NEWSLETTER

Society for the History of Children and Youth

SHCY NEWS

President’s Remarks

We have made a lot of room for violence in our contemporary portraits of children.   No longer pictured in pristine white clothes sheltered in nursery, schoolroom, and play ground, children today are portrayed as fully engaged on all fronts wherever we are conscious of the presence of violence:  as soldiers on battlefields, killers at school, consumers of violence in the media, members of vicious gangs.  Thus, we have partially released children from the innocence which once seemed to protect them from implication in these arenas, but we still evoke their special innocence when they become victims of murder, abduction, rape and other abuses.  Violence is critically part of the dilemmas of modern childhood.  As children become defined as more competent actors, they assume the many ambiguous and sometimes nasty characteristics such action can take.  When they are vulnerable, their weakness becomes a magnet for our imagining of that nastiness. 

As historians, these images and realities attract our attention and investigations into the nature of the child as human, the qualities we invest in childhood, and how these have changed over time.  Examined through the new modern language of psychiatry, the murder committed by the young Leopold and Loeb (both in their late teens) became an ace of psychological immaturity.  Viewed through the lens of twenty-first century suspicion and panic, a twelve-year old Lionel Tate became an irredeemable killer.  A volunteer in the revolutionary army in the nascent United States, a thirteen-year old early becomes a patriot; dragged into the rebel forces in Sierra Leone, a thirteen year old becomes a vicious killer.  What does it mean to be a violent child?  Who is legally responsible when a child is violent?  What effect do media representations have for children and adolescents?  Are children innocent?  These are the kinds of questions that historians of children and childhood can help to illuminate as we bring our knowledge and perspectives to a table fully set for a century intrigued and baffled by violence.

Paula S. Fass

July 23, 2008