From Day-to-Day Quietly and Without Fuss: Child Protection, Simple Modernity and the Repression of Knowledge of Child Death, 1914–70

Abstract

By 1914, the foundations were laid of the very notion that through forms of social intervention children could and should be protected in time. Here, it is argued, are the cultural roots of modern child protection and of an ideal and practice which carries so much in Western culture. In this chapter I will focus on the continuities in the ‘modern’ forms of child protection after 1914 and how critical issues like child deaths were managed up to the upheavals that began in the 1970s. Once again, I shall use actual developments in the nature of and responses to child abuse as the basis for developing conceptual thinking and theorizing protection practices. If relatively little has been written about child maltreatment and child protection in the period up to 1914, virtually nothing is known of these cultural practices in the inter-war years and up to the 1970s. In an afterword to his Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England 1870–1908, Behlmer wrote that ‘there remains to be explained the curious decline in public interest in child abuse between 1914 and the early 1960s’ (1982, p. 225). Wolff argues that ‘If child abuse came out’ in the late nineteenth century, ‘it was soon buried and forgotten again’. For Wolff, the true and lasting ‘discovery’ of child abuse was made by Henry Kempe in the 1960s with the recognition of ‘the Battered Child Syndrome’ (Wolff, 1988, pp. 61–5).