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Thank you, Andrew, for a good deal of "actual history," all quite fascinating.
Thank you, everyone, for contributing to this discussion. I was pleasantly surprised by how extensive has been the discussion.
"There are more things in heaven & earth..." Libertarianism is a specifically American, specifically 20th century development. It is not a universal archetype.
I'd be most interested if you would explicate this argument, perhaps in a new post to our list.
"No. What you're saying is that it would be up to every individual to decide whether to intervene and accept the risks and costs and responsibility of intervention all for themselves, instead of sharing it with the community through the mediation of the state. Is that really likely to produce better results?"
Far better. Consider how much horrific abuse and child molestation and rape occurs in the institutions of government child protective services. There is no perfect solution to child abuse. It occurs in all statist cultures, and I wouldn't be surprised if it happened more in more statist ones. But the fact is, if it's defensible for the state to take a child from his parents and take care of him, at any age, then it would be defensible for a neighbor or relative to do the same.
Sorry, that was Jasmine Beckford.
Since the 1950s, legislation has successively whittled away the role of family & added to the powers of officials. The framework now is almost wholly legislative: officials dominate. In the toddler fight case, one of the aunts involved is in fear that her children will be removed by officials.
The larger part of the population in Britain, by the by, belongs to the working-classes. Coal-mining areas are another story altogether.
"There are more things in heaven & earth..." Libertarianism is a specifically American, specifically 20th century development. It is not a universal archetype.
I described working-class culture as it was even in the early years of the welfare state. Sociologists like Patricia Morgan (inter alia) have investigated the decay of impt aspects of that culture from the 1950s onwards. It is the growth of the 'social services' so-called which has produced the spate of cases like Jasmine Beckwith, Maria Colwell, & others. In the Beckwith case, the social worker placed the child with foster parents, then returned Jasmine to her mother. The foster father was so concerned he kept watch on the Beckwith house & then repeatedly attempted to get the social workers to see what was happening. Legislation had already given the social service bureaucracy complete charge.
Similarly, social workers placed Maria Colwell with white foster parents who wanted to adopt her, but her mother got the court to return the child. Social workers didn't want a black child in a white family. Legislation gave officials virtually complete control. Legislation has pre-empted family networks.
The destruction of working-class networks through knocking-down older houses & 're-housing' people in state flats is a commonplace in all studies of British state housing.
In England & Wales, infant mortality fell just over 19%, 1840-1914; life expectancy rose 25%, 1840-1911. Population rose 96%, 1851-1911; the urban proportion rose from 54% to 79%.
Between 1855-57 & 1911-13 per capita output in Britain rose 79%. Between c. 1870 & c. 1900, money wages _rose_ 40%, while money prices _fell_ (fell) by around 36%. 1860-1913: per capita consumption of meat, bacon, fresh milk, cheese, butter, tea, sugar rose dramatically. The major changes in consumption patterns that occurred then continue today. 'Multiple shops' developed, providing mass consumption ready-made clothing, also footwear; so did chemists'shops, providing the range of cosmetics & other items found today. Mass produced foodstuffs appeared for the first time; the brands still continue. Low-cost housing rose faster than population, c. 1860-1914. Mass production of furniture dates from this period.
Workingmen & their families provided themselves with medical care & income while sick, through provident societies.
A whole new range of leisure resorts developed for working-class holidays; also an entire range of mass entertainment or leisure facilities (music halls, sports clubs, etc.) The mass publishing industry dates from the 1860s. Working hours had begun falling around the 1870s.
_Urban_ working-class culture is a development of the Victorian era.
See esp. F M L Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society...Victorian Britian 1830-1900 (1988.)
I have my doubts whether one can speak of a pre-existing Libertarian family policy. One has to make a distinction between immediate authority and ultimate authority. The regime of the pre-welfare-state-period was not ultimately libertarian. In the end, courts did decide custody cases, if both parties were willing to go to the trouble of litigation. In one seventeenth-century child abuse case, that of the diarist Henry Newcomb's granddaughter, the neighbors simply confiscated the child, and contacted the grandparents, without bothering to seek any legal authority (Keith Wrightson, _English Society, 1580-1660_, 1982, p. 117). That was apparently the end of the matter. There is another case I know of, however. Walter Scott, in _Peveril of the Peak_, includes a footnote (note L) about one of his forebears, Scott of Harden, who, circa 1686-87, confiscated an abused (apprentice) child from a mountebank, and was sued for doing so. The mountebank had bought the little dancing girl from her mother for 2 lbs. 10 s. (thirty pounds, scots, perhaps several thousand dollars in modern money), and was working her hard enough in his business that she had juvenile arthritis. Scott of Harden won the case without any particular difficulty, one supposes, partly on the basis of the medical evidence, and partly just on the basis that he was a minor nobleman or clan chief, the sort of man who would feel entitled to whip a mountebank on the street if he felt like it, and that the judges, being men of the same quality, would be inclined to respect his prerogatives. The ultimate authority was the same as it is at present, the state and the courts, but the mechanics of enforcement were different. It is hard to say whether one could call this a libertarian arrangement or not.
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/domestic/vol2ch6.htm
The Barnardo Homes are an analogous case. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Barnardo Homes sent about 30,000 children to Canada, and I suppose the Salvation Army organization must have operated on a similar scale. The Barnardo Homes were notoriously aggressive about removing children found in any sort of physical or moral hazard, and tended to take the view that once they had sent a child off to Canada or Australia, the other side was not going to be able to come up with the return fare. Dr. Barnardo was an Irish Protestant of the more primitive type, who tended to include "popery" as a form of moral hazard. The Homes went through a series of lawsuits over the scope of their self-assumed authority, and eventually reached a concordat with the Catholic charities. In dealing with a powerless individual, such as a typical bad slum mother, the kind who drank and slept around, the Homes had fewer inhibitions, naturally. They didn't give second chances.
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/barnardo.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Barnardo
As for the leading late twentieth century cases, which I cited in my previous post, I think you can make a case that they have a distinctive geography of their own. Granted, a handful of cases do not make a trend, but still: the Maria Colwell case was in Brighton, and the abusing stepfather seems to have been Irish; the Victoria Climbie case was in London, and involved West African immigrants; and now this latest case involves someone living in Plymouth. We are talking about places where working people have immigrated to, in order to be guest workers in the service industries. In the nineteenth century, it was axiomatic that urban housemaids tended to become prostitutes. The former occupation entailed the absolute maximum of alienation, in the Durkheimian sense of the word. A housemaid tended to come to the conviction that just about _anything_ would be better than being a housemaid. I think we are talking about people who are the economic successors of the Victorian housemaid. These cases did not happen in Wales or Northumberland, or Lancashire, the traditional manufacturing parts of Britain. The classic Rhonda Valley mining village tended to develop a kind of highly evolved working-class community, centered around the mine. The outlying mining villages have been in long-term economic depression for the last forty years or so, and the proportion of the residents relying on welfare state benefits might have been on the order of seventy-five percent, but these villages do not seem to have produced leading child abuse cases. Presumably, the community worked, and the children were informally removed long before crisis point. Instead the cases seem to turn up at a market economy node, which was attracting migration. Migration tends to break down extended families, and to a degree, the abuse cases happen because the extended family is back in the old country.
The Maria Colwell case does, to a degree, fit the argument about destroying working class community. It is not so much a matter of public housing or public benefits, so much as the extent to which the girl's respectable relatives, neighbors, teachers, etc. deferred to the authority of the state, and its welfare officers. The state was represented by an exceedingly arrogant young woman, highly educated but with little practical experience, who afterwards found her natural level as a superior clerk in the Foreign Office. All of these people, relatives, neighbors, and teachers, who knew the family more or less intimately, put a great deal of effort into lobbying this young official, rather than simply taking action themselves. Complaints were filed through a variety of channels, but repeatedly got lost in red tape. One element of the case was the official's insistent efforts to "liberate" the girl's mother from the claims of extended family and neighborhood. By the time the official was interviewed by the investigating commission, she was for nearly all intents and purposes on trial for negligent homicide, and her explanations amounted to "stonewalling." The result is that we do not have a satisfactory explanation for her motives. However, a case could be made that she was practicing something like libertarian theory, trying to resolve cases as quickly as possible in favor of the biological parent, and resisting efforts to bring the parent's conduct into discussion. She did not, for example, do a background check on the stepfather, which would have turned up the fact that he had a police record for repeated crimes of violence. The account I read was not explicit, but the balance of probabilities would be that he might have been a football hooligan, or something like that. At any rate, he did things like threatening female social workers with bodily harm, to the point that the official felt the need to bring along a male colleague for her own protection.
In Victorian England, there's a good chance the parents would have been deceased from poverty and disease, and the children with them. That would be a solution, yes.
only have to ask yourself: what would you do if you saw this happening?
No. What you're saying is that it would be up to every individual to decide whether to intervene and accept the risks and costs and responsibility of intervention all for themselves, instead of sharing it with the community through the mediation of the state. Is that really likely to produce better results?
I'm mildly curious: you accept the shared risk principle with regard to investment, I assume; why not apply the same principle to states?
I'll take the bait now that I'm back from vacation and had a chance to see this post, so you don't have to worry that we're all tearing our hair out and abandoning all our principles. In order to answer that question, you really only have to ask yourself: what would you do if you saw this happening? "I would wait for somebody called 'the government' to do something" does not make you principled. It simply says that you care enough to put the responsibility for difficult problems on someone else.
1. In Victorian or Edwardian England, or even in the inter-war period, the family would've taken charge of the children, since these women are clearly deranged & incapable of caring for children.
It is notorious that the so-called 'welfare' state has destroyed large parts of working-class culture. Part of the reason is constant destruction of working-class communities by knocking down houses to build subsidised state housing. This in turn is the consequence of rent control, in place since WWI. This killed the cheap rental market -- workers chiefly lived in rented housing.
2. What incomes were these women living on? _Could_ they have held jobs? It is significant that the reports say nothing about where they lived -- probably state housing; & they probably received state payments. Without the 'welfare' state & its steep taxes, their families would've looked after these women, & they most certainly would _not_ have had charge of children.
The statist society responded by removing the children from the care of the irresponsible parties. It's not a perfect system -- foster care, etc. -- but I -- and presumably, the author of this post -- want to know what a libertarian society would do instead.
Or, if you really want to go down this road, you can argue that a libertarian society would produce less suffering of this sort in the first place, but that's a huge, huge argument to take on.
Not so fast. What do you mean "handle it"? How does statist society handle it? Indeed, these problems _are_ happening in statist society, so should we conclude that statist society can't handle these problems?
I waited a day to see if any of the libertarians here jumped up to say anything, because I really didn't think they could.
I'll throw this out: there's nothing libertarianism can do about this situation. Not without a very supportive (aka "nanny") state. Nothing. So if it bothers you, you have to consider whether it bothers you enough to reconsider those libertarian principles.
I think you have to put this story in its context. I am appending a short bibliography, dealing with notable British cases of child abuse, and the official responses to them, as well as American and European parallels.
At the risk of some oversimplification, a case can be made that over a period of years, the British social service bureaucracy has been attempting to persuade the respectable British working man to take such cases to the authorities instead of simply walking down the street and settling the matter with his own version of rough justice.
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Bibliography:
Department of Health and Social Services (1974) Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Care and Supervision provided in relation to Maria Colwell, HMSO London.
Catalog entry: http://www.bopcris.ac.uk/bopall/ref18581.html
This is a British government publication, long out of print, and not available via any of the online booksellers, nor on the web as near as I can determine, and available in only a very few large libraries in the United States. However it is cited extensively in secondary literature. Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert J. Solnit reproduce about a third of the report in their _Before the Best Interests of the Child_ (Free Press, 1979).
In 1973, seven-year-old Maria Colwell was beaten to death by her stepfather after having been systematically starved and beaten for the preceding year, in the face of the systematic blindness of the social services. This triggered a scandal, and an investigation.
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Joseph Goldstein, Anna Freud, and Albert j. Solnit, _Beyond the Best Interests of the Child_ (Free Press, 1973, 1979). _Before the Best Interests of the Child_ (Free Press, 1979).
An argument for a better system of child custody. However, these two volumes incorporate a lot of relevant anecdotal material, especially the Colwell report.
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Larry Wolf, Child Abuse in Freud's Vienna: Postcards From the End of the World, New York University Press, New York, 1988. Makes a somewhat debatable argument about the "invention" of child abuse as, for want of a better word, a diagnostic category.
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Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England, University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Especially useful for its discussion of the spread of the culture of generalized "anti-cruelty" in the working class.
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FROM MARIA COLWELL TO VICTORIA CLIMBIE: REFLECTIONS ON A GENERATION OF PUBLIC INQUIRIES INTO CHILD ABUSE, Plenary paper by Professor Nigel Parton for the BASPCAN conference, July 2003 (published in Child Abuse Review (2004), 13 (2), pp80-94)
http://www.gptsw.net/papers/clwlclmbi.pdf
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The Victoria Climbie Inquiry
http://www.victoria-climbie-inquiry.org.uk/
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House of Lords discussion on the Victoria Climbie report
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200203/ldhansrd/vo030908/text/30908-04.htm