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).
From child-saving to child rights
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.
Embedding child rights in national and international law
Child rights and child-saving are both discourses about how to govern childhood. Child-saving has a long history and is embedded in wider discourses about suffering,