Policy and attitudes: historical roots of the stigmatisation of children in care today

Annie Skinner | 31 July 2024

‘My Government’s legislative programme will be mission led and based upon the principles of security, fairness and opportunity for all’, proclaimed King Charles at the State Opening of Parliament on the 17 July 2024. How will these high ambitions deliver for children in care who experience lifelong institutionalised prejudice and stigmatisation? Stigma is said to have originated in the moralistic New Poor Law of 1834 and Victorian philanthropists who wanted to ‘rescue’ children from what they considered irresponsible parents. According to Goffman, stigma has different manifestations. For children in care, this can be seen in institutional policies based on stigmatising attitudes; public opinions reflected in the media creating negative stereotypes; and society’s view of the association with their parents’ behaviour. Will the Labour government use the life experience of those who experienced care to understand and combat institutional prejudices in their new programme? The new Children's Wellbeing Bill is focussed on education, including measures to improve child protection; these measures are welcome but do not address the long-standing stigmatisation of children in care.

The impact of early child protection legislation and policies

In the first half of the nineteenth century the British establishment, fearing the evolution of movements like the French Revolution, reinforced the need for social regulation, leading to the introduction of criminal legislation allowing the state to remove children.  Options for parents in dire straits were limited to applications to charitable childcare organisations or the Poor Law.  They were treated as improvident, regardless of their circumstances and without considering the impact of poverty. Regular employment was considered preferable to voluntarily relinquishing a child to care in charitable institutions. Lone mothers were particularly targeted in efforts to prevent daughters being contaminated or repeating their mother’s behaviour. 

When arrangements broke down for poor families the authorities had the power to commit children to care until they were 16 years of age and remove parental rights.  Several Industrial Schools Acts were introduced from 1857 onwards, each giving increased power to the state. Young children were charged and appeared in court usually without any legal representation, likewise for their parents. Children were removed from their families, criminalised and incarcerated in regimented industrial schools, with little or no contact with their parents.

The impact of Victorian childcare policies

Children were blamed, punished and stigmatised for their parents’ behaviour by virtue of their committal.  Rescued children were seen as both ‘victim’ and ‘threat’ because they came from immoral backgrounds; and exemplified by narratives from child rescuers of derogatory descriptions of the children with racial undertones such as, ‘Street Arabs’ or ‘English Kafirs’, or even described as ‘human vermin’ or savages.  Influential people condoned and perpetuated these attitudes including a pamphlet with a derogatory title, ‘Child of the English Savage’, written jointly by Benjamin Waugh, the NSPCC founder, and The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.  Meanwhile, children in care were trained for low paid employment, with little opportunity for social mobility.  

Changing policies of the welfare state

Fast forward to the inception of the welfare state in 1948 which marked the end of the New Poor Law.  During this transition and beyond, some former staff who remained in post as practitioners or administrators and continued with the same attitudes associated with the deserving and underserving poor which had dominated welfare provision for over 120 years. By the late 1960s and 1970s changing attitudes and practice were starting to emerge, but following budget cuts in the mid 1970s restrictions were made in public sector services including housing, education and welfare. In the 1980s gaps between rich and poor widened and public services were cut under the politics of the Thatcher governments promoting a more individualistic and less compassionate society.  [url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09pmbdf]https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09pmbdf[/url].  This was reflected in the attitudes towards lone parents, reminiscent of those in the nineteenth century towards illegitimacy and resurrecting notions of the deserving and undeserving.  In the 1980s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher suggested that ‘young women were getting pregnant to jump the housing queue’.  This perception was eagerly promoted in the right-wing media of the time, encouraging the view that lone mothers were simply persons of ‘bad character’.  And in 1995 the future Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson wrote in The Spectator ‘Single mothers were raising a generation of ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate children.’

Childcare legislation still retains some of the nineteenth-century punitive clauses towards children. Even the latest Act contains the phrase 'the child is beyond parental control' (s.31(2), Children Act 1989) This suggests the real continuity in the legal framework as ‘bad parenting’ is still seen as a final explanation and the locus of legal responsibility.

Where are we now?

Serious Case Reviews in the twenty-first century unpicked the failings of local authorities.  Their conclusions highlight incompetent and uncaring political and professional leadership as well as a desire to restrict funding for looked after children.  Children in care and care leavers are dependent on social care managers for their upbringing (the corporate parent), which is now dependent on reduced budgets and protocol. In practice an unequal system, created by policy leads to further disadvantage and public stigmatisation. For example, one of the frontline scandals about children in care concerns placements in unregulated independent or in semi-independent living accommodation for some under the age of 16. Children placed in these properties have described the difficulties of having to reside with drug dealers, trying to study, financial problems, fear and other aspects of being alone while trying to negotiate independent living without support.  The advocacy organisation Article 39 regularly brings these issues to public attention. Yet the responsible authorities, the corporate parent, have sanctioned this arrangement.  

It is perhaps unsurprising that attitudes towards children in care are remarkably similar over the centuries when, since the onset of nineteenth-century childcare legislation children were criminalised rather than protected.  Yet these lived experiences are not used to the full benefit in developing government policies. Why has it taken so long for care-experienced people to be included in official positions like other minority groups? Hannah Brown, raised in the London Foundling Hospital in the late nineteenth-century, considered it essential for care experienced people to write about the impact of care ‘… this can best be told by one who has experienced the evil consequences of this stigma’. In 2023 young care leavers presented a petition to Downing Street requesting that being in care be determined as a protected characteristic. Surely the fact this had to be raised by care leavers themselves, demonstrates the failure of the state to adequately care for their ‘corporate children’.

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About the author

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Annie Skinner, is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford Brookes University. Before moving into historical research, she worked as a social worker with children and families. Her research has focused on finding the hidden, unheard and often silent voices behind social histories. Her latest published research finds the voice of the child in nineteenth-century child protection practice, Behind Closed Doors, Hidden Histories of Children Committed to Care in the late nineteen century. Peter Lang, Oxford (2021). She is currently investigating the historical routes of stigmatisation of children in care within a legal and cultural framework, with a lived experience perspective.