NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

Violence and Childhood: Some Historiological Considerations

Jacob Middleton

Violence is a fundamental form of human behaviour, found in all cultures and historical periods. It plays an important role in art and literature, providing drama and provoking emotion. In the modern world the fear of violence dominates the media, from moral panics over knife crime, to the attention given to terrorist threats. Whilst most of us will attempt to avoid personal contact with violence, it is difficult to prevent it from intruding in some way into our lives.

Its relevance to the modern world suggests one reason why the history of violence is a significant subject for historians to address. Moreover, violence is an extremely pervasive aspect of human society, and whilst frequently ignored, played an important role in many institutions. An example of this which is of particular relevance to those historians working with the history of childhood is the practice of corporal punishment. For much of recorded history this was considered a normal means by which children might be disciplined. Children might be subjected to corporal punishment both at home and at school, and its inflictions were sufficient severe that some were seriously injured or killed by its use. Yet when historians have referred to corporal punishment it has generally been looked at as an aspect of school administration, rather than part of the history of violence.

Whilst this might seem illogical in these terms, it is often the result of attempts by historians to position violence as an aspect of what are considered larger issues, such as class conflict. A typical example of this can be found in Anna Davin’s work on urban London, in which popular hostility towards corporal punishment in schools has been interpreted as a class-based struggle centring on family autonomy. From her viewpoint ‘discipline and order in school were about discipline and order in society. They were about class.[1] Yet by framing the problem in these terms she implicitly rejects the notion that parents might find intrinsically unreasonable the fact that their children are exposed to violence.

That violent acts may not be seen as violent by historians is not intrinsically unreasonable. As the historian John Carter Wood has pointed out, aggressive behaviour is contextualised by what he calls an economy of violence, which he describes as ‘a complex nexus of custom, law, economics, ethnicity, politics and psychology’.[2] Although it may seem abstract in these terms, what Carter Wood is expressing is the notion that violence is giving particular meaning by the society in which it occurs in, and is sometimes not even seen as such by contemporary observers. As such, violence is difficult for the historian to study, as definitions vary over time, and what might be considered a violent act in one time period might be viewed in a different manner at a different time. Some forms of behaviour are, of course, more obviously violent than others; for instance, the idea of what constitutes a murder has not shifted significantly over the last five hundred years. Other activities have seen more rapidly changing definitions, and behaviour constituting an assault or rape in the early twenty-first century might have been viewed differently even a hundred years ago.

The foregoing are all examples of criminal violence and, in these cases, the historian has at least the advantage of a strict legal definition. Much of the violence aimed against children comes from a second category, so-called “everyday violence”, which, if not always explicitly legal, is condoned and accepted by society. A good example of this is the punishment of children; whilst historical acts of child discipline will often appear unquestionably violent now, they were rarely seen as such by contemporary observers. It was, rather, more common to see it as a routine procedure, which children would accept, or even enjoy. As the public-school master Thomas Steele was to claim in his memoirs, the acts of punishment he inflicted were not ‘anything grim or cruel’. ‘If I look back at such occasions,’ he stated, ‘what I see is a boy’s face not surly at all but smiling’.[3]

Whilst Steele’s claim might seem surprising, it dates from a period when violent discipline was ubiquitous, when children might expect to receive violent punishment on a regular basis, from parents, from teachers, and from the adult world in general. If one reads autobiographical accounts of childhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries one sees that they are often dominated by violence. Some forms are welcome, even desirable, with boxing a fashionable spectator sport, and playground fights being a popular leisure activity whilst at school. Domestic punishments were almost universal and rarely objected to, and being struck by one’s parent was seen as perfectly reasonable. Other forms of violence were more objectionable and both children and parents disliked the frequent and often arbitrary use of the cane in the elementary schools of the time.[4] And behind all this they were exposed to a backdrop of violence which they did not participate in but might observe, such as with street violence, and the domestic conflicts of their own families and their neighbours.

When we talk about violence we rarely speak with this everyday violence in mind. We often turn, instead, to the more dramatic forms of criminal violence, without realising that their drama relies upon the fact that they are, and always were, infrequent and tragic events which punctuate normal life. Such events are, of course, important, since they have great cultural meaning, being actions which society has decided are particularly objectionable. Yet to only concentrate on such events misses the point that they are often situated in a broader context of violence. The man who goes on to murder in adult life may have been desensitised by a childhood exposure to severe punishment, domestic abuse, and spectatorship to aggression.

A second historiographic problem relating to the nature of everyday violence is the fact that its perpetrators were often sympathetic figures. This often creates difficulties for historians, who may struggle to reconcile the positive and negative images of historical actors. A useful example can be drawn from the history of warfare, where the soldiers on “our” side are seen as heroes, a tendency which affects our ability to see them as responsible for violence against others. As the historian Joanna Bourke has wryly noted, one ‘might be excused for believing that combatants found in war zones were really there to be killed, rather than to kill’.[5]

This problem is less visible, but nevertheless present, when one examines the history of childhood. Historians are generally sympathetic to parents and teachers who were also the foremost perpetrators of violence against children. A typical example of this can be found in the work of Peter Cunningham and Philip Gardner on the autobiographical accounts of teachers. Noting the frequently negative terms in which teachers are portrayed, they state they wish to ‘challenge such easy historical stereotypes’ as ‘the elementary school teacher portrayed as brutal and uncaring sadist’.[6] Yet, if one looks at the experiences of children we find that such descriptions are not necessarily unreasonable, and that in later life many people thought that the word sadist was a reasonable term by which the adults who beat them mercilessly and arbitrarily could be described.[7]

The result of these two historiographical issues is that the history is often drained of the violent events which played an important role in shaping childhood life. Whilst this behaviour does not disappear entirely, it is often marginalised, present but not explicitly acknowledged as being violent in nature. If we return to our example of corporal punishment, we can see how historians often describe it as merely a routine disciplinary procedure, not intrinsically different from forcing a child to write lines or remain at the school in detention. Its employment is excused by the arguments that it was necessary in the large classes of the nineteenth century, or that it was the produce of a society that did not know better. That it may have had an effect on the children who were the subjects of punishment seems not to attract the attention of historians. The ubiquity of everyday violence is such that experiences seem to disappear entirely from historical discussion.

NOTES

[1]Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870-1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), 131.

[2]John Carter Wood, Violence and Crime in Nineteenth-Century England: The Shadow of Our Refinement (London: Routledge, 2004), 2.

[3]Thomas Steele, Musings of an Old Schoolmaster (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 58. The occasions to which Steele was referring would date from the turn of the nineteenth century.

[4]Jacob Middleton, ‘The Experience of Corporal Punishment in Schools, 1890-1940’, History of Education, 37 (March 2008), 275.

[5]Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing (London: Granta, 2000), 2.

[6]Peter Cunningham, and Philip Gardner, Becoming Teachers: Texts and Testimonies, 1907-1950 (London: Woburn Press, 2004), ref!

[7]Middleton, ‘The Experience of Corporal Punishment’, 271-272.