We know just how important family bonds are for children to grow up healthily. Research shows clearly the detrimental effects of institutional care on children, and the harm that family separation in migration settings can create — especially for the youngest children.
Yet, families are far from perfect. It is within family settings that abuse can take place, as well as neglect. We don’t have to dig deep into any formal research to know that there are families who are detrimental to a child’s wellbeing.
So, how can we try to keep families together if we know that the family unit itself can potentially be very dangerous? Child protection services, or social services, walk this very fine line every day — and they often get the balance wrong.
Children’s wellbeing: a recent concern
Children’s wellbeing is a relatively recent worry for governments. The concept of child abuse was not even acknowledged until the 1960s. As this BBC podcast explains, it was a U.S. paediatrician who was the first one to define the ideas around child abuse for the medical community. In 1962, Dr. Henry C. Kempe and his colleagues published an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association on what they called “The Battered-Child Syndrome.”
“The Battered-Child Syndrome is a term used by us,” wrote the authors, “to characterize a clinical condition in young children who have received serious physical abuse, generally from a parent or foster parent.”
“Beating of children is not confined to people with a psychopathic personality or of borderline socioeconomic status. It also occurs among people with good education and stable financial and social background.”
The article was a turning point for how society views children. While historians assume that child abuse (both physical and sexual) was just as common in the past as it is now, it was rarely documented because there were no legal nor medical frameworks to use to talk about it.
Larry Wolff, a history professor at New York University, wrote a book about a case that took place in Venice in the 18th century: a 60-year-old man who was accused of having sex with an 8-year-old girl was charged simply with “causing a scandal” and made to pay a fine to the girl’s family. “There was no other plausible criminal charge on the books,” writes Wolff.
In a separate book, Wolff also documented cases of child abuse in Vienna at the end of the 19th century. While Sigmund Freud was theorising about the Oedipus complex and hostilities between parents and children, Wolff looked at four cases of child abuse who dominated the pages of the newspapers — but failed to be addresses properly.
“It was only after [Kempe’s] medical ‘discovery’ in 1962 that child abuse was recognised as a regular and recurring aspect of family life, not a sensational exception but a common syndrome,” writes Wolff.
The birth of child services
While some types of child protection agencies existed prior to the 1962 paper, they were often controversial (in New York, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was asked to step in to aid children) and biased against marginalised groups, including those living in poverty, migrants, and indigenous populations.
That logic led to the creation in the 19th century of the Orphan Train Movement, a welfare programme that relocated up to 200,000 children from cities in the East coast of the United States to foster homes in rural areas of the Midwest who needed farming labor. The leaders of the orphan train movement claimed that these children were orphaned, abandoned, abused, or homeless, but mostly they were children of new immigrants and of families living in poverty.
In Switzerland, well into the 1970s, children of unmarried mothers or from poor families were taken away from their parents and sent to live with new ones, especially on farms, where they were mainly abused and forced to work.
There were also the brutal residential or boarding schools that tore away indigenous children from their families in Canada, the United States, and Australia, among other countries.
The legacy of these awful programmes serve as a reminder of systemic failures in protecting vulnerable children.
Yet many countries still have systems in place designed to remove children from their families of origin, often citing protection as the rationale. Unfortunately, these institutions frequently perpetuate separation because of inherent bias or because they have no other means to support families to do a better job at home.
Anglo-American child protection systems have had huge increases in the numbers of referrals and reports of child abuse, with more investigations into the most vulnerable communities. In the U.S., there is an overrepresentation of African American and Latino children in welfare investigations. One study found that 53% of all Black children will experience a child-welfare investigation by the time they reach age 18, while one in 10 Black children are separated from their parents by the Child Welfare System.
But as professor of social work Andy Bilson points out, “sadly, we have no evidence that child protection systems at the national level reduce harm to children.”
A similar trend seems to be happening in Europe, where migrant and Roma families are overrepresented in most countries’ social welfare systems, even though data is often not available.
Are these families being targeted because they also live in poverty and social workers consider poverty as a factor to separate children from their families? With all the neuroscientific knowledge we have now on the importance of supporting families and keeping them together, how much is actually passed down on social workers? How much oversight is there of their single actions?
I am proud to support a team of journalists across Europe in investigating cases of biases and discrimination of child protection services thanks to a grant we have recently received. It is vital to share the stories of those who have suffered injustices and to explore how states can better serve children and their families.
I would love to hear from you. Are you researching the topic? Do you know of interesting cases that provide positive solutions? Please, get in touch, and help me contribute to this important journalistic work.
What I’ve been reading
This is a beautiful first-person piece by journalist Lynzy Billing about her life as a teenager in Jerusalem. Through conversations with her Palestinian and Israeli classmates, 16 years after having left Israel, she talks about deep trauma and different narratives.
What I’ve been listening to
This interview with British psychotherapist and author Philippa Perry was insightful in many ways. There is a bit in there about how necessary it is to pay attention to our kids when they become insistent about doing something with us. Especially when we parents are trying to save time, she says, it may be easier to sit down and concentrate on playing with them for five or ten minutes, until they catch their own flow and you can then focus on your things again. She also talks a lot about how difficult it is to change things in one’s life — and how necessary.
What I’ve been watching
I’ve been watching a Spanish comedy TV series on Netflix called Machos Alfa (Alpha Males) and I got a few good laughs out of it. The series focuses on four male friends in their forties who start realising that, with all the social changes happening, their usual male privileges aren’t what they used to be. Each one has to adjust in his own way. In the first season, they sign up for a “deconstructing masculinity” course, and the lessons they learn start to shift their outlooks, at least partially. Interestingly, two of the protagonists are fathers, and they seem to be the ones who are more flexible when it comes to adjusting to a new paradigm of masculinity.
What’s been inspiring me
This BBC podcast about children learning music in devastated, war-torn Gaza is bittersweet. Thanks to the drive of some musicians, the local branch of the Palestinian national music conservatory is still operating in makeshift tents in Gaza. Children are singing and practising the violin, guitar and traditional instruments such as the ‘oud. One boy, Mohammed Abu Aideh, started playing the violin after he lost his hand in an airstrike. And the parents are surprised by how much the children who have music in their lives feel better on a daily basis.
With love and care,
Irene
📣 The First 1,000 Days is edited by community member and friend, Shaun Lavelle.
Photo credits and alt-text: Soraya Irving on Unsplash. Close-up of a child wearing owl-patterned pajamas, playing with a small orange toy boat featuring wooden figures and a fabric sail labeled ‘PlanToys’.
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