Adult assumptions about, and conceptualizations of, childhood continually change, and concepts of child abuse, the relationships between parent and children, and idealized forms of child rearing shift over time. What was true of the Chaga in the 1940s, or of Amazonian children in the 1970s, is not necessarily true now. Similarly, disciplines change as do the scholars within them. If Turnbull or the Beagleholes were writing today, they might well have quite different views of what they had observed, as indeed would some of the historians whose work I draw on in this book and whom I implicitly criticize for failing to see or acknowledge violence against children. They too might well analyse their sources very differently, given contemporary understandings and anxieties about child abuse.
Some of the above may sound slightly chauvinistic, as if anthropology could provide the context that history cannot or that it has uniquely valuable insights into understanding children’s lives. This is certainly not what I mean to imply. I recognize that anthropologists have an ‘ethnographic advantage’ in their access to sources, especially on a topic such as child abuse. While it can be difficult and ethically fraught, they can talk directly to their child informants and do not have to rely on rare and likely unrepresentative ‘ego documents’ such as letters, diaries and autobiographies written by the young, or by adults reminiscing on their past experiences, as a primary source. Other than this, however, anthropologists and historians share a fundamental commitment to understanding children’s lives and experiences holistically and within their own time and place. Both are concerned with context and relativity. In an essay on anthropology and history, E. E. Evans-Pritchard claimed that the difference between the disciplines ‘is one of orientation, not of aim’. He argued it was not the case that anthropology had ‘the choice between being history or being nothing’ or that ‘history must choose between being anthropology or nothing’ but that (to quote Claude Lévi-Strauss): ‘the two disciplines are indissociables.’14
I make no claims to be a trained historian nor in this book am I concerned with historiography or indeed with wider philosophical, legal or historical questions about what constitutes violence. I have not written ‘a history of childhood’ – not least because there are already some superb, highly readable, general histories already written which cover all nations of the United Kingdom, Europe and the wider world.15 My focus instead is on children’s experiences of abuse, on where the boundary between unacceptable and acceptable parental behaviour lies, and how it has changed over time. I have used a historical perspective to examine child abuse as a contested and changing topic with moving parameters and elastic meanings. This enables a greater understanding of what can and cannot be seen as abusive in the past, but also contextualizes practices and behaviours in the present and allows for a discussion of how the meaning of child abuse may change in the future.
A nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken?
In 1975, historian and psychoanalyst Lloyd de Mause made a startling claim. The history of childhood, he wrote, ‘is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of child care, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized, and sexually abused.’16 Essentially, until the recent past, he argued, children were brutally treated by unkind and unloving parents, who could not empathize with them, having been blinded by ignorance and their own unresolved psychological traumas and early experiences.
This claim has both infuriated and intrigued historians ever since. Dismissed as a peddler of exasperating psychobabble, de Mause has been accused of using evidence selectively and of disregarding economic, social and cultural contexts.17 His view of the late twentieth century as a time of enlightenment, when parents and adults finally started to concentrate on children’s needs and desires rather than their own and which marked the start of an empathetic, enlightened golden age for children, has also proved untrue, fatally undermined by contemporary revelations of child abuse by both individuals and institutions.
Elements of de Mause’s argument continue to beguile, however, not least because it remains one of the more cherished and potent ideals of modernity that our attitudes to children have become ‘better’ – that we are more nurturing, less hierarchical and more enlightened compared with our ancestors who, whether through ignorance, religious bigotry, psychological underdevelopment or a thirst for power, were both vicious and violent towards anyone or anything less powerful than themselves, especially their children. Certainly, we do not have to look far back in history to find limited regard for children’s emotional or physical vulnerability and for potentially abusive disciplinary practices to support this contemporary complacency. Children, so the Victorian cliché went, should be ‘seen and not heard’, parents who ‘spared the rod’ would ‘spoil the child’, and parenting was about demanding obedience and compliance rather than providing support or nurture. Apocryphally, King George V said, ‘My father was afraid of his mother; I was frightened of my father, and I am damned well going to make sure that my children are afraid of me.’ This attitude was probably not confined to the aristocracy. While much of de Mause’s argument might seem overblown, therefore, and his conclusions questionable, his work undeniably pioneered an ongoing discussion about the significant and continual part played by violence in adult–child relations.
Nevertheless, it does not tell the full picture, and de Mause’s argument is undercut by evidence of love and nurture that has existed throughout the centuries. Levels of parental love are extremely hard to measure in any epoch, but there is as much proof of parental love and concern throughout history as there is of maltreatment. In diaries, in letters, in literature and even on tombstones, historians and archaeologists have found plenty of evidence of parents expressing great love, sympathy and kindness for their children and inconsolable grief when they died. In her account of Roman funerary practices in Western Europe, Maureen Carroll gives many instances of parents mourning the loss of young children, despite a wider cultural emphasis on stoicism and indifference to the deaths of children. On the gravestone of a girl who died at six months, for example, her parents lament, ‘Oh, had you never been born, when you were to become so loved.’ Others grieved for older children, such as nine-year-old Asiatica: ‘I shall always be searching for you, my darling Asiatica … I often imagine your face to comfort myself.’18
More broadly, neither local communities nor state authorities were indifferent to child suffering. Murder, rape, abandonment or neglect and other forms of indiscriminate violence against children have never been unequivocally tolerated. What has changed, however, is the limits of that tolerance and the wider understandings of where the line between the legitimate and illegitimate use of force lies, leaving a grey area of behaviours and practices which were acceptable, and even valued, in their own time and context but which are now held up as evidence of widespread child abuse. It is in this ambigious area that questions of relativism and context – the twin concerns of both anthropologists and historians – come to the fore. There are certain practices and institutions that one cannot dismiss as just the way things are, or that ‘they’ do things differently ‘there’. A position of absolute relativism is untenable and taken to its extreme would end up defending and justifying the abhorrent. The whipping, torture or even murder of children living in chattel slavery, for example, would not have greatly concerned members of the slave-owning society, who viewed them as non-human pieces of property which they could treat as they wished. No one would argue that this needs to be understood only in terms of its own internally coherent set of cultural beliefs or without external moral judgement. As one historian points out, ‘To youngsters harshly disciplined by their elders … it was doubtless small consolation to know that this was taking place “within the context” of communal culture.’19
We must be careful, therefore, not to use either cultural difference or historical distance as trump cards which obscure equally salient ways of analysis. While childhood in general may be seen differently in other societies, children’s experiences are further differentiated by their sex, age, ethnicity and class. Such differences are obscured by using the word ‘child’ as a generic and ungendered catch-all term to refer to younger members of society. Without knowing which children are under discussion, making judgements about how they are treated is almost impossible. We know, for example, that while many children, of both sexes, and from all classes, have always suffered violence, certain groups of children have undoubtedly been more vulnerable than others. Orphans, poor children, those discriminated against because of their ethnicity and those of unmarried mothers have always been at greater risk of harm than others, and their defencelessness should be highlighted.
Keeping all the above in mind, and drawing on case studies, newspaper accounts, court records, works of literature and previously published texts, this book will explore the changing meanings and definitions of child abuse over the years. It will examine where the line between acceptable and unacceptable treatment of children was drawn in the past, how it changed and how it has been, and still is, continually re-evaluated. It contextualizes apposite examples, uses them as representative of wider points and builds them into a coherent narrative. The book focuses primarily on England and covers a large timeframe, extending from the medieval world to the present. My original plan was to write about child abuse globally but the more I read and researched, the harder this became, and there was so much material that it became overwhelming. Different countries have their own histories of child abuse, and there are significant anomalies between even near neighbours. Women in Scotland, for instance, seemed to commit infanticide with much greater violence than those in Wales or England. One study suggested 63 per cent of the cases of infanticide between 1750 and 1815 (out of 140) in Scotland involved incidents where the method of killing children was unnecessarily brutal. In contrast, in England, while overall numbers of cases were higher, blood was ‘rarely shed’.20 I restricted myself to England, therefore, to keep the material manageable, although I bring in comparative material from other countries where appropriate and relevant. Even so, there are gaps in the historical record and periods where no abuse, or no abuse of a particular kind, was recorded. Given the longevity of many of these actions, it would be foolhardy to conclude that parental violence against children did not exist at this time, rather that it left no historical mark.
I have tried, as far as possible, to make this book child-centred and to focus on the children themselves, rather than on those that abused them or on their motivations for doing so. This is often difficult. First-hand accounts are rare and, combined with the historical tendency of adults to view children as not having anything interesting to say, means that children remain silent and unrecorded witnesses. They have not always been considered worthy of an identity and are mentioned in court records or newspaper accounts without names, ages or gender, sometimes forcing me to use the hateful word ‘it’ when referring to a dead or abused child, simply because that child left no historical traces other than being the victim of a crime.
The book is divided into seven thematic chapters. The first will look at infanticide, arguably the most heinous crime against the most innocent – widely condemned and severely punished and yet treated, at times, with ambivalence and its perpetrators with sympathy and understanding. Chapter 2 will focus on practices such as abandonment or sending children out to others to nurse or foster. This may not have been done with the explicit intent to cause harm to children but might nevertheless be seen as abuse by delegation. Chapter 3 looks at neglect. This term has taken on quite a different meaning over the centuries and raises questions about the nature and duties of parenting both now and in the past. Chapter 4 focuses on physical abuse in the form of punishment, examining its justifications, value and the counterarguments against physical discipline. Chapter 5 will look at child sexual abuse within the household which, despite almost universal prohibitions against it, remains one of the hardest aspects of children’s lives to research and discuss. It is, and always has been, secret, hidden and stigmatized. Chapter 6 looks at interventions over the years, how they have become more structured, more formal but not necessarily more beneficial to abused children. The last chapter will discuss how random acts of cruelty by parents gradually came to be understood more systematically as acts of abuse. Focusing on doctors and outside authorities, it will also look at what happens when abuse is both discovered and when it is wrongly suspected. Finally, the book concludes with a brief look to the future, tentatively exploring where the boundary between the tolerable and intolerable may shift in times to come.
Key arguments of the book
The boundaries between the acceptable and unacceptable treatment of children have always existed but have always been, and still are, continually re-evaluated. What was acceptable in the past may not be so today, and what is acceptable today may not be so in the future.
Most parents love their children and want what is best for them, and always have done. The argument that adults in earlier centuries were deliberately unkind, could treat children as they wished or could not distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable treatment of children is not valid.
We do not need to justify and condone every child-rearing practice in previous eras, but we do need to think about children’s experiences within their own contexts.
Notes
1.
I have written extensively about the many problems and unanswered questions that emerged during this fieldwork in, for example, H. Montgomery,
Modern Babylon? Prostituting Children in Thailand
(Oxford: Berghahn, 2001); H. Montgomery, ‘Understanding the Indefensible: Reflections on Fieldwork with Child Prostitutes in Thailand’, in C. Allerton (ed.),
Children: Ethnographic Encounters
(London: Bloomsbury, 2016); or H. Montgomery, ‘Owning our Mistakes: Confessions of an Unethical Researcher’, in S. Richards and S. Coombs (eds),
Critical Perspectives on Research with Children
(Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2022).
2.
L. P. Hartley,
The Go-Between
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953), p. 1.
3.
J. Korbin,
Child Abuse and Neglect: Cross-Cultural Perspectives
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); J. Ennew,
The Sexual Exploitation of Children
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986); H. Montgomery,
An Introduction to Childhood: Anthropological Perspectives on Children’s Lives
(Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
4.
A. James and A. Prout,
Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood
(London: Falmer Press, 1997).
5.
J. Ennew, ‘Selling Children’s Sexuality’,
New Society
77(1234) (1986): 10.
6.
B. Hassett,
Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood
(London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
7.
J. Boyden, A. Pankhurst and Y. Tafere,
Harmful Traditional Practices and Child Protection: Contested Understandings and Practices of Female Early Marriage and Circumcision in Ethiopia
(Oxford: Young Lives, 2013).
8.
O. Raum,
Chaga Childhood: A Description of Indigenous Education in an East African Tribe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. 228.
9.
Raum,
Chaga Childhood
, pp. 225–6.
10.
M. Harner,
The Jivaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls
(New York: Natural History Press, 1969).
11.
T. Gregor,
Mehinaku: The Drama of Daily Life in a Brazilian Indian Village
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
12.
C. Turnbull,
The Forest People
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), p. 129.
13.
Quoted in H. Kavapalu, ‘Dealing with the Dark Side in the Ethnography of Childhood: Child Punishment in Tonga’,
Oceania
63(4) (1992): 313.
14.
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘Anthropology and History’, in E. E. Evans-Pritchard (ed.),
Essays in Social Anthropology
(London: Faber and Faber, 1962), pp. 64–5.
15.
See, for example, on England: H. Cunningham,
The Invention of Childhood
(London: BBC Books, 2006); C. Heywood,
A History of Childhood
(Cambridge: Polity, 2001) or A. Fletcher,
Growing up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600–1914
(Yale: Yale University Press, 2008). On Europe, H. Cunningham,
Children and Childhood in
Western Society since 1500
(Harlow: Longman, 1995) or C. Heywood,
Childhood in Modern Europe
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). On North America, S. Mintz,
Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). For world history, see P. Stearns,
Childhood in World History
(London: Routledge, 2016) or J. Marten,
The History of Childhood: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
16.
L. De Mause, ‘The Evolution of Childhood’, in L. de Mause (ed.),
The History of Childhood
(New York: Psychohistory Press, 1974), p. 1.
17.
L. Brockliss and H. Montgomery, ‘Childhood: A Historical Approach’, in M. J. Kehily (ed.),
Understanding Childhood: A Cross Disciplinary Approach
(Bristol: Policy Press, 2013), p. 77.
18.
M. Carroll,
Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 198.
19.
P. Horn,
Children’s Work and Welfare 1780–1890
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 31–2.
20.
S. Radbill, ‘A History of Child Abuse and Infanticide’, in R. E. Helfer and R. S. Kempe (eds),
The Battered Child
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 9.
ONEInfanticide
In 1591, near Salisbury, a young, unmarried woman called Alice Shepheard was widely suspected of being pregnant. She denied this but when her contractions started was forced to admit the truth to her mother and grandmother. They fetched a midwife and shortly afterwards Alice gave birth to a baby boy. One of the women – it is not clear who – broke the child’s neck and buried him, secretly and in haste, in the local churchyard. The next morning, a local man, Hugh Mawdes, came across the newborn’s corpse which had been dug up by a dog. Hugh was horrified and went to find the parish officials who immediately suspected infanticide by a ‘strumpet’ who had murdered her child to avoid the shame of giving birth when unmarried. Suspicion quickly fell on Alice. When she and her family were brought before the local magistrate, they denied killing the child, swearing on the Bible that the boy had been stillborn and that they had not harmed him. Later that day, the midwife’s conscience started to trouble her, and she was overheard admitting that she had lied. Alice, her mother and her grandmother were brought back to the magistrate where they changed their story and admitted the murder of the child. They were sentenced to the ‘doome judgement by Death’, which, as added with satisfaction in the anonymously written pamphlet that reported the case in detail, ‘they had deserved for so wicked a deede’.1
Over four hundred years later, in 2022, Lauren Saint George was brought before an English court charged with the murder of her 10-week-old daughter, Lily-Mai. Lily-Mai had been born nine weeks prematurely, and there had been many concerns about her mother’s apparent lack of interest in her care. Although hospital staff had argued that Lily-Mai should not return home to her mother, she was, nevertheless, sent home with her on 22 January 2018. Nine days later she was dead, after sustaining fractures and a head injury. Lauren was charged with murder but found not guilty on this charge. She was also acquitted of manslaughter but convicted instead of infanticide. Despite the violence done to the child, the judge was surprisingly sympathetic towards Lily-Mai’s mother, refusing to send her to prison on the grounds that she had already ‘suffered and continues to suffer’. He went on to comment: ‘It is quite clear to me you were depressed, still suffering from the effects of the birth at the time you committed the act that caused the death, and the verdict of infanticide is one that has traditionally evoked sympathy rather than punishment.’ He suspended her sentence for two years and wished her well, saying, ‘You now have a future to look forward to.’2
These two cases, separated by centuries, both deal with the best-documented, longest-standing and, arguably, most extreme form of child abuse – infanticide. Infanticide is usually understood as the killing of a child under the age of one year, including neonaticide (the killing of a baby within 24 hours of birth). It has been described variously as ubiquitous, an eminently sensible form of population control and a way of getting rid of burdens on the community. Yet it has also been strongly condemned as a sign of savagery, associated with the distant past or with the ‘primitive’ other. When it is found to occur in the United Kingdom, it is viewed as a rare and atypical aberration, a form of temporary insanity on the part of the mother, for which she cannot be held responsible.
