Deep Background / Let's Ground This in Actual History
I think you have to put this story in its context. At the
risk of some oversimplification, a case can be made that over
a period of years, the British social service
bureaucracy has been attempting to persuade the respectable
British working man to take such cases to the authorities instead
of simply walking down the street and settling the matter with his
own version of rough justice. I have my doubts whether one can
speak of a pre-existing Libertarian family policy. One has to make
a distinction between immediate authority and ultimate authority.
The regime of the pre-welfare-state-period was not ultimately
libertarian.
In the end, courts did decide custody cases, if both parties were
willing to go to the trouble of litigation. In one
seventeenth-century child abuse case, that of the diarist Henry
Newcomb's granddaughter, the neighbors simply confiscated
the child, and contacted the grandparents, without
bothering to seek any legal authority (Keith Wrightson, _English
Society, 1580-1660_, 1982, p. 117). That was
apparently the end of the matter.
There is another case I know of, however. Walter
Scott, in _Peveril of the Peak_, includes a footnote (note
L) about one of his forebears, Scott of Harden,
who, circa 1686-87, confiscated an abused (apprentice) child
from a mountebank, one Reid, and was sued for doing so. The
mountebank had bought the little dancing girl from her
mother for 2 lbs. 10 s. (thirty pounds, scots, perhaps
several thousand dollars in modern money), and was working
her hard enough in his business that she had juvenile arthritis.
Reading between the lines, the fact that Scott of Harden's wife
was also sued implies that she befriended and confiscated the
little girl, and, when the montebank Reid objected, Scott of
Harden would have commenced whipping him.
Scott of Harden won the case without any particular difficulty,
one supposes, partly on the basis of the medical evidence, and
partly just on the basis that he was a minor nobleman or clan
chief, the sort of man who would feel entitled to whip a
mountebank on the street if he felt like it, and that the judges,
being men of the same quality, would be inclined to respect
his prerogatives. The ultimate authority was the same as it
is at present, the state and the courts, but the mechanics
of enforcement were different. It is hard to say whether one
could call this a libertarian arrangement or not.
The Barnardo Homes are an analogous case. In the late 19th and
early 20th centuries, the Barnardo Homes sent about 30,000
children to Canada, and I suppose the Salvation Army organization
must have operated on a similar scale. The Barnardo Homes were
notoriously aggressive about removing children found in any
sort of physical or moral hazard, and tended to take the view that
once they had sent a child off to Canada or Australia, the other
side was not going to be able to come up with the return fare. Dr.
Barnardo was an Irish Protestant of the more primitive type,
who tended to include "popery" as a form of moral hazard.
The Homes went through a series of lawsuits over the scope of
their self-assumed authority, and eventually reached a concordat
with the Catholic charities. In dealing with a powerless
individual, such as a typical bad slum mother, the kind who
drank and slept around, the Homes had fewer
inhibitions, naturally. They didn't give second chances.
As for the leading late twentieth century cases, which I cite in
the bibliography, I think you can make a case that they have a
distinctive geography of their own. Granted, a handful
of cases do not make a trend, but still: the Maria
Colwell case was in Brighton, and the abusing stepfather
seems to have been Irish; the Victoria Climbie
case was in London, and involved West African immigrants;
and now this latest case involves someone living in
Plymouth. We are talking about places where working people
have immigrated to, in order to be guest workers in the service
industries.
In the nineteenth century, it was axiomatic that urban
housemaids tended to become prostitutes. The former
occupation entailed the absolute maximum of alienation, in
the Durkheimian sense of the word. A housemaid tended to
come to the conviction that just about _anything_ would be better
than being a housemaid. I think we are talking
about people who are the economic successors of the Victorian
housemaid.
These cases did not happen in Wales or Northumberland, or
Lancashire, the traditional manufacturing parts of Britain.
The classic Rhonda Valley mining village tended to develop
a kind of highly evolved working-class community, centered
around the mine. The outlying mining villages have been in
long-term economic depression for the last forty years or so, and
the proportion of the residents relying on welfare state
benefits might have been on the order of seventy-five
percent, but these villages do not seem to have produced leading
child abuse cases. Presumably, the community worked, and the
children were informally removed long before crisis point. Instead
the cases seem to turn up at a market economy node,
which was attracting migration. Migration tends to break
down extended families, and to a degree, the abuse cases happen
because the extended family is back in the old country.
The Maria Colwell case does, to a degree, fit the argument
about destroying working class community. It is not so
much a matter of public housing or public benefits, so much
as the extent to which the girl's respectable relatives,
neighbors, teachers, etc. deferred to the authority of
the state, and its welfare officers. The state was
represented by an exceedingly arrogant young woman, highly
educated but with little practical experience, who
afterwards found her natural level as a superior clerk in the
Foreign Office. All of these people, relatives,
neighbors, and teachers, who knew the family more or less
intimately, put a great deal of effort into
lobbying this young official, rather than simply taking action
themselves. Complaints were filed through a variety of channels,
but repeatedly got lost in red tape. One element of the case was
the official's insistent efforts to "liberate" the girl's mother
from the claims of extended family and neighborhood. By the
time the official was interviewed by the investigating
commission, she was for nearly all intents and purposes on trial
for negligent homicide, and her explanations amounted to
"stonewalling." The result is that we do not have a
satisfactory explanation for her motives. However, a case could be
made that she was practicing something like libertarian
theory, trying to resolve cases as quickly as possible in
favor of the biological parent, and resisting efforts to
bring the parent's conduct into discussion. She did not, for
example, do a background check on the stepfather, which would have
turned up the fact that he had a police record for repeated crimes
of violence. The account I read was not explicit, but the
balance of probabilities would be that he might have been a
football hooligan, or something like that. At any rate, he did
things like threatening female social workers with bodily harm, to
the point that the official felt the need to bring along a male
colleague for her own protection.
======================================================================
A short bibliography, dealing with notable British cases of
child abuse, and the official responses to them, as well as
American and European parallels.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Maria Colwell Inquiry
[United Kingdom] Department of Health and Social Services (1974)
Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Care and Supervision
provided in relation to Maria Colwell, HMSO London.
Catalog entry:
http://www.bopcris.ac.uk/bopall/ref18581.html
This is a British government publication, long out of print, and
not available via any of the online booksellers, nor on the web as
near as I can determine, and available in only a very few
large libraries in the United States. However it is cited
extensively in secondary literature. Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud,
and Albert J. Solnit reproduce about a third of the report in
their
_Before
the
Best Interests of the Child_
(Free Press, 1979).
In 1973, seven-year-old Maria Colwell was beaten to death by
her stepfather after having been systematically starved and beaten
for the preceding year, in the face of the systematic blindness of
the social services. This triggered a scandal, and an
investigation.
-----------------------------------
Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert j. Solnit,
_Beyond
the
Best Interests of the Child_
(Free Press, 1973, 1979).
_Before the Best Interests of the
Child_ (Free Press,
1979).
An argument for a better system of child custody. However, these
two volumes incorporate a lot of relevant anecdotal
material, especially a portion of the Colwell report.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Maria_Colwell
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Victoria Climbie Inquiry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Victoria_Climbié
Domain no
longer registered
[http://www.victoria-climbie-inquiry.org.uk/]
------------------------------------
House of Lords discussion on the Victoria Climbie report
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200203/ldhansrd/vo030908/text/30908-04.htm
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FROM MARIA COLWELL TO VICTORIA CLIMBIE: REFLECTIONS ON A
GENERATION OF PUBLIC INQUIRIES INTO CHILD ABUSE, Plenary
paper by Professor Nigel Parton for the BASPCAN conference, July
2003 (published in Child Abuse Review (2004), 13 (2), pp80-94)
The Wayback
Machine only has a containing page,
but did not yet know how to incorporate Acrobat files.
[http://www.gptsw.net/papers/clwlclmbi.pdf]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Larry Wolf, Child Abuse in Freud's Vienna: Postcards From the End
of the World, New York University Press, New York, 1988. Makes a
somewhat debatable argument about the "invention" of child
abuse as, for want of a better word, a diagnostic category.
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Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and
Vivisection in Edwardian England, University of Wisconsin
Press, 1985. Especially useful for its discussion of
the spread of the culture of generalized "anti-cruelty" in
the working class.
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Barnardo Homes:
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/barnardo.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Barnardo
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Walter Scott, _Peveril of the Peak_ (footnote L)
refers to an incident described in, and presumably derived from:
Robert Chambers, Domestic Annals of Scotland, 1874 (3 rd ed., 1st
ed. 1827), Vol II, Ch 6, entry for January 13, 1687
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/domestic/vol2ch6.htm
in:
https://www.electricscotland.com/history/domestic/index.htm
https://www.electricscotland.com/history/books.htm#other
on the site:
https://www.electricscotland.com/books/index.htm
https://www.electricscotland.com/history/suggested_reading.htm
https://electricscotland.com/history/index.htm
https://electricscotland.com/index.html
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