Little Children Suffer (1978)

From the May 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Closely rivalling, if not outdoing, sex as the advertising industry’s most popular theme is the home and the family. There is, of course a difference; sexually orientated ads work on promise — the near-nude rolling in the surf, the tightly jeaned female bottoms — while those based on the home are about fulfillment. The image of a smart, comfortable home with affectionate parents and secure children is used to sell toothpaste, breakfast cereals, soup, scouring compounds . . . Because the family, as a place of care, of security, where children grow into happy, well adjusted adults, is one of capitalism’s essential ideals.

Well a recent survey by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (The Child’s Guardian—Winter 1977) estimated that 110 children —mostly babies—are battered to death every year and that beyond these at least 7,700 children receive non-accidental injuries of varying degrees of severity. The NSPCC’s annual report for 1976 said that during twelve months they actually found 30,878 children potentially at risk of neglect or injury.

Concern about child abuse is a comparatively modern fashion; for much of the span of property society children have been regarded as wilfully deficient adults and therefore deserving of whatever punishment their elders liked to inflict on them. As a child king, Edward VI was regularly flogged; Charles I managed to interpose a whipping boy to take his treatment. In the 17th century Massachusetts and Connecticut had a law which prescribed the death penalty for unruly children (nowadays, in England, they are likely only to be put into prison). The case of Mary Ellen, in the 1860s, which saved her from parental brutality, succeeded only on the grounds that she was an animal; while it was illegal to maltreat animals the rights of parents to chastise their children was inviolable.

It was entirely natural, then, that the Industrial Revolution should extend the field of child abuse. In Halifax, Defoe admired four year olds earning their living like grown ups, which meant that in the mines and factories they worked 14, 16, or even 18 hours a day, whipped at their machines to keep them awake and often subjected to imaginative torture by sadistic overseers. The tradition was carried on in the schools, where children were persistently beaten and humiliated to make them learn or behave themselves. It was not only poor kids who suffered; Lord Shaftesbury recalled the school he was sent to, at the age of seven, at the start of the 19th century:

  The memory of that place makes me shudder . . . I think I never saw such a wicked school before or since. The place was bad, wicked, filthy, and the treatment was starvation and cruelty.

(The Prevention of Cruelty to Children — Leslie George Housden)

The agitation over child abuse, which gathered strength in the late 19th century, was largely an upper class affair, typified by a letter in The Times in 1884 which bemoaned “. . . the cruel neglect towards children among our degraded and criminal classes.” From this movement the NSPCC was born, to grow up with the (undeserved) image of the black-uniformed inspector calling in response to anonymous and groundless complaints from malicious neighbours.

Since then there has been a progressive refinement of the techniques of dealing with cruelty towards children, beginning with the deficiencies existing in the methods of detecting the condition some of which were hair raising. One girl, who had herself battered her child, gave an example:

  My elder sister, I think she could have been classed as a battered child, though you didn’t have them then, did you?

(Children in Danger — Jean Renvoize)

Doctors and social workers were pretty slow to detect the signs of baby battering, even misinterpreting something as apparently obvious as healed fractures showing up on an X-ray plate. Now the paediatrician works as a specialist in his own right, but under the restraints common to anyone whose job is to minister to capitalism’s casualties. And, as the NSPCC indicate, a substantial amount of child cruelty still goes undetected.

In 1961 an American doctor, Henry Kempe, published his theory that baby battering might be regarded in the same way as a disease, in that its presence was indicated by certain symptoms which collectively made up what he called the battered baby syndrome. The first symptom may be the act of the parents bringing their child to hospital with, say, a large bruise on its face and a story about it falling off the settee a couple of days before.

Questioning the parents may then reveal other symptoms—one or both of them may have had a bad experience at the hands of their parents; they may make excessive demands on their children for obedience or achievement or uncritical affection. And in among this mixture of physical and emotional problems there are also often social ones, part and parcel of the working class status of the battering parents.

An NSPCC research project in 1976 (At Risk) found that an unwanted pregnancy, marital difficulties and bad housing were predisposing factors in baby battering :

   Many of the parents were living in poor, cramped accommodation, unsuitable for the arrival of a new baby. Hence they spent much of the pregnancy desperately seeking an alternative, which must have added to their general insecurity and anxiety.

If the battered baby syndrome tells us anything it is that human behaviour is largely a response to the conditions the human being finds himself in.

The growth of knowledge about child abuse should cause some questioning of the assumption — on which many of the decisions in domestic and juvenile courts are based — that the best and safest place for a child is at home with its natural parents and that the greatest institution ever developed by man is the monogamous marriage which is, was and shall be.

In fact the family has been a changing organism in society reflecting development in the mode of production. Frederick Engels (The Origin of the Family) describes the monogamous family as: ". . . the first form of the family to be based, not on natural, but on economic conditions — on the victory of private property over primitive, natural communal property”, and points out that it was the intensification of production in agriculture, metalwork and later slavery — all of them the preserve of the male — which finished of the primitive social order dominated by kinship groups, with group marriage and matriarchal families.

The observations of primitive society by Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa) revealed households consisting not just of biological families but also of all those related in any way to the headman or his wife. One effect of this was that children could wander freely and always find food, shelter and protection because they were never out of surveillance of some older relative. If a child was under pressure in one household it could always move to another — a safety valve against over-punitive discipline:

  A girl whose father has beaten her over-severely, in the morning will be found living in haughty sanctuary, two hundred feet away, in a different household. So cherished is this system of consanguineous refuge, that an untitled man or a man of lesser rank will beard the nobler relative who comes to demand a runaway child.

As the Samoan child was passed from one relative to another it learned that no one person, or small group of people, represented care, security or authority, it grew up without the need to invest a great deal in any one relationship; at the same time as passions like jealousy were practically eliminated so was my strong emotional attachment. It couldn’t have been more different from Woman's Own; in Samoan society the successful people were those whose affections were spread thinly over many others, in contrast to modern capitalism’s ideal of an intense focussing of affection onto a small group.

One conclusion from this is that conformity and deviance are very much subjective concepts, fashioned by the demands of the social system within which they exert their pressures on people. The tragedy in what capitalism does to us is that we have the worst of all possible worlds. The monogamous family is restrictive and repressive; it encourages intense involvement over a small scale but it does not bring the commensurate rewards which the moralists claim for it. To begin with it is a perilously fragile arrangement; for example children who conform and form a dependence upon their parents are grievously damaged if anything goes wrong with that relationship. The family of capitalism copes only with difficulty with the natural pressures of the system, which amount to the everyday burdens of working class poverty. If the bough breaks, and the cradle falls, there is rarely a safety net below.

At the same time the family of capitalism is under pressure to become ever more private and introverted. In face of the popular notion that it is breaking up, an increasing amount of money is being diverted into cementing the family together. Mortgages, washing machines and television sets are not just ways of spending money; they are also inducements to use, or enjoy, the results of that spending behind your own front door. And if you must go out you can always keep yourself intact as a unit within the mobile privacy of the motor car.

When we intensify this situation of stress with the normal pressures of survival under capitalism — the need to keep, and progress in, a job for example — we have something which can realise its explosive potential in violence among the electrical gadgets or in a battered baby lying in the G Plan bedroom. Jean Renvoize puts it starkly, as an everyday problem in a working class home when a baby arrives:

  Time and again battering parents report sleeping problems. and no one consistently deprived of their proper quota of sleep can be said to be fully themselves.

Capitalism works by deception and among the cruellest is its family, which it presents as a haven but which is often a torture chamber. Organisations like the NSPCC, typical of their kind, sit Canute-like, puzzled and dismayed at the ever-encroaching tide of reality. Panicked, they splash among superficialities — bad housing or emotional tangles or misconceptions about a child’s abilities. Capitalism is a society in which some violence earns a gaol sentence and some wins medals. It cannot provide for its children or its adults and it will go down in history as having much blood on its hands.

Ivan