The construction of child neglect in English-speaking countries: Children, risk and poor families

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The construction of child neglect in English-speaking countries: Children, risk and poor families☆ Jan Mason School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University, Australia

A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Child neglect Poverty Work ethic Risk Child as investment Childhood and societal politics

Parental neglect is a major reason, in English-speaking countries, for the removal of children from their parents. The connection between child removal, neglect and poverty has historically always been a factor in policies on neglected children. This article is an historical analysis of the association between interventions for neglect and attitudes to poverty in English speaking countries, with reference to specific countries by way of illustration. The focus is on the dominant discourse associated with state (and philanthropic agency) policies and interventions for child neglect, and more recently with policies for emotional neglect/abuse. I identify how this discourse has been based on an ideology highlighting the capitalist work ethic and the goal of productivity. When policies incorporating this ideology, have targeted families for interventions for neglect, they have typically abstracted, conceptually, the children in these families from the social, economic and cultural factors that impinge on their day-to-day lives. This process has been connected with the construction of children as becoming adults, subsumed within families for instrumental purposes. Interest groups of the elite, whether philanthropic reformers or scientific and social scientist experts, have targeted children as becoming adults and/or investments for the future. I conclude that if the contemporary shift in paradigms from child welfare to child well-being is to contribute significantly to policies and practices for improving the lives of children vulnerable to neglect, it will need to give weight to an alternate discourse identifying the significance of structural issues, in terms of children's socio-economic and generational locations.

1. Introduction Contemporary child protection policies on abuse and neglect are about monitoring risk. The media discourse on risk to children from abusive, violent individuals is very explicit and written in stark headlines. This discourse tends to overpower the more nebulously framed discourse on child neglect and conceals the extent to which neglect has generally been the major reason in English-speaking countries, for state auspiced, or condoned, interventions in families. While differences exist in English-speaking countries in the particulars of policy interventions for neglect, a focus on the commonalities is useful in highlighting salient aspects of neglect policies as they impact on children and their families. Munro, in discussing child protection policies, has drawn attention to these commonalities. She has noted that ‘(a)s a rough generalization, the English speaking countries (Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) put most resources into the investigation and protection services while continental Europe places most emphasis on family support services’(Munro, 2008 p. 34). The discussion in the following section locates the dominant discourse on investigation and

protection services, in English-speaking countries, as traceable to values that emerged in Poor Law times. Later sections detail how these values have continued over the centuries to influence child neglect policies. In contemporary times, according to a 2005 review of the literature, neglect has been the fastest growing and the most common form of substantiated maltreatment in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia (Watson, 2005). Indications, from perusal of more recent figures, are that neglect is still generally the predominant form of substantiated maltreatment, either in association with, or sometimes second to, what is defined as emotional abuse or emotional neglect (e.g. AIHW, 2015; USDHHS Department of Health and Human Services, 2012). In the literature it is noted that difficulties in isolating neglect from other forms of maltreatment and in defining neglect and emotional abuse make the picture more complex than is apparent from the statistics. When attempting to track the extent of maltreatment interventions over time, additional complexities arise. The statistics are nevertheless meaningful in terms of significant policy and practice directions, particularly as neglect, understood as ‘perceived failures or omissions of parents or caregivers to provide children with basic

☆

This paper is based on research completed mid-2014. E-mail address: [email protected].

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2017.06.011 Received 24 May 2017; Accepted 4 June 2017 0190-7409/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Mason, J., Children and Youth Services Review (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2017.06.011

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necessities’, is considered to be ‘the core issue underlying all child maltreatment’ (ACOSS, 2008). Whereas the child abuse discourse is about children being at risk in terms of survival and the threats physical and sexual violence pose to children and childhood, the child neglect discourse is generally about the threat that children whose lives are lived in poverty pose to the social status quo. Since Poor Law times, within English speaking countries, there has been a consistent discourse about children in families in poverty being potentially dangerous to the status quo. This discourse and the varying policy and practice responses to it, as detailed in this paper, exemplify Qvortrup's (2014) argument that ‘one can hardly underestimate the range and significance of the impact on childhood of macroeconomic, macro-political, and macro-social parameters. …whether we like it or not, childhood is inadvertently part of society and of societal politics’ and within these politics ‘(c)hildren have always assumed a particular role, namely, that of being raw material for the production of an adult population” (p. 691–693). It is argued in this paper that the dominant discourse on child neglect has responded to childhood as ‘raw material’, as a tool for controlling the dangerousness of the poor, initially in policies coercing individuals to labour and in later times as a way of preventing threats to the capitalist way of life. Within a cultural context that stigmatises the poor as immoral, as a means of reinforcing hegemony around the values of the work ethic (Beder, 2000), the concept of neglect has over the centuries broadened to cover increasingly more areas in which children are considered ‘risky’ or ‘at risk’. In highlighting in this article the strength, pervasiveness and significance of the dominant discourse only limited attention can be given to the complexities of policymaking. The way contestations to the dominant discourse have achieved strength at different times in history and in specific locations to modify, and even at times create diversions from, the trajectory of the dominant discourse, must await opportunities for further exploration.

young people survived infancy their economic roles were as for adults. For example, children in receipt of poor law assistance were required, like adults, to wear badges with the letter ‘P’, emphasizing that poverty was the fault of the individual – a practice legislated for in 1697 and implemented in various parishes until discontinued in an act of 1810 (Higinbotham, 2015; Quigley, 1996). Where the Poor Laws did attribute a unique meaning to childhood, it was in locating children as a family responsibility. In this early example of familism policy children's needs were subsumed within the family. Parents and also grandparents were legislated to assume responsibility for children. It is in the context of these policies that the earliest interventions into families for child neglect occurred. Interventions were applied to children classed as dependent through being orphaned, disabled or destitute. Being destitute included instances where children were found begging or idle, whose families were assessed, by those administering the Poor Laws, as unable to keep and maintain them. According to the Poor Laws such children could be put to work by authorities in some form of apprenticeship or other labour arrangement (Quigley, 1996; Richett & Hudson, 1979). 3. Transportation of Poor Law ideology to the colonies: the child as labourer There was a diffusion of English Poor Law ideology through the processes of colonization. In the case of the American colonies the values were conveyed very directly under Poor Law provisions, through the transportation of adults and children as indentured labour. In the seventeenth century transportation served the purpose of ridding England of adults and children who would otherwise be unemployed and therefore idle and subject to criminality. Additionally and importantly, transportation of adults and children was a strategy to contribute to the labour requirements of the colonies (Mason, 1986). Following a petition in 1618 to the Council of the City of London by the owners of the Virginia Company, the Company was given permission to capture from the streets “vagrant” children eight years and older for their transportation to Virginia to ‘be apprentices… and afterwards they shall be placed as tenants upon public land’ (Reproduced in Bremner, 1970, p. 7). Where children were resistant to being transported permission was given to the Virginia Company to ‘ship them out for Virginia’ against their will (Acts of the Privy Council of England (1930). Further, the ‘opportunity’ was given to English parents ‘overcharged and burdened with poor children’ to surrender their children. The coercive nature of these laws was evident in the provision that where parents did not cooperate they were to be denied relief assistance from the local government. Poor parents in the American colonies, because of their economic dependency on the community, were the focus of colonial policy for what was considered their moral defectiveness (Mason, 1986). The children of these parents, as in England, once past the age of four, were expected to contribute their labour. They were objects of policies of indentured labour, directed at preventing them acquiring what were spoken of as the ‘bad habits’ of their parents (McGowan). For example, legislation in the colonies of Plymouth and Connecticut made the explicit connection between the concept of dependency and poverty, when mandating authorities to intervene and remove children from parents in receipt of poor relief, if they were ‘neglecting’ their children by not equipping them for a productive life by having them employed (McGowan, 1983, Records of the Colony of New Plymouth Laws, 1623–1682. Reproduced in Bremner, 1970). The concept of neglect, as used broadly in Puritan Massachusetts, in legislation of 1642, can be seen as a precursor of more contemporary child neglect legislation in providing for intervention in families where adults were not conforming to community standards for child upbringing. This legislation required the Town officials ‘to keep a vigilant eye over their brethren and neighbours’ to make sure that those receiving poor relief were teaching their children the capital laws and

2. Linking economic dependency with immorality: the early English Poor laws as a frame for child neglect Historically, societal politics around poverty have been framed by values on work and productivity, as initially defined in the early Poor Laws of the pre-industrial era. Prior to this period, in feudal and medieval times, Judaic and Christian biblical thinking had influenced attitudes to the poor. These values and the interests of landowners had supported community-centred, rather than family-centred, ways of life, within which the needs of the poor were accommodated (Frost & Stein, 1989; Trattner, 1974). The church as an institution had played a major role in providing relief to the poor. Poverty was defined as a community, religious responsibility, rather than as the fault of individuals. At the same time the church, in establishing limits to the distribution of relief, laid a foundation for the way in which Poor Law relief ignored the structural contributions to poverty (Quigley, 1996). The English Poor Laws of the mid-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries built directly on fourteenth century statutes and were a response to the changed labour relations accompanying the move to the industrial era. The Statutes and Laws signalled changes in attitudes in the association of morality with productivity. The policies implemented under these laws attempted to regulate the working, as well as the nonworking, poor. They attempted to deal with issues associated with increased population, economic instability and the accompanying vagrancy and begging, in which both adults and children engaged as a means of survival. The laws put in place a system of relief, that treated labourers, vagrants and beggars similarly, in that ‘they must be compelled to work, compelled to stay at work, compelled to accept lower wages, compelled to stay where they can be put to work, and imprisoned if they disobey’ (Quigley, 1996, p. 92). Children were not distinguished from adults by Poor Law legislation in terms of economic dependency. Implicit was an assumption that once 2

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5. Moulding children and childhood: a defence against dangerousness

principles of religion, as well as training them for future employment (Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts, 1648, Reproduced in Bremner, 1970). While the Poor Laws were considered inappropriate by those developing legislative policy in English Canada, and at a later time the Australian colonies, the legacy of these laws was perpetuated through the adaptation of various elements of them (Richardson, 2006; Swain, 1998). These elements can be traced in attitudes and actions by the state and by child welfare reformers towards childhood, the poor and the ‘neglect’ of children of the poor.

5.1. Child malleability as the basis for saving children from neglect The construction of childhood as the raw material, to be moulded in compliance with economic goals and the associated morality, was particularly evident in the promotion of visions for the ‘new’ nation of America in the nineteenth century. During this period the social Darwinist concept of natural laws of developmental progression of life towards positive ends captured America and reinforced values implicit in the work ethic (Bell, 1983). In its application to (white) childhood, it was used to justify policies towards the poor and their children, surfacing in both the eugenics movement and in the idea that removing children from parents was a way of reversing the inter-generational transfer of poverty. An idealization of children as representing a vital resource for the future, if appropriately developed, was accompanied by blame and criticism of parents. Assistance to poor parents was eschewed on the basis that assistance would only serve to perpetuate weakness and dependency of the lower classes, thus impeding the progress of the American race, as evident in the work of Brace (1880), for example (Mason, 1986; Richardson, 2006). Removal of children from families, initially justified by the early Poor Laws, on the basis of putting them to productive work, was now justified on the basis of the child as malleable. Fitting with the idea of progressive improvement, the concept of malleability was central to distinguishing children from adults and was congruent with images of children as blank slates (Locke, 1690), as innocent (Rousseau, 1762), or as needing to be brought into subjection (John Wesley 1703–1791, in Lanham, 2000). Particularly relevant was that element of the work of Rousseau (1762) that made explicit the idea of the child as naturally progressing according to certain laws and as a not fully reasoning or responsible person. Childhood constructed as a stage in which persons were both necessarily dependent and potentially malleable, provided the opportunity for structured state and philanthropic interventions to create moral and economically productive citizens. The significance of the malleability of children, in enabling them to be moulded so they could become ‘useful’ to the nation was articulated by the American philanthropist Ann Alexander (1817, p. 9, quoted in Jordanova (1987)). She spelt out the value of the malleability of children for moulding them so they became ‘useful’: ‘Whether we consider their helplessness, their necessities, or their innocence, THERE is the widest field for the exercise of humanity, and THERE, is the fairest prospect afforded of final success: THEY possess the greatest pliability of disposition to receive good impressions, and they afford the brightest hopes of retaining these impressions the longest, and of becoming most eminently useful’ (1987, p. 194). Moulding children in conformity with the status quo was to assume urgency following the French Revolution and threats that the disaffected poor in other countries could follow the example of the poorer classes in France.

4. The work ethic: legitimating social inequality The values around work, poverty and idleness, were increasingly made explicit, from the eighteenth century on, by European Enlightenment thinking. Mokyr (2007) claims that this thinking provided the basis for the epistemic changes that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. It resulted in a changed outlook, fundamental to which was a ‘belief in the possibility and desirability of human progress and perfectability through reason and knowledge’ and an assumption that ‘the growth of useful knowledge would sooner or later open the doors of prosperity’ (p. 5–6). The work ethic was expounded as a religious principle, by Protestantism and Puritanism and in the nineteenth century by writers, businessmen and teachers. Associating the work ethic with the quest for money, the developing Anglo-American ideology equated work with virtue, a moral duty to God, and poverty and idleness with immorality (Beder, 2000; Fraser & Gordon, 1994; Sugrue, 1994). Beder (2000) highlights the role this ethic has played in legitimating social inequality and quotes the observation of Gini and Sullivan (1989), that the work ethic ‘has often been used as a means of masking the drudgery and necessity of work… the tradition of the work ethic glorified and legitimized work and gave it a teleological orientation—a sense of purpose or design—which helped to both sustain individual effort and ameliorate its temporal brutishness’ (p. 9). The role the work ethic played in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in legitimating social inequality and poverty was made explicit by, for example, the English writer and traveller Arthur Young. He wrote in 1771, ‘(e)veryone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious,’ (Young, 1785, p. 361). Similarly, Mandeville, a politician in Louisiana, America, wrote about the same time, that in a nation without slaves ‘(t)he surest wealth consists in a multitude of Labourious Poor. … To make the Society happy and People easy under the meanest Circumstances, it is requisite that great Numbers of them should be Ignorant as well as Poor,’ (Mandeville, 1731, p. 328). The Poor Laws, commonly described as the first form of social welfare provision in the English-speaking world, have been referred to as representing residualism in the ‘purest form’ – implying a mistrust of the poor as improvident, immoral and indolent (Bell, 1983, p. 19). Over the 500 years that the poor laws were in operation in England, until replaced by the National Assistance Act in 1948, the governing principles remained the same, with, poverty generally seen as a fault of the poor, not society, and the poor as requiring governing to keep them working. The Anglo-American discourse on the work ethic and morality, present in various forms in other capitalist (and also socialist) countries, in so far as it has framed the role of children as ‘raw material for the production of an adult population’ has remained constant over the centuries. It is the specifics of the construction of childhood as ‘raw material’ that has varied, in accord with social, economic and political developments of particular eras. In this context the conceptualization of the neglected child and child protection policies has been a key discursive space for the governing of childhood and of child-adult relations towards economic objectives.

5.2. Extending the concept of neglect: a strategy to avert danger Late nineteenth century reformers on both sides of the Atlantic wrote of concerns about dangerous children. For example, the English writer Caroline Frances Cornwallis, argued that the children of the disaffected poor, through ignorance and depravity, might ‘cherish the views of the chartist and the socialist’ or ‘the dangerous fallacies of Communism’ and participate in ‘revolutions very distasteful to those (of) better and higher classes’ (quoted in Selleck, 1985, 19–20). Charles Loring Brace (1880), the American child welfare pioneer, who has been considered the ‘father’ of the foster care movement, commented that it was important to rescue poor children from the streets in order to prevent revolt by the masses, as had been the case in the ‘terrible communistic outbreak in Paris’ (Brace, 1880 p. 29). These reformers echoed the values traced in this article, as associated with the Poor 3

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alien will become naturalized’ (Mass. Records I, 311 for 1640. Reproduced in Bremner, 1970). Similar arguments were made for interventions in families of Indigenous children in the American and English-Canadian states. Interventions removed children of First Nations to boarding schools, as a way of preventing them from becoming an ‘undesirable and often dangerous element in society’ (Fournier & Crey, 1997, 55–56, cited in Schumaker, 2012). In the early twentieth century parallel arguments were made for the removal of Aboriginal children within the Australian states. The New South Wales 1909 Aborigines Protection Act gave the Aborigines Protection (later Welfare) Board powers to remove Aboriginal children from their families and place them in institutions or menial work situations. The lack of the work ethic and habits of these communities were directly targeted in the argument for the legislation, on the basis that ‘(t)o allow these children to remain in the Reserve to grow up in comparative idleness in the midst of more or less vicious surroundings would be, to say the least, an injustice to the children themselves, and a positive menace to the State’ (Report of the Aborigines Welfare Board of 1911, quoted by Read, u.d., p. 7). After it was pointed out that the label of ‘neglect’ in the legislation, did not necessarily suit the situation from which Aboriginal children were being removed, the Board sought and gained powers, in a 1915 Amendment to the Protection Act, whereby the definition of Aboriginal parenting as per se neglectful, enabled the removal for children ‘for being Aboriginal’ (Read u.d., p. 6). The use of the term ‘neglect’ to define deficiencies in parenting had, by the twentieth century, been significantly extended beyond its earliest use in targeting children who were not being prepared to labour by those whose socio-economic location marginalized them, through the elasticity of the term ‘neglect’ to include threats to social stability. During the twentieth century the term was to be further extended in defining what counts as deficient parenting. In this process its use reinforced definitions of what constituted normative values of good parent-child relations.

Laws, and reinforced by theories of morality and human development, blaming the parents, of ‘depraved’ or socially errant, children for neglecting their children. For example, Mary Carpenter, an active reformer, in mid-nineteenth century, England, argued, like some philanthropists of the time, that ‘it is not so much poverty which fills our prisons with young criminals, as the vicious conduct and culpable neglect of parents’. In spite of her recognition of some of the social aspects of poverty, she wrote that it was ‘gross parental neglect’ of children that led to their criminal behavior (cited in Selleck, 1985, p. 113). The efforts of reformers during the nineteenth century to mould individual children, were also about constructing childhood, according to middle class norms. In this process precocity or ‘un-childlike’ behavior in children, outside established norms, was critiqued. For example, the English reformer Matthew Davenport Hill, deprecated children referred to as ‘street Arabs’ in terms of being ‘a little stunted man already … he knows a great deal too much of what is called life. … He is selfreliant’ … ‘ (and) has to be turned again into a child’ (Hill, 1855: 1–2, quoted in Hendrick, 1990 p. 43). At the macro level in both England and America, important reforms for gaining what Mary Carpenter referred to as the ‘willing obedience’ of future adults to democratic industrial society were the steps taken to end child labour and extend schooling to children of the lower classes (Hendrick, 1990 p. 45). For poor children, where schooling was not compulsory or was not effective as a socializing process, the solution was seen to be through child welfare responses directed at both neglect and delinquency, often conflated. The laws of different American states from about 1825, authorized the courts to intervene to remove children from their parents for reasons of neglect, through statutes that reflected a belief in the contiguity of crime and neglect. Similarly, the English Reformatory and Industrial Schools Acts of 1854 and 1857 echoed assumptions of the contiguity between crime and neglect. This legislation, while directed at delinquency, included as part of this jurisdiction children who were deemed in need of ‘care and protection’ even though they had not broken any law (Hendrick, 1990). Between 1864 and 1874 legislation for neglected children modelled on the Industrial Schools Act 1857 (England), was introduced in all the Australian colonies enabling state interventions for removing neglected children from parents deemed negligent, in order to transform them into useful citizens (Swain,1998). Swain's comments on the direction of Australian legislation, when she notes that the concerns of reformers had moved from targeting children on the streets to targeting them within the home, can be generalized to legislation and policies of other English speaking countries. By the late nineteenth century interventions for rescuing children considered neglected from homes where parenting associated with poverty was assessed as inadequate, through ‘care and protection’ orders, had become part of an explicit way in which elite groups attempted to minimise threats to the social order from the ‘dangerous classes’. In a summary of a 1910 review of the laws of the Juvenile Court in the US, it was stated that through these laws ‘the three classes of children (dependent, neglected and delinquent are so bound up together that they cannot very well be separated”. The review described the children subject to these laws as ‘begging’ “receiving alms’ ‘homeless’ and living with ‘unfit or disreputable parents’ (Hart, 1910, p. 3).

6. Child development and family (maternal) dysfunction: the child as tool of the economy 6.1. The child as ‘being’: ambivalence towards valuing social justice The twentieth century was a period in which ‘good’ parent-child relations increasingly became defined in terms of good mothering, and extended beyond instrumental care to include emotional care. Embedded in the extension of mothering to include emotional care of children, was the construction of child development as not only (in Rousseau's words of 1762, relating ‘to the man (sic) in the child’ but also to ‘what he is before he becomes a man’. Acknowledgement of the child as a being, as well as a becoming adult, contributed to a complexity in policymaking on interventions in poor families for child neglect. This complexity was reflected in the organisation of and major conclusion to the 1909 White House Conference in the United States. Designed as an attempt to reduce the extent to which children were removed from their families, the conference recognised in its Concluding Statement the association between poverty and interventions into families. It stated that: “Home life is the highest and finest product of civilization (and) … the home should not be broken up for reasons of poverty… only for considerations of inefficiency and immorality’. It advocated financial aid to mothers, when there was no male breadwinner in the home. However, it additionally specified that the only children whose families should receive financial aid were ‘children of parents of worthy character, suffering from temporary misfortune, and children of reasonably efficient and deserving mothers’ (Letter to the President, 1909. Reproduced in Bremner, 1971, p. 192–197). Similarly, Mangold (1914) a child welfare commentator of the time, while acknowledging the seriousness of ‘breaking up a home’ also stated ‘Nevertheless the rights of society are paramount, and if its

5.3. Rescuing children: a strategy for cultural hegemony Particular targets of neglect policies were those poor whose racial characteristics challenged the cultural hegemony of the ‘new’ nations. In America these were the immigrants. A statement of the Massachusetts State Board of Charities in a report of 1865, made explicit the threat immigrants were considered to pose to the status quo. The report in advocating for the advantages of care in orphanages and later foster homes, stated that it was important for immigrant children to receive training in ‘proper’ homes, as their ‘habits and character must be radically changed; they be no more foreigners but Americans - the 4

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experiences of children and preventing delinquency. Concerns for psychological adjustment had replaced concerns for moral development as a symptom of parental neglect. Significantly, as Swift (1995b) has noted for Canada, the focus continued to be on deficient parents rather than the experiences of the child. Further, as the paradigms of child development and associated socialization processes imposed an ‘adultcentred notion of structured becoming upon children's experiences in the present, children tended to collapse ‘into a singularity - “the child”, an outcome ‘deflect(ing) attention from children's varied circumstances, experiences and social relations’ Thorne (1987, p98). Thus poverty was marginalized as an issue in instances of child neglect.

interests will be plainly served by such action then the breaking up of the home is right and expedient’ (p. 498). Society's interests in the ‘man in the child’ continued to be of over-riding concern to policymaking. The extent to which the state in English speaking countries assumed responsibility for child development, beyond that of rescuing the child from neglectful parents, increased in the second part of the twentieth century. These were times when social justice concerns, based on what has generally been the more subjugated discourse, assumed some dominance over punitive attitudes towards the poor. In particular, in the period following the World Wars and the Great Depression, when large numbers of people in English speaking countries experienced financial difficulties, there was some acknowledgement that poverty could not necessarily be blamed on the individual. Support for social justice as a goal in welfare politics was evidenced in Britain, in the provision of services to families (Parton, 2014), in Canada and the United States, in legislation for financial assistance to single mothers in the form of Mothers' Aid Laws, and in Australia by universal child endowment. While this period of increased economic assistance was one where child neglect was less of a focus, American and Canadian evidence indicates that where neglect complaints were made they continued to reflect poverty and economic insecurity and the emphasis in individual cases remained on parental (that is maternal) rather than social culpability (Mason, 1986; Swift, 1995a, 1995b). The premises basic to the struggle between those promoting social justice values and financial assistance for poor families and those continuing to support traditional punitive values to deal with poverty were clear in the presentation of arguments for the introduction in 1941, of Child Endowment Allowances to families, at the Commonwealth level in Australia. While a Minority Report argued for a supplement to the basic male wage, as economically necessary for the support of mothers and children, a Majority Report argued against such payments because they would undermine both men's incentives to work and women's dependence on men (Cass, 1993).

6.3. Ambiguities: the continuing dominance of elite interests The dominance in state policies of economic goals over the interests of children, as reflected in concerns for their psychological development, explains a seeming paradox to which Lawrence and Starkey (2001) draw attention in a discussion of child migration. This is the paradox whereby British policy of the mid-twentieth century, at the same time as emphasizing the importance of maternal bonding for child welfare, employed policies supporting forced child migration to the former colonies. The forced migration of British children removed them from poor families on the basis of neglect (in some cases ‘voluntarily’ given up) and transported them, initially to Canada and, from the 1940s to the late sixties, to Australia and New Zealand, thereby, deliberately disrupting mother-child bonds. As with the children transported through the Virginia company to the American colonies, the emigration schemes served the multiple purposes of imperialism, ridding Britain of the poor and contributing to the labour requirements of the former colonies (Hill, 2007; Lawrence & Starkey, 2001). Notably, these schemes were implemented without the right to land tenancy on reaching adulthood, as had been the case in the earlier transportation of children to the American colonies. The extent to which economic policies dominated over children's interests, as identified by social scientists, highlights how child development arguments, used as a rationale for child neglect interventions, served the purpose of governing poor parents and their children. During the 1970s and 1980s the issue of child neglect ‘moved to the far background’ (Swift, 2003, p. 2). This may, in part, be attributed to an impetus to social reform in English speaking countries at this time, including a focus on skilling those experiencing social and economic disadvantage. In large part however, it can be attributed to a shift in gaze from child neglect to child abuse, accompanying the prominence given to medical and psychological expertise on childhood and family dysfunction. Child abuse, with a focus on the ‘battered baby’, took ‘centre stage’ in a movement led by medical practitioners in the United States (Parton, 2006), that set an agenda quickly followed by other English speaking countries. In implementing this agenda, the contribution of social and economic factors to dysfunctional families was deliberately rejected. This rejection was explicit in the US Congressional Hearings prior to the enactment of the Child Abuse and Prevention Act of 1974. In these hearings Senator Mondale stated a number of times “(t)his is not a poverty problem, it is a national problem’ while another senator rejected the relevance of issues of social and economic inequality as ‘a namby-pamby wishy-washy attitude which is absolutely not realistic’. (Patti & Berlman, 1976, p. 4 quoted in Mason, 1986). The implications of this decision are reflected in the fact that poverty (and racism) continued to be associated with the majority of child protection interventions in the United States (Charlow, 2001) as indeed in Canada (Swift, 2003), during the latter part of the twentieth century.

6.2. The scientific gaze: governing children and parents Alongside some recognition of the social-economic pressures on families and the seeking of solutions to these in the mid-twentieth century (Frost & Stein, 1989) there was, post-World War 2, an increased focus on child development, in which the pre-eminence given to applications of the laws of science to the study of the child played the major part. The introduction of compulsory schooling from the late nineteenth century had enabled the classroom to be used as a laboratory for the focus of the scientific gaze (Hendrick, 1990). This gaze became a supplement to the socio-political purposes of the school in the regulation of childhood towards specific economic goals. A specific concern of the scientific gaze was the threat that the feeble-minded child, and the adult that child would become, was considered to pose to society. This threat included fears that dysfunctional households would pass degeneracy through the generations (Hendrick, 1990; Swift, 1995a). A consequence of a concern with brain dysfunction, was the development of the intelligence test. This test provided a process for diagnosing and attempting to eliminate the pathological, while also creating a hierarchy of the normal. When translated into theories of development, including theories of child emotional development, this process became a key factor in the construction of childhood, while the rise of experts in normative assessment enabled family life to be governed in a new way (Rose, 1999). State administrations now had strategies for monitoring family relations and child development along a dimension of adjustment and maladjustment. Interventions were built around assessment of the mothering relationship in meeting children's psychological needs. The court could order attendance at clinics and also the removal of the child from the home (Hendrick, 1990; Rose, 1999). In the fifties and sixties in England (Parton, 1985) and the United States (Mason, 1986), there was an upsurge in child removal as a strategy for improving the nurturing

7. The rediscovery of neglect: protecting the child as investment In the contemporary era in English speaking countries there has been a rediscovery of neglect, now conflated with, what is referred to 5

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dependency on benefits. By making the payment of welfare benefits conditional on children in Aboriginal communities conforming to school attendance requirements (at the same time as abolishing community development employment schemes for this population), attention is diverted from the structural issues inherent in indigenous children's experiences of schooling (Behrendt & McCausland, 2008). This Australian example, which is being implemented at a time when there has been an exponential increase in the numbers of Aboriginal children removed from their families, bears a marked resemblance to nineteenth century stopping of food rations to Aboriginal parents who did not send their children to school (Read u.d.) and even earlier, seventeenth century policies of docking parents' benefits if they did not agree to transportation of their children. It reflects a more general trend in English-speaking countries, of punitive targeting of non-white groups in these countries. In the United States for example, those children hardest hit by benefit cuts through the ‘demonization of ‘welfare’ (Gordon, 1998) have been children from Black families (Coates, 2009; Gordon, 1998).

as, emotional abuse or emotional neglect. This rediscovery of neglect occurs within a context of widespread ontological insecurity, fuelled by anxieties created by the shifts associated with the globalization of capitalist production and reflected in economic and social problems. Relevant to the connections between poverty and child neglect is the connection Katz (2008) makes between anxieties about the political economic situation and the fact that while the employment landscape has changed, there have not been accompanying changes in the social relations of production and work. Instead, there has been a sharp turn to the right, in the application of neoliberal ideology in English speaking countries, and globally (e.g. Gillies, 2014, Albo, 2001, Gunders, 2012). This turn to the right has impacted on the poor and in particular poor women, in terms of the way surveillance of their parenting is implemented and the forms in which any support provided is delivered. Their children continue to be part of the politics of this century, regarded as both ‘at risk’ and ‘risky’ within the economic parameters of the era, and as the focus of scientific research targeting children's earliest years.

7.2. Extending the frame of neglect: the commodification of childhood 7.1. Welfare as a pejorative: a ‘twisted logic’ applied to the poor As strategies for securing the domestic environment are played out at both the public or macro-level of the state and the personal or microlevel of the family, the child continues to be targeted as the ‘raw material’ of socio-economic policies, as a becoming adult. The construction of children in economic terms, as an investment for the future now has an additional emphasis – their investment potential, as a response to resolving global insecurities. Part of this response is the commodification of childhood (Katz, p. 6–7). The economic argument for children as investment, is unambiguously articulated in the writing of Conti and Heckman (2014), who define child well-being as based on the concept of the child as a becoming adult, ‘a work in progress’. They summarise their argument for investing in child well-being, through a graph which shows that for ‘the returns to a hypothetical investor who is deciding where to place his/her money in the life of a newborn… From a purely economic standpoint, the highest return to a unit dollar invested is at the beginning of the life cycle since it builds the base that makes later returns possible’ (p. 392). This explicit definition of children as human capital, the ‘raw material’ of adult economic strategies, supports the shift in policy from funding welfare to funding investment in early childhood, based on the premise that: ‘The foundations for adult success and failure are laid down early in life’ (Conti & Heckman, 2014). According to these economic arguments, child well-being, or flourishing, is determined by ‘quality parenting’, rather than family resources (Conti and Heckman, p. 385). This is a point Heckman (2014) also made in a speech to the Obama hosted, 2014 White House Summit on Early Education, where he argued that the solution is seen to be early interventions in the lives of ‘disadvantaged’ children. Such arguments construct the parent, usually the mother, ‘as determinant of the future well-being of the child’ and ‘as a manager of risk, who has in their power the ability to decide the fate of the child according to how well they perform this task’ (Lee, 2014, p. 11–12). Actuarial concepts, that emphasize costs and benefits around risk, explicitly sideline issues of structural disadvantage, as ‘evidence from the economics of child well-being calls for a move from a policy of redistribution to one of pre-distribution of resources’ (Conti & Heckman, 2014, p. 397). The neglectful parent is defined by extension, as the parent who appears to be failing to secure the economic future of her children according to middle class norms. ‘Children raised in disadvantaged environments start behind and usually stay behind throughout their lifetimes’ with ‘(g)aps in cognitive and behavioral traits emerg(ing) very early’ (Conti & Heckman, 2014, p. 363). The portrayal of early intervention ‘as an unquestionable social good’ Gillies (2014, p. 216), contributes to the increasing targeting of potentially neglectful parents, especially mothers, through parenting

Policy responses to widespread ontological insecurity have included rhetoric and policies conveying attitudes to the poor typical of pretwentieth century Poor Law based ideology and policy. As Paz-Fuchs (2008) concludes from a comparison between Poor Law policies and current policies in the United States, policy makers are actively jettisoning welfare state ideology and practice, for what amounts to a masked revival of Poor Law policy and practice. Continuing the legacy of the sixteenth century, whereby the poor were stigmatised as dependent, by having to wear the letter ‘P’, the poor are now not only blamed for being poor, but also blamed for the failure of ‘welfare’ to ameliorate their poverty. Linda Gordon (1998) has argued, with reference to programs of financial assistance to women and children in the United States, that the very word ‘welfare’ has become a pejorative. The threat posed by the poor in English speaking countries, is no longer perceived in the terms of nineteenth century fears that the masses might revolt and upset the status quo. Rather, the threat is now seen to lie with the provision of ‘welfare’ to the poor. It is ‘welfare’ which it is now argued poses a threat to the neoliberal order. Policies directed at coercing the poor into labour (even when in contemporary times work for many may be non-existent), are couched in language strongly reminiscent of that of earlier centuries in blaming the poor for their failure to embody the work ethic. For example in Australia, John Howard as Prime Minister talked about a ‘work for the dole’ policy as being ‘how the Government can help instill a work ethic in our young people’ (cited in Gunders, 2012 p. 7). Julia Gillard, a more recent Prime Minister, in her rhetoric linked the importance of the work ethic with a denigration of the concept of welfare. As she attempted to disassociate her party from welfare, she stated: ‘(t)he party I lead is… the party of work. The party of work not welfare … of responsibility not idleness’ (cited in Gunders p. 10). Similar rhetoric in other English-speaking countries has been accompanied by policies that include widespread cuts in financial assistance to families and children and to welfare programs more generally, contributing to the already marked increases in social inequality and poverty, (e.g. Featherstone, White, & Morris, 2014; Lein, 2013; Luhby, 2012). Policies, specifically targeted at curbing intergenerational transmission of dependency and ignoring the structural issues that contribute to the dependency of the poor on welfare, create what Gillies (Gillies, 2014) refers to as a ‘twisted logic’. The logic here supports strategies, such as ‘the docking of family benefits for the sake of the child’ as a measure to stem the transfer of deprivation. It does this while ignoring the interests of children, the supposed beneficiaries of the policy (Gillies, 2014, p. 129). A particularly blatant example of such a policy has been the targeting of Australian indigenous families, as to blame for their 6

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population’, treats them as objects obscuring the child as a being. It responds to parents as the instruments for promoting children as an investment, at the same time as devaluing the human in both parents and children. The shift from child welfare to child well-being is described as an important paradigm shift for promoting children as beings as well as becomings (e.g. Ben-Arieh, 2010). If we are to give the paradigm shift to child well-being meaning, beyond replacing the word welfare as a pejorative, we must argue for children as social beings, taking into account the importance children themselves place on the social in their lives (Fattore, Mason, & Watson, 2016). A broad acknowledgement in policy terms, of the importance of the social for children as beings, would give prominence to the alternate and generally subjugated social justice discourse on child neglect and poverty. It would mean structural change, as envisaged in the most optimistic framing of welfare, as promoting justice for all children and their families. It would mean acknowledging that child well-being, as defined in eudemonic terms of individual flourishing, is only possible when the families and communities in which children are embedded are flourishing. The importance of social justice goals in the lessening of social inequalities, as a way of promoting functioning and flourishing families and communities, has been documented by the Marmot (2010) in the UK and by the European Social Network (2012). In examining the establishment of indicators to reduce child poverty, the European Social Network, while noting the importance of paying attention to the needs and wishes of children, underlines that improving children's lives means also improving the lives of adults responsible for these children.

programs, as a way of enforcing good parenting (Featherstone et al., 2014; Gillies, 2014). The targeting of ‘(l)ess-educated women’ by these programs is justified by economists on the basis that ‘(l)ess-educated women tend to be single parents’ who ‘do not invest much in their children’, in contrast with more educated women, so that ‘inequality is being perpetuated – and even increased – across generations’ (Conti and Heckman, p. 392). 7.3. Extending the frame of neglect: psycho-medical problematizing of mothers A reliance on economic arguments has combined with scientific based research, emphasizing biological determinism in extending the surveillance of parenting, that is mothering, to the time of conception. An extension of the gaze on the psychological, as well as physical health of the mother, as it contributes to development of the foetus and infant development from the time of conception, links with the increased focus on child neglect. This link is illustrated in a document of the United States, National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2012). The authors state that ‘neglect can cause more harm to a young child's development than overt physical abuse’. They highlight the importance of psychological aspects of development and of brain circuitry (2012) in ‘the earliest years of life’ (p. 2). Others, for example Leach (2014), link research on brain circuitry with the importance of parents being made aware of ‘the impact on babies in the womb of mothers’ moods and emotional states and especially of the potentially damaging effects of maternal stress, anxiety, and depression’ (Leach, p. 2303). Little attention appears to be given by policymakers to arguments, such as that made by a US Professor of Law, that, ‘the psychological effects of neglect are not readily distinguishable from those of poverty’ (Charlow p. 789), or to questions about the effectiveness of early intervention programs in preventing child neglect, where issues of technique are abstracted from the lives of parents and interventions at structural levels (e.g. Featherstone et al., 2014; Holzer, Higgins, Bromfield, Richardson, & Higgins, 2006). Instead, the evidence on the brain and early development, used by its advocates to justify the funding of programs for poor parents, has been re-directed in its use, for example in the United Sates, to justify harsh welfare regimes, such as in prioritizing parenting programs over income support and housing needs (Lowe, Lee, & Macvarish, 2015). Discussion of contemporary child protection practice in England links pressures for early intervention for neglect, on the basis of concerns about long-term brain damage, in the context of a lack of provisions to support the needs of families, with an outcome of early removal of children from their families to alternative families (Featherstone et al., 2014).

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