The first legislation to protect British children was passed in 1889, popularly known as The Children’s Charter. This was the result of five years’ vigorous lobbying by the NSPCC. The legislation gave their inspectors the power to remove children from abusive homes with the consent of a Justice of the Peace (1904). Only police were involved in child sex abuse cases, which were rare. Amazingly it was not until 1908 that intrafamilial child sexual abuse became a legal matter instead of a religious/church matter.
After the Second World War, NSPCC officers, women police, children’s social workers (known as children’s officers) and probation officers worked together on child protection cases in metropolitan London and police routinely shared information with team members.
Since 1904 the NSPCC has been the UK’s only voluntary organisation with statutory powers to intervene and remove children from abusive homes and seek care and protection orders from courts. The NSPCC also supervises probation orders relating to child maltreatment. The organisation is now best known for its hard-hitting publicity campaigns, advisory service, and advocacy for children, research and publications76.
The Victorian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
Waugh’s success in England led to the formation of the Victorian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1896) in Melbourne, later known as the Children’s Protection Society (CPS). Created on the London model, it aimed to publicise child abuse, co-operate with relevant organisations, enforce existing laws to deal with neglected children and juvenile offenders and protect children. It was one of few secular non-government agencies in the child welfare field and it operated on the philosophy of persuading or, in the last resort, compelling parents to fulfil their responsibilities. Changes to welfare policy and legislative reform in 1985 changed the Society’s role. A team of psychologists and social workers now provide therapeutic counselling for children and young people who (a) have been sexually abused and (b) exhibit inappropriate or sexually abusive behaviours.
The CPS offers:
assistance to children, families and caregivers to understand and overcome the impact and difficulties created by sexual abuse
education and consultation to professionals and the community on matters associated with sexual abuse
specialised training and education programmes tailored to meet the needs of organisations charged with the care of children such as schools, residential care services, and foster care77
The influence of Dr Henry C. Kempe
The problem of physical abuse was brought to the notice of medical professionals in 1961 when Dr Henry C. Kempe and his American colleagues presented a paper entitled, “The Battered Child Syndrome” at the 30th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Paediatrics in Chicago (October 3rd). This paper was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association a year later (181-1:17-24). Kempe was concerned that children’s x-rays often showed unexplained fractures. He deliberately used the emotive term “baby-battering” to draw attention to a problem that he found to be far more widespread than was recognised. This gradually gave way to the more general term “child abuse” to include older children and sexual, physical and emotional abuse and neglect and damaging exploitation. Until that time, doctors were reluctant to accept that parents, least of all mothers, were capable of injuring their own sons and daughters.
Kempe and colleagues surveyed 71 American hospitals and found 302 cases of battered children; 33 died and 85 were brain-damaged. Seventy-seven District Attorneys disclosed 447 cases in one year. Forty-five children died and 29 were brain-injured. Kempe emphasised that the problem was not confined to the poor but could be found across all social groups. Kempe’s article was later cited by the American Medical Association as one of the most important contributions to American medicine in the 20th century.
In 1972, the National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect was established at the University of Colorado as a national resource, later re-named the Kempe Children’s Center. In 1977 Kempe established the prestigious journal Child Abuse and Neglect: The International Journal published for ISPCAN, The International Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect which offers annual conferences and training institutes worldwide.
The first major Australian child protection initiative was a conference on “non-accidental injury” (1973) organised by the Princess Margaret Hospital, Perth78 with Dr Henry Kempe as keynote speaker. The publicity surrounding the conference led to responsibility for child protection being transferred from charities to government departments, the emphasis remaining on physical abuse.
ISPCAN held its 6th bi-annual Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect in Sydney in 1986 attended by a record 1600 people. By that time, child protection was no longer the sole domain of the medical profession. At that conference, psychiatrist Dr Roland Summit presented his influential paper, “The Child Sexual Abuse Accommodation Syndrome” explaining for the first time how children react to sexual abuse79.
Australian child protection pioneers
Foremost among Australian child protection pioneers were Victoria’s long serving police surgeon Dr John Henry Winter Birrell and his paediatrician brother, Robert. In 1966 they published a paper entitled, “The Maltreatment Syndrome in Children” in the Medical Journal of Australia. They documented the non-accidental injuries of children admitted to Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital. In the same issue was Dr Dora Bialestock’s paper on her examination of 289 babies who were consecutively admitted to the care of the state. This revealed significant developmental delay associated with neglect80. The next influential article was again authored by the Birrell brothers81. This described the state of 42 maltreated children seen over an eleven-month period. The doctors also recorded parents’ incredible explanations for children’s serious injuries.
The Birrells were ahead of their time in their recommendations. They accepted that punishment was not the answer given that many parents had themselves been abused in childhood and abuse was learned behaviour. They recommended psychiatric help for parents and child victims, the use of multi-disciplinary teams, a central register of abusers/victims, child abuse education for health workers and medical staff and the introduction of mandatory reporting legislation to make reporting compulsory. It took the Victorian Government another 25 years to respond to these recommendations.
Their contention that child maltreatment was a widespread problem in Victoria received no support from the state government or even the Children’s Hospital. The suggestion that a child protection unit should be established was treated with derision. The hospital was known to have dismissed the problem of gonorrhoea in children as caused by “infected linen” and staff responded to the deliberate burning of children with “ongoing observations”82.
Although the counting of child abuse cases began in Australia and New Zealand in 197283,84, there were no reliable studies that could estimate the extent of child abuse even in the 1980s and, furthermore, the Australian Research Council had no category of funding that included child abuse or protection. The lack of incidence and prevalence data made it easy for professionals and politicians to deny that child abuse occurred.
The damaging long-term influence of Britain’s Poor Law
Historians Dickey, Martin and Oxenberry85 showed that prior to the 1960s, Australian policies and practices continued to reflect attitudes associated with the English Poor Law of 1834 which was abandoned in Britain in 1946 with the introduction of the National Health Service. In other words, they were based on the belief that poverty was self-inflicted and people were poor because they were “morally deficient” and idle. There was a widespread belief among the well-endowed that the poor could help themselves and, if they didn’t,