We interview Heather Montgomery about her book, Familiar Violence: A History of Child Abuse
Our member, Prof. Heather Montgomery (the Open University, UK), talks about her new book, Familiar Violence: A History of Child Abuse (Polity Press, 2024).
Q: What is this book about?
Familiar Violence examines the long shadow that child abuse has cast over the history of childhood. Across the centuries, there are innumerable accounts of children being beaten, neglected, sexually assaulted, and even killed by those closest to them. The experiences of children in the past were often brutal, and they were treated with what seems to us to be callousness and cruelty. But how was the mistreatment of children understood at the time?
Using anthropological and historical perspectives, the book argues that parents, local communities and state authorities have never been indifferent to child suffering. Indiscriminate violence against children has never been unequivocally tolerated. What has changed, however, is the limits of that tolerance and the wider understandings of where the line between the legitimate and illegitimate use of force lies with the family.
Familiar Violence argues that there have always been widely shared understandings of the boundaries that separate acceptable treatment from the intolerable and the morally wrong, but these boundaries have changed and been contested across time. Drawing upon the stories of individual parents and children in Britain, Familiar Violence paints a vivid and varied picture of children’s lives in context from the Middle Ages to the modern era. From infanticide and baby farming to discipline, neglect and sexual abuse, the book tells the story of how society identifies, prosecutes and tries to prevent abusive behaviour.
Q: What made you write this book?
I have researched child abuse within the family for over thirty years, first as a social anthropologist looking at children’s understandings of commercial sexual exploitation in Thailand (Montgomery, 2001) and, in this new book, uncovering and analysing historical account of child abuse in English families.
I have always found that child abuse within the home is an emotive topic. It is difficult, and arguably undesirable, to think about it dispassionately or without judgement. It defies easy definitions, changes according to context and depends on intention – something difficult to judge now and almost impossible to do so in the past. While violence against children in schools has long been researched, there has been much less work done on violence inflicted on children, by their parents.
In writing this book, therefore, I wanted to try and bring anthropological insights to historical accounts of violence against children. I wanted to understand if a history of child abuse within the family was possible or was it so hidden as to be unrecoverable. I also wanted to explore issues of cultural and historical relativity, and whether we can judge other societies, or other times, by our own contemporary standards. I wanted to see if there were certain ways of treating children that have always been abhorred while other behaviours, which may seem puzzling, bizarre, or even harmful, to modern sensibilities were practised and valued elsewhere or at different times.
An excerpt from Chapter Three ('Neglect and Negligence'):
The Times of 1810 gives the case of four-year-old Joseph Gadbury who, as well as being regularly and violently beaten, was neglected by his mother, Mary. Mary got up early to go to Covent Garden market to sell greens and ‘was in the habit of leaving the child locked up in a room by itself until nine or ten at night.’ She had tried to send the child to the workhouse but on investigation the overseers found that she made a relatively good living at Covent Garden and asked her for money for the boy’s upkeep. When she refused, they sent the child home to her and, neighbours claimed, that she ‘has since treated it in the above inhuman manner.’ Her behaviour was reported and she was arrested. ‘When she was taken out of the office, it was with the greatest difficulty she could be protected from the fury of the women on the outside.’ (The Times, May 28, 1810). Whether this anger directed at her was because of the beating, the neglect, or trying to send her child to the parish when she had enough money to look after him, is not clear, but her behaviour was evidently socially unacceptable.
Other parents also felt the force of community opprobrium. In 1824, Mr and Mrs Cayzer were taken to court for ‘barbarous cruelty.’ (The Times, April 7, 1824). They too both beat and neglected their children so that ‘the two youngest children, a boy and girl of four and six years of age, were generally confined in a closet, and when they implored food, their unnatural protectors would dash him against his little sister.’ Neighbours were outraged by this and tried to free the children from the closet but the door was always locked. When the Cayzers were finally arrested the ‘officers had great difficulty, in conducting them to prison, to protect them from the fury of an immense crowd that had assembled.’
In small communities, neighbours were well aware when children were ill-treated and neglected. The Times of July 27, 1825, tells of a group of women going to a Bethnal Green magistrate to complain about the neglect of a 17-week-old boy by his parents, a young couple called Timothy and Catherine Debouche. One of the complainants, Mrs Brown, told the magistrate that the couple ‘were in the habit of going from home, and keeping the child locked up the whole day without food’. When they did give him food, it consisted of bits of rotten pork, ‘the smell of which she said would prove not only that it was improper food for a child of such tender age, but even for any human being.’ She further claimed they hit the child and on one occasion had broken his jaw. She added that ‘she conceived the women to be more blameable than her husband for the neglect with which the poor child had been treated, as the care of children was rather the duty of a woman than a man.’ On hearing their complaint, the magistrate ordered the parents to bring the child before him. He examined the boy’s clothes which were found to be in ‘a filthy condition’ and, when they were removed, the child was covered in bruises. The mother denied the charges and claimed the marks were general ‘disorders’ common in all children. Mrs Brown was a mother of six and declared that ‘rather than suffer this child to be exposed to further ill-usage, she would take care of it herself’. Instead the magistrate committed the parents to trial and gave the child to the parish to look after.
The reporting of such cases remained rare however and does little to prove whether there was a widely shared understanding of child neglect or whether neighbours were concerned about all forms of neglect or only when accompanied by violence. It is also difficult to tell whether the accused parents were already marginalised and accusations of child cruelty a way of reinforcing the parents’ status as unwelcome outsiders or undesirables. Despite the very few individual instances therefore that came to public attention neglect, unless so severe that it threatened a child’s life or was accompanied by particularly brutal beatings or extreme cruelty, does not appear a great concern. While parishes or, later, workhouses might take in the most destitute of children, especially those without a parent, they did not concern themselves with those who were neglected, under-fed or left unsupervised and imprisoned in rooms while their parents worked. Until 1868 there was no specific law against child neglect and in general, neglect, like malnutrition, disease and poverty, was ubiquitous in parts of towns and cities. Only the most egregious forms of negligence ever became known.