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CHILD PROTECTION in ENGLAND, 1960–2000 Expertise, Experience, and Emotion PALGRAVE STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD CHILD PROTECTION IN ENGLAND, 1960–2000 Expertise, Experience, and Emotion JENNIFER CRANE Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood Series Editors George Rousseau University of Oxford, UK Laurence Brockliss University of Oxford, UK Aims of the Series Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood is the first of its kind to historicise childhood in the English-speaking world; at present no historical series on children/childhood exists, despite burgeoning areas within Child Studies. The series aims to act both as a forum for publishing works in the history of childhood and a mechanism for consolidating the identity and attraction of the new discipline. Editorial Board: Matthew Grenby (Newcastle) Colin Heywood (Nottingham) Heather Montgomery (Open) Hugh Morrison (Otago) Anja Müller (Siegen, Germany) Sïan Pooley (Magdalen, Oxford) Patrick Joseph Ryan (King’s University College at Western University, Canada) Lucy Underwood (Warwick) Karen Vallgårda (Copenhagen) More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14586 Jennifer Crane Child Protection in England, 1960–2000 Expertise, Experience, and Emotion Jennifer Crane University of Warwick Coventry, UK Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood ISBN 978-3-319-94717-4 ISBN 978-3-319-94718-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94718-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948678 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration © imageBROKER / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am incredibly grateful to a variety of groups and individuals whose men- torship, wisdom, and generosity has made this research possible. I am very grateful to the Wellcome Trust for their Doctoral Studentship [grant number WT099346MA], without which I could not have done the PhD on which this research is based. The Wellcome Trust also jointly awarded Eve Colpus and I a small grant [200420/Z/15/Z] to convene a witness seminar about ‘30 Years of ChildLine’ in June 2016. By work- ing closely with Eve, and by meeting with contemporary witnesses, I was able to enhance my thinking about this topic. I am also grateful to the Wellcome Trust for providing the funding to make this book open access, and to the organisation’s open access team, and the library team at the University of Warwick, for guiding me through the mechanics of this process. I have also always found the Humanities and Social Sciences team at Wellcome incredibly helpful, enthusiastic, and generous with their time, and appreciate the training opportunities and peer-support networks they facilitate. I am very grateful to present and former colleagues at the Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick, where I have undertaken my Masters, PhD, and first postdoctoral project in the lovely ‘Cultural History of the NHS’ team, led by Roberta Bivins and Mathew Thomson and funded by the Wellcome Trust [104837/Z/14/Z]. My PhD supervi- sor, Mathew Thomson, has always been a generous reader of my work and inspiring colleague. I have also been particularly grateful for insightful comments, career advice, and support from Centre colleagues Roberta Bivins, Hilary Marland, Angela Davis, Jane Hand, Tom Bray, Margaret v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Charleroy, Rachel Bennett, Andrew Burchell, Flo Swann, and Kate Mahoney. In addition, I have benefited immensely from the hard work, organisa- tional skills, wisdom, and good humour of our Centre administrators, Sheilagh Holmes and Tracy Horton. More broadly—and outside of Warwick—a number of wonderful scholars have been generous enough to read drafts of my chapters, and I would like to thank Laura King, Eve Colpus, Grace Huxford, Hannah Elizabeth, Sophie Rees, Jono Taylor, and Phil King in particular. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this book, whose comments were challenging and enriching, and to Heather Montgomery, who provided generous feedback on the full final manuscript. My viva was also a useful and productive experience, for which I thank my examiners Pat Thane and Roberta Bivins. I am also grateful to Pat Thane for inviting me to join the European University Institute network, The Quest for Welfare and Democracy: Voluntary Associations, Families and the State, 1880s to present. Being a part of this network, and hearing from incredible scholars at their events, has really helped me to hone the arguments of this book. Many archivists have been incredibly helpful while I conducted my research, notably at the Bodleian Library, British Film Institute, British Library, Children’s Society, Hall-Carpenter Archives at the London School of Economics, Institute of Education, Kidscape, Liverpool University Special Collections and Archives, Modern Records Centre, National Archives, and Wellcome Library. I am always thankful for their wisdom and kindness. The editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Emily Russell and Carmel Kennedy, have also been very helpful, informative, and efficient throughout the publishing process. I am also grateful for the thought- provoking guidance and advice from Palgrave’s History of Childhood series editors, Laurence Brockliss and George Rousseau. Some ideas and discussions in this book were initially tested out and featured in two journal articles, in slightly different forms—“The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to ‘tell’: The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America”, Social History of Medicine, 28 (4) (2015): 767–788 and ‘Painful Times: The Emergence and Campaigning of Parents Against Injustice in 1980s and 1990s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 26 (3) (2015): 450–476. Both articles were published Open Access under a Creative Commons CC-BY article, thanks to the Wellcome Trust, and I have reproduced and reinterpreted some thinking and archival work from these articles in this book under the terms of that licence. I am grateful to Social History of Medicine and Twentieth Century British History for giving me the opportunity to publish­ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii this work as an early career researcher, and to the peer reviewers of these articles for their thought-provoking and generous comments. I am as ever immeasurably grateful for the lifelong support and love from my husband, David Bowkett, and my parents, Steve and Hazel Crane. CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 The Battered Child Syndrome: Parents and Children as Objects of Medical Study 27 3 Hearing Children’s Experiences in Public 45 4 Inculcating Child Expertise in Schools and Homes 77 5 Collective Action by Parents and Complicating Family Life 107 6 Mothers, Media, and Individualism in Public Policy 133 7 The Visibility of Survivors and Experience as Expertise 161 8 Conclusion 197 Index 211 ix CHAPTER 1 Introduction In July 2014, then Home Secretary Theresa May established an Independent Inquiry into Child Abuse to ‘consider whether public bod- ies—and other, non-state, institutions—have taken seriously their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse’.1 After the establishment of this inquiry, May emphasised the need to involve adults who had them- selves been abused in childhood, reiterating her desire to gain the ‘confi- dence of survivors who must be at the heart of this process’.2 From the outset, voluntary groups working in this area voiced discontent. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood stated in November 2014 that the inquiry was ‘a farce’ and a ‘dead duck’ and highlighted that they had not been contacted until December 2014—months after the inquiry began to take shape.3 Survivor groups were critical of the appoint- ments of Baroness Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and subsequently Dame Fiona Woolf to chair the inquiry, and also argued that the inquiry should be granted statutory powers, so that it could seize documents and compel witnesses to provide evidence.4 Such critique proved relatively influential. In February 2015, the inquiry was reconstituted on a statutory footing, and Butler-Sloss and Woolf both stepped down, to be replaced in March 2015 by Justice Lowell Goddard.5 Resigning from the Inquiry, Woolf stated that ‘It’s about the victims—their voices absolutely have to be heard—if I don’t command their confidence, then I need to get out of the way.’6 Within the new statutory inquiry, led from August 2016 by Professor © The Author(s) 2018 1 J.
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