The fight for children’s rights

The struggle to provide children with rights and end their status as mere chattels or belongings of their parents has been a long and bitter one. At every stage, the cry by parents has been the same; ‘The state has no business intruding in family life and is harming the rights of parents by doing so.’

In the 19th Century, many children were forced to work down mines and up chimneys from an unbelievably early age. They had no rights in the matter at all. Each time some piece of legislation prevented, for example, children under the age of ten from going down coal mines; there was outrage, principally from parents. How dare the state dictate to mothers and fathers what their children should or should not do? This was an assault upon the rights of parents and indeed the very institution of the family. If a father could sell his eight year-old son to a chimney sweep for £5, what on earth business was it of anybody else?

Nowhere was this outrage more indignantly expressed than when the government tried to secure the right of children to receive an education. The 1861 Newcastle Report into the State of Popular Education in England summed the case up neatly. It said:



Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nor desirable. An attempt to replace an independent system of education by a compulsory system, managed by the government, would be met by objections, both political and religious.



Wiser counsels prevailed and in 1870 the Elementary Education Act was passed, popularly known as Forster’s Act. A decade later, education was made compulsory for all children between the ages of five and ten and there was a huge uproar. Parents led the complaints, comparing the British government with that of Prussia; a grave insult indeed! The crux of the matter was that this was an erosion of parents’ rights to raise their children as they saw fit. Compulsory education was an attack on the family. In the ten years following the making of education compulsory for children, prosecutions of parents for the non-attendance at school of their children were running at over a hundred thousand a year. It was the commonest offence in England, apart from drunkenness.

Every single attempt to increase the rights of children, which of course means giving greater duties to their parents, has been met by strong opposition by parents. The governments of the day have had to lead the way, fighting apathy, sloth and reactionary parents in order to furnish children with more legal rights and protection under the law.

In recent years, we have seen two examples of this tendency. One has been the efforts of the legislature to make it a criminal offence to strike children. This has met with only limited success. Parents have fought ferociously to retain their right to beat children. Incredibly, even now in the 21st Century, there are those in this country who feel that they should enjoy the ’right’ to hit their kids! Any attempt to abolish this ’right’ is met by howls of protest and the familiar claim that the state is intruding where it has no business to be; that is to say into family life.

The other recent example of this reactionary and backward-looking trend is of course the campaign by some parents a few years ago to force the state not to enquire to closely into whether or not children were receiving a suitable education. Again, parental ’rights’ were cited and the government was told that any move to check up if children not attending school were actually being educated was an attack on the family by the state. Just as when the 1870 Elementary Education Act was being planned, the case of Germany was brandished by parents fighting against any diminution of their supposed rights. That this was essentially about the rights of parents and not of children can easily be seen by the language being used. The right of children to an education was scarcely mentioned, it was all about the ’right’ of parents to home educate.

Although the calling of a general election in 2010 ended the hopes for this latest extension of children’s rights, the cause is not entirely lost. A first step would be at the very least the registration of all children who are not attending school. Such a move is now planned by Wales and there are signs that Scotland too has such a scheme in mind. If this happens in those two countries, then introducing such registration in England would be merely an exercise in bringing this country into line with what is happening elsewhere in the United Kingdom. As has always happened throughout history, the reactionaries will howl their protests, but we must hope that this time they do not get their own way and that one more step is taken in ensuring that the most vulnerable members of society are properly protected and furnished with the rights that they deserve.

An historical retrospective

The thesis put forward by many home educating parents is that it is parents who are primarily responsible for their children and not the state. They regard any intrusion by the state into family life as unwarranted and something which should only happen if there is clear evidence of neglect or abuse by parents.

This is not of course a new point of view. Before the introduction of compulsory education in the nineteenth century, a government enquiry was set up which looked into the idea. They decided that it would be a bad thing. The Newcastle Report into the State of Popular Education in England was published in 1861. The authors said;

'Any universal compulsory system appears to us neither attainable nor
desirable. An attempt to replace an independent system of education by
a compulsory system, managed by the government, would be met by
objections, both religious and political...'

One of the main objections which the enquiry encountered was that government had no business to poke their noses into family life. It was for parents to arrange for their children's education, not the state. Plus ca change....

I think it reasonable to say that this attitude, that the state should keep out of family life, is still going strong and was a major line of argument against the recommendations of the Badman Report in 2009. It is interesting to reflect that precisely the same line has in the past been used to prevent the police investigating allegations of marital rape and domestic abuse of women. For centuries, the legal position was plain. The law should not concern itself with what went on in the marital home. The relationship between man and wife was sacred and the state should not attempt to regulate how marriages ran or look into what went on in the homes of married couples. We no longer follow this principle of course and for very good reason. There is often an imbalance of power within a marriage; the man may be stronger and more aggressive, the home might be in his name, he usually has more money than his wife. Some women will therefore put up with an abusive partner and even if the police are called will refuse to make a statement. That is why the police will now proceed on cases of domestic violence even if the wife does not wish to press charges. It is also why in 1991, it was ruled that a wife can refuse to consent to sex with her husband.

Those now arguing that the state should not involve itself in the relationship between parents and children remind me a lot of the sort of people who were dead against the police being able to intervene in marital disputes. Witness the anger when it is suggested that hitting children should be outlawed. Some parents insist that they have a perfect right to hit their kids; the same argument used in favour of wife-beating. This is more common in the USA, but there are still plenty of parents here who feel that the government should not legislate about this and that hitting children is a private, family matter.

The parallels between the two cases are compelling and disturbing. The emphasis used to be placed upon a husband's 'rights'. Today, we hear talk of a parent's 'rights' in precisely the same way. It was once acceptable for a husband to slap his wife around a bit in order to discipline her; many people claim that this is something that is acceptable for a parent to do to a child.
I think that in the future, we may look back on this current period and see it as being the time when the rights of children began to be recognised seriously by society, just as the rights of women have similarly been recognised in recent decades. I cannot help but notice that when home educating parents talk about rights in connection with the practice, they almost invariably refer to their own 'rights'. We hear all the time from such people of a parent's 'right' to home educate. As I say, this sounds ominously like the old and discredited concept of a husband's 'rights' over his wife.