The remedy lies in numerous directions. Many laws and customs and
doctrines have been (many of them are still) on the side of the torture of
a child.
1. Unhappily, Courts of Law, by their rules of procedure, have not been on
the side of the child. They have rather lent security to the inflictor of
its sufferings. A mother who has to screen her children from the madness
of their drunken father at midnight, since such midnight orgies were
introduced into England, has never been allowed--that is, if she were a
married mother--to give evidence of the fact in an English Court. Boys and
girls under ten who witnessed atrocities committed on a brother or sister,
they, too, were excluded from Courts. And who can estimate the number of
families in which wrongs to children were thus made, legally, absolutely
safe!
Here is a sample of such excluded cases:--Before the baby was many days
old its father soused it on its mother's knee with the contents of a pail
of cold water. On another occasion he seized it while suckling at her
breast, and flung it violently against the wall at the other end of the
room. When its mother was out, he took it into the yard and put it
overhead in a tank of cold water, holding it under till it was with
difficulty recovered. "What do you feed the little devil for?" he would
ask his wife. He was for ever assaulting her for her care of it. As it
got older he pitched it on the floor, and struck it with the legs of a
chair. It grew to dread the sound of his footsteps on the stairs, and
would hide under the bed and lie breathless till he had gone. Such a
brute's wife always, and his family generally (often the only witnesses of
a crime against a child), were, till recently, all excluded from Court.
2. And everybody else was excluded from the scene of his wickedness. His
house was "his castle," not to be entered even by a warrant, save if he
had stolen a watch.
3. Even when the facts were got at, and legal proceedings taken, every
injustice was done to the little sufferer on whose behalf they were taken.
It could never be removed from its torturer's custody. Even when after the
hearing of the case, it was committed for trial, still for a period
possibly of three months the child had to be left in the custody of the
culprit to pamper, to coax, to warn and threaten into the denial of
everything on which a conviction could be obtained.
Is it wonderful that, under these conditions of the law, one-half of the
brutes towards English children were unpunishable brutes, and practised
their damnable deeds in safety?
Happily, every one of these conditions is changed.
4. One practice of Courts--an almost universal one--I must mention in
passing, as most unjust to a child--viz., the custom of accepting
testimony against it without any confirmation; and that, too, from the
person who has ill-treated it. Men who are cruel to a child easily add to
their cruelty a damaging false witness, which, being only against a child,
nobody ever prosecutes. In consideration of lies, the sentence is often
admittedly reduced. After 400 wronged children have spent two, three,
four, and six months in our Society's Shelter whilst their maligners were
in prison, speaking generally, I may say that charges pleaded in excuse,
and accepted in extenuation of outrages, have proved to be mere inventions
of cowardly malice. When the grave, frightened little looks with which
they came had passed away, they were full of the ways of sunny childhood.
More pleasant docile children, or children more ready to twine their arms
around your neck, you seldom find, than have been some little people who
had been called liars, thieves, vixens (even infants in arms have been
called vixens), and the like--by savages before magistrates as pleas for
their mercy. And from every quarter to which children have been sent, the
same testimony comes as to the untruthfulness of the charges their parents
made in Court, against the children and for themselves.