Скачать книгу

were established between 1890 and 1916.

      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.

      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).

       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,

Скачать книгу