9 - ‘Uncramping child life’: international children's organisations, 1914–1939

Summary

The normal child is the most valuable member of the community, and whereas welfare work flourishes in most countries, and has everywhere aroused popular imagination and generosity, there remain the great questions of education and training, mental and moral, of the young … We want to protect and develop the normal child as well as the abnormal, weakly, or poverty stricken … We may point out that many women's organizations considered and passed in 1922 a children's charter setting forth the right of every child to have opportunities of full development.

(The Times, 5 February 1925)

Developing a discourse

The present preoccupation with child abuse and the discussion on the best means of protecting child life merely elaborate a rhetoric whose antecedents are in the nineteenth-century child-saving movement which flourished in industrialised nations. A study of international child protection organisations illustrates the continuity of such rhetoric which moved from a sentimental depiction of victims to a medico-social scientific discourse of children at risk that expanded the concepts of victimisation, exploitation and abuse.

It is through discourse that social claims become persuasively defined and social conditions are identified and transformed into social problems whose advocates lobby for recognition of the priority of their claims.