The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the RSPCA, was founded in 1824. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, meanwhile, would not be founded for another sixty years. When a Liverpool businessman by the name of Thomas Agnew visited New York City, he was impressed by the society that had been set up there with the mission of rescuing 'little children from the cruelty and demoralization which neglect, abandonment and improper treatment engender'. Inspired, Agnew returned home and founded the Liverpool Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (the LSPCC). Other cities and towns followed suit and, in the summer of 1884, the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Lord Shaftsbury, was the first President and he was joined by others including Benjamin Waugh as co-secretary and Angela Burdett-Coutts. The latter also founded Columbia Market in the late 1860s and served as President of the British Goat Society, both of which still exist but only one which can be found here and comes highly recommended (by me) for the value of the homepage alone. Burdett-Coutts was also President of the British Beekeepers' Association for almost thirty years and did a lot of other weird and wonderful and actually extremely useful things with her time. As you can tell, I'm quite the fan. You can read about her here and I urge you to do it.
Angela Burdett-Coutts
In 1889, Parliament passed the Prevention of Cruelty to, and Protection of, Children Act 1889, commonly known as the Children's Charter. That same year, the London Society became the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the NSPCC that we know today and the Police Commissioner decreed that all cases of child neglect brought to the police ought to be handed over to the organisation.
The Sheffield Daily Telegraph explained the changes that the new Act brought with it. Firstly, it provided protection for boys up to the age of fourteen and for girls up to the age of sixteen. Most interestingly, in cases concerning the neglect or ill-treatment of children, the court would no longer be primarily concerned with whether the child had resultantly become a burden on the parish. Instead, the inquiry would consider whether the child had been caused 'unnecessary suffering' or 'injury to its health' and could impose a penalty of a £25-£100 fine or three months to two years' imprisonment; this was a fairly major departure. The newspaper noted that
"It will be interesting to persons in the habit of starving, exposing, scourging, hammering, burning, or otherwise torturing their children to know that the amusement has become much more expensive than it was formerly"
The newspaper celebrated that baby farmers, among others, would now be held responsible for their cruel treatment. 'There are some men,' it continued, 'who have not considered it necessary to marry the mother of their children, and have also judged it beneath their dignity to provide food for those children. The law has hitherto recognised the right of these unnatural fathers to throw the burden of responsibility on the mother. Henceforth the unmarried man who lives with the mother of his children will have to provide food and raiment for those little ones'. Sending children out to hawk at night or to beg was now also within the scope of punishment by the law.
Prior to the implementation of the Act, most child-neglect-related cases were manslaughter charges - in other words, cases usually only came to court if the child actually died as a result of the neglect. In instances of severe neglect or cruelty, the child could be removed from the home and would usually end up in the workhouse; prosecution of their parents tended to be fairly unusual and sentences were light. Throughout the century, there had been a growing romanticising of childhood and a far greater preoccupation with ideas of childhood innocence; no longer were children seen as sort of small adults, but rather childhood began to be seen as a distinct life phase. Efforts had been made by various organisations and philanthropists throughout the era to improve working conditions for children, as well as attempting to widen access to education. Both of these aims were interlinked - children who attended school, even on a part-time basis, would be less able to earn money and contribute to the household. In some families, the wages of children, even very young children, were essential in staying afloat. When the state began to legislate about what contribution was appropriate for these children to make, they were in effect stepping on the toes of parents who hitherto had had almost unrestricted power over their children. The 1889 Act, then, was an extension of this, a death knell to the supreme rights of parents and to some, an example of the state's unwarranted interference in private family life.
Across the country that year, the NSPCC began bringing cases to court and in the September the first prosecutions in Glasgow under the new Act took place. Two Italians were given a nominal fine of 5s for allowing their children, aged six and eleven, to receive alms in the street. The Sheriff noted that since the Act was new and the two were foreign, they could hardly have been expected to know about it. The second case involved a man whose ten-year-old son had been found selling newspapers in the street between ten and eleven o'clock at night. In this case, the Sheriff found that there was no evidence that the child had been compelled by his father to sell the newspapers, but conceded that parents probably ought to know where their children were at night.
Many prosecutions seem not to have taken full advantage of the scope of available penalty. That same month, a woman in Carlisle was charged with having neglected her child in favour of the pub and received a sentence of only a month's imprisonment with hard labour. Over the next few decades, a great deal of discretion was often used by the authorities, depending on the specifics of each case. On one day in March 1895, two cases came before the Police Court in Blackburn, Lancashire. In the first, an NSPCC inspector stated that the defendant, a widow, had severely neglected her eight-month-old illegitimate son. She, he argued, frequently left the child with other women while she went to work, and often his only source of sustenance was a bottle of tea. Weak and dirty, the child 'looked more like a rabbit than owt else' according to one neighbour. The magistrate nonetheless decided to deal leniently with her, feeling strongly that the father of the infant ought to be brought before the court himself for failing so abjectly to provide financial support. The child was taken to the workhouse for a few months and it was suggested that perhaps the mother ought to be given at least a little outdoor relief. The case that followed this one was in every way worse. The child in question was sixteen months old and weighed 12lbs instead of the expected 22lbs. A doctor testified that 'the child was nothing better than a bag of bones, and was suffering from ulceration of the mouth'. The child's step-father was sentenced to two months in prison, but the mother, who at that very time was in the workhouse herself, preparing for the birth of another child, had the case against her dismissed.
Frequently in these cases one is left wondering how exactly the penalties, even where they are comparatively more severe, actually help anybody, least of all the children themselves. One 1905 case involved a woman who lived on Soapery Street, West Gorton, whose intemperate habits were so extreme that she had been convicted of child neglect four previous times and had even served two six month sentences for the crime. In this instance, the NSPCC inspector found that the youngest child, aged just nineteen months old, had a sore and inflamed mouth caused by drinking sour milk from its bottle which was 'choked with fermented curd'. The children's bed was so filthy that it needed to be burned. The children's father, a carter, earned 24s a week, but had lately taken to giving his wife no more than 2d a day to buy food for the children, as anything else she was given she spent on drink. The last time she had been in prison, her husband had taken the opportunity to buy ne beds, bedding, and clothes for the children. The moment she was released from prison, the woman had pawned the lot. Sentencing her to yet another six month period in prison, the Bench remarked that the children were better off without her.
In some cases, the penalties handed down by the law seem not only to have been unhelpful, but sometimes to have actually made the situation worse. In 1895, a sixteen year old mother with a one year old child was prosecuted for child neglect, alongside her own father. Financially, the family were doing fairly well - the father worked and had three grown up sons living at home who were also employed. He could not control what his daughter did, he said, and she often left home taking the baby with her. Both the girl and her father were sentenced to three months imprisonment with hard labour. One cannot help but wonder what impact this had on the family's finance and it certainly difficult to see how it helped them. Rather like we saw with the Matrimonial Causes Act, imprisonment and financial penalties tended to make situations worse, as they merely exacerbated the poverty that was so often present in such cases.
Cases continued to be brought and punishment meted out. Alcohol abuse on the part of parents was a common theme, alongside the very worst poverty imaginable. The Children's Act of 1908 brought in, among other things, the borstal system, and led to the setting up of various social services. It required the formal registration of foster parents, prevented children from purchasing cigarettes, and prevented children from working in dangerous trades. In 1946, the Secretary of the Pacifist Service Unit wrote to the Guardian noting that there were so many children already in orphanages and other institutions that it was 'more than ever necessary that children are only removed from home in very extreme circumstances, and that the normal policy should be to "educate" and help the parents'. It was an attitude that in general prevailed, but despite the passage of more and more legislation, concern about child neglect continued to grow.
Bringing prosecutions for child neglect eventually ceased to fall under the NSPCC's remit and its focus shifted towards awareness and campaigning. In the late 1980s, only a few years after the NSPCC celebrated its centenary, cases began to appear in the United States that would lead to a full-scale moral panic, one which would eventually make its way into British courtrooms too. Many high-profile figures and organisations were convinced of the veracity of the claims that were made and allegations of satanic ritual abuse began to gain traction.
Satanic Ritual Abuse essentially refers to extreme sexual and/ or physical abuse committed against children by organised groups who commit those acts in a ritualistic and supposedly Satanistic manner. Inextricably linked to these abuse allegations is the notion of recovered memories and the still very much contentious diagnosis of Multiple Personality Disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder). In 1988, a book was published by poet Ellen Bass and one of her students, Laura Davis, the latter a survivor of incestuous childhood abuse; neither had a background is psychotherapy. Entitled, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse, the book does contain some genuinely comforting quotes for victims of CSA. However, according to the American branch of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, 'no book did more to spread false memory syndrome'. The simplest way to explain the phenomenon is to look at a specific case.
The Guardian, 8th March 1991
At around the same time, a similar case was unfolding in the Orkney Islands. Ultimately, the children in both cases were returned to their families and no evidence of satanic abuse was found. In fact, it should be noted, there has never been a verified example of satanic ritual abuse. That is not to say that paedophile rings do not exist - they do. And childhood sexual abuse is rampant and destructive. But satanic abuse has never been properly demonstrated to have taken place in any context, in any country, at any time. British anthropologist, Jean La Fontaine, conducted a years long investigation into allegations of this sort of abuse and concluded that the evidence was just not there. She also explored the failings and misplaced motivations of the relevant authorities, as well as examining the development of a moral panic around the issue. La Fontaine's findings were published in the late 1990s in a well-received book entitled Speak of the Devil.
Edmonton Journal, 13th April 1991
"Our very experienced people are very concerned [...] The society in no way invented these stories"
In the Spring of 1990, the charity published a report into such cases but, most curiously, I have been unable to find a copy anywhere; it is almost as if it never happened. Newspapers at the time did report on it, however, with the Guardian noting that it had 'sparked controversy'. The once left-leaning-now-not-so-much journalist, Melanie Phillips, attempted in 1990 to raise the idea with the NSPCC that it was the charity's 'latest publicity stunt to raise funds in a viciously competitive financial climate for all charities' which does admittedly seem quite harsh. She does make a good point, however, that 'the problem with highlighting satanism [...] is that it provides a convenient let-out for those who don't want to admit that child abuse occurs as a matter of grisly routine in utterly ordinary families involving "normal" fathers and grandfathers.'
The Guardian, 31st December 1990
There are many documentaries, books, radio programmes, and podcasts that deal with the moral panic of satanic ritual abuse from a United States perspective, but there are also some that look at the situation as it unfolded here in the UK. In 2015, BBC Radio 4 did a two part programme with Times journalist, David Aaronovitch, which compares the allegations of the past with the more recent abuse scandal that unfolded concerning ex-members of Parliament. It is interesting to note that moral panics very often seem to relate to child sexual abuse, at least in part. In 1885, a series of articles appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, investigating child sex trafficking. An important Act of Parliament was passed partly as a result, but there was also a rather unexpected trial that took place. This, the story of 'The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon', will be the subject of next week's post.
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