Child Abuse Was Rarer In Victorian Slums
Tuesday, November 18, 2008 at 07:41PM A letter in today's Telegraph:
Sir - We seem to want to take comfort in the belief that child abuse was just as common in the past.
Child abuse to the death is many times more common where the mother was not married to the father and the present boyfriend is not the child's father. Those household arrangements are many times more common than in the past.
We need not depend on theory. The great empirical study of slum life in Victorian England was Charles Booth's survey of the East End of London. Of child abuse he wrote: "I can only speak as I have found: wholesome, pleasant family life … affectionate relationships of husbands and wives, mothers and sons, elders and children."
From 13 volumes of observations, he concluded that this "agreeable picture" applied to 98.75 per cent of the population of East End slums - chosen by him as the worst in England. The "dangerous class" accounted for 1.25 per cent, and these few "fouled the reputation of the poor".
Would that it were 1.25 per cent today. Yet Booth is often quoted as the authority on the social disorder and moral squalor that the welfare state removed.
Norman Dennis, Director of Community Studies, Civitas, London SW1
What Booth's great first hand work revealed was British civil society functioning perfectly well, even in the Victorian slums of London's East End. The difference today, of course, is the destruction of family life and civil society under the onslaught of a Century of expanding government interference in our lives, particularly the welfare state in the post-war era.
However well intentioned such policies are, not only can they not help us, they are destructive because all government action squeezes natural family and community life. This is true even before we consider those many policies designed specifically to erode marriage and the family unit.
The only way in which we can again become a civilised nation is by a great retreat of government from our lives. Smoking, drinking, eating, welfare, what we say, think and do amongst ourselves in our civil society cannot be affected positively at all by government.
Britain's own social story is proof of that.
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Reader Comments (17)
A selective and thus flawed fact about Booth, an interesting industrialist (not a social scientist) whose actual findings suggested 35% of the population was in abject poverty. Exploitation of child labor, lack of medical care, dentistry and lack of education were standard concerns in that time, and I am suprised anyone would try to claim children were better off then. God only knows what the real abuse statistics were back then, I suspect short of killing a child a parent could get away with virtually anything.
How often would the police have ever become involved in allegations of child abuse in overcrowded slums in Victorian times. How many professional medical or social agencies and individials would have been involved in closely monitoring and recording the health statuses of every child, born in those slums. Would the authorities have ever even bothered to prosecute parents for violence against their children in a world where in particular the father's rights to instill discipline as he saw fit (on his wife as well as his kids) was almost always unchallenged. Far far less real effort would ever have been made in those days to deal with child abuse than would happen today.
I do not pretend that we don;t have massive problems today with dysfunctional individuals and families often made worse by the ever forgiving Welfare state and the hideous bureacracy inertia and inefficiency of many social services structures, but let's not try and pretend children were loved and cared for and treated with near universal decency in Victorian times or any other period.
>>The difference today, of course, is the destruction of family life and civil society under the onslaught of a Century of expanding government interference in our lives,<<
Perhaps the idyllic family life Booth describes was to be found predominately among the working class - they had after all few other sources of joy in their lives, and the industrialisation that brought the nuclear family and cramped housing conditions meant they had little choice but to come to terms with each other's presence.
This was a need that the middle classes apparently didn't have. MC and upper-MC children were in fact often brought up almost without any direct parental influence at all. They were reared by nannies, packed off to boarding schools and/or relatives and constantly subject to the most draconian and petty regulations at home and at school.
Maybe that's why Booth was so pleasantly surprised at what he saw.
Recently read a biography of Enid Blyton (a very interesting woman in many ways), in which her domestic arrangements are described as typical for her class at the time. She had two daughters; the elder was allowed sup with mother for half an hour each evening if she had been good, otherwise she didn't see or hear her all day. The younger didn't see her mother at all during week days, even though they lived in the same house and Blyton worked at home. If they played so loudly that she could hear them, nanny would be ordered to administer a severe chastisement on the spot. Blyton was after all a trained teacher, and had learned how to deal with children!
It is true that when they were very young they were allowed eat near her table, but only when separated from her view by a screen (this was common practice in middle-class homes from the mid 19thC). Ah, happy families.
These practices probably continued until the 60s or thereabouts.
Colm's right.
Extremely harsh violence against children, by fathers, would have lasted far beyond the Victorian time.
It was easy to see here too into the 1960s- in your Irish and Italian neighborhoods, and others.
It's less common now. Good.
It was abuse, and it destroyed people. There was nothing good about it.
I'm not speaking about a certain amount of spanking - I speak of what went way beyond that.
And the Victorians would have been cool with it, as the cops here were cool with it deep into the twentieth century.
I don't beleive a word of this.
We don't really know the ful extent of child abuse now or in the past. There was too much or it in all eras.
Even if it was possible to go back in time and check, we would need to have a common objective definition of child abuse and not just rely on superficial indications.
Poor baby P still smiled.
Mahons,
Don't forget that 'back then', we had capital punishment, and that was a deterrent to the casual killing of anyone, let alone, children, and given the more communal nature of life, even in the cities, the death of a child would have been quickly noticed. We also had a very functional and proactive policeforce then, Bobbies knew their patch intimately and were a definite force for good. Even then sadistic child abuse was not tolerated, even among the working class.
Life may have been different then, with a different morality and life was undoubtedly harder, but better? - that is debatable!...
Mahons -
Exploitation of child labor, lack of medical care, dentistry and lack of education etc are trotted out so often these misconceptions of life in Victorian Britain are now 'common knowledge'.
Booth's great work - the most comprehensive of its kind - contradicts this view. As the letter states, even his evidence is erroneously cited.
These miscnceptions were often perpetuated in the first half of the 20th Century and have lived on. Fabians, liberals, some novelists and 'social reformers' can be blamed for many of these misconceptions.
We have shades here of Roman writers obscuring the true nature of Britain prior to the Roman invasion of 43AD. Their sources cite a land of uncivilised savages, which of course was believed for a very long time. We now know, through archeology, that this was often little more than propaganda and that British culture and trade was highly sophisticated.
One such myth of the Victorians is that of them being a prudish bunch who draped piano legs lest any randy young buck should lose control. Except that this wasn't the case. There's not a shred of evidence that anyone ever did this. It's completely made up. The actual truth is that middle and upper class Victorian Britons were far more relaxed about sex than is otherwise believed.
Working class Britons knew they as good as anyone else. They thought it their duty to demonstrate this overtly in behaviour, otherwise they'd be letting their class down.
This view persisted until even the 1970s within the old, now extinct patriotic labour movement which was as hang'em and flog'em as any conservative.
>>Working class Britons knew they as good as anyone else. They thought it their duty to demonstrate this overtly in behaviour, otherwise they'd be letting their class down.<<
There's a lot of truth in that. Class solidarity obviously requires social discipline. And of course there was still a lot of residual low-church Puritanism among the English working class. I read somewhere recently that the rate of illegitimate births in Victorian London was significantly lower in the East End than in the rest of the city.
Interesting subject.
When I started writing there were no comments, by the time I had finished there were four erudite comments, all apparently based on studious reading of the many books and pamphlets produced post WWII in the pursuit of pushing the cause of State 'welfarism'.
I have no doubt that life then was much tougher than now, and that aspect is well left behind us, but there was far more to family life then than TV, video games and pop music.
Families were - for want of a better word - more cohesive than now, and they were more extended, with large family groups living in close proximity. While most children had it tough, there was ample supervision to see that sadistic abuse was rarer than perhaps our writers can imagine. I am not suggesting that rigorous chastisment did not take place, but of course, by today's standards it was still quite heinous, but then it was 'normal'.
I admit my experience of the working class lifestyle is limited to London, and things may well have been different, and worse, in the North in such places as the Gorbals and perhaps Belfast.
"Working class Britons knew they as good as anyone else."
Pete Moore's comment is very true, they may have been poor, but they did have their pride, and were not afraid to show it. The gratuitous scumbag behaviour we see today, would have be seen as 'letting the side down'.
In those days the Pearly Kings and Queens were more than just a money raising charity, they were the masters of their domain, i.e. their local community, and they did a far better job than 'the Council' seems to do...
Interesting, but it is difficult to believe that one man measured child abuse among an army of children better than an army of police and social workers measured it in the case of one baby.
Related to that, over at devil's kitchen there is a reference to an interesting post which suggests that the reason the child abuse of baby P was missed was because it escalated in the last couple of weeks.
Frank O'Dwyer -
Steady on there. What are you doing at DK's place?!
"but it is difficult to believe that one man measured child abuse among an army of children better than an army of police and social workers measured it in the case of one baby.'
You could say that one dedicated volunteer is worth an army of 'pressed men'....
Pete,
"What are you doing at DK's place?!"
Sssh
Pete - Booth wrote of abject poverty, and there is no doubt of the exploitation of children in the workforce and the lack of schooling and poorer medical care. What are you on about?
What I'm on about is that Victorians did much to end the exploitation of children, and that education and medicine were much more common than is widely thought.
Just because the State does not provide does not mean no-one provides. In fact the welfare state nationalised much of the long-standing education and healthcare provision in the United Kingdom.
Many of the the old school and hospital buildings here, which are being replaced slowly or converted into apartment buildings, are great, austere Victorian buildings.
Yet - astonishingly - it seems to elude many people that these Victorian school and hospital buildings pre-date the post-war welfare state.
I had a blood test a few weeks ago a couple of miles down the road from me at the Ongar War Memorial Hospital. It's been an NHS hospital since the founding of the NHS in the 1940s (and yes I will use the NHS while I have no choice but to pay for it) but it was built through private subscription soon after WW1, hence the 'War Memorial Hospital'.
In short, these public services were much more widespread for a long time before the State crowded out private provision.
I wonder if Pete,Frank and all the rest ever lived in slums;I lived in a slum set up in Victorian times and I found that even the 1960s life was poor.
Food was usually poor, conditions were cramped and mostly there was little hope of further education.
It is certain that that when Booth wrote things were much worse, oh, and I've read Bootgh and it would not hurt some of them to read further what he set down.
I wonder if Pete,Frank and all the rest ever lived in slums;I lived in a slum set up in Victorian times and I found that even the 1960s life was poor.
Food was usually poor, conditions were cramped and mostly there was little hope of further education.
It is certain that that when Booth wrote things were much worse, oh, and I've read Bootgh and it would not hurt some of them to read further what he set down.