Spare the Rod

The Dickensian world of tiny flower girls freezing on wintry corners at midnight and brutalized orphans refused a second helping of porridge came startlingly alive last week in London. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children published a book entitled This Is Your Child, whose 200-odd pages are filled with stories and photographs of starved, burned and appallingly neglected children. One father heated leather thongs in a fire and then lashed his child until the skin lifted from its back. A mother kept her illegitimate son in a chicken coop until he was seven years old. "These things have happened and are happening," wrote Authors Anne Allen and Arthur Morton, "in the midst of this nation which so prides itself on its humanity."

Cruel to the Young. Many travelers in Britain conclude that the British are kinder to animals--parakeets, dogs and horses --than to children. A horrified Scandinavian told an Englishman, "You treat your children like dogs," and then had to explain that no compliment was intended. An official of the N.S.P.C.C. charges that cruelty to the young is common to every class, income group, and area: "All over the country children are ill-used, and too many parents think they have the right to beat their child unmercifully and beyond the limits any human being should be called upon to endure. God knows which is the worst area of the country."

Overall, the society estimates that seven out of every 100 British children are so blatantly neglected or abused during their childhood that social authorities have been forced to intervene.

Highly Irregular. In Britain there are seven voluntary societies concerned with animal.welfare, compared to the one that protects children. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded in 1824, and it was not until 58 years later that children got rudimentary protection--when, during a discussion of a proposed home for dogs, someone thought of setting up a home for neglected children. Wrote a Liverpool banker who was at the meeting: "The whole thing was highly irregular and I felt very nervous, but to my great delight, Mrs. Forrer, the president of the Society for Protection of Animals, said openly, 'I am here for prevention of cruelty, and I can't draw the line at children.' " Even today, it can be safer to thrash a child than an animal. The maximum fine for mistreating a child is $70; for mistreating an animal, $140.

Child psychologists believe that the British tendency to mistreat their young may be connected with traditional British reserve. Said one specialist: "Many parents think it soppy and embarrassing to show affection. To cover up their embarrassment they become extra strict and demanding, even to the point of mental, if not physical, cruelty."

Britain's famed public schools have long believed in the efficacy of corporal punishment (during this century at Eton, boys were held by two of their schoolmates over a flogging block to be beaten by teachers). The present Home Secretary, R.A.B. Butler, is on record "in favor of parents using the cane" on their offspring. A recent Gallup poll showed that 70% of British men, and a whopping 76% of British women, urge the flogging of young criminal offenders. Said a dejected British doctor: "Instead of feeling a sense of horror on hearing of some father brutally belting his son, many people instinctively think that the little bastard probably deserved it."

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