Taking it Onto the Streets: The Discovery of Child Death and Birth of Child Protection, 1870–1914

Abstract

Making sense of the protection of children in particular times has to involve an analysis of the relationship between the social practices that went on in particular historical periods and the concepts of risk, childhood, time and space and technological resources available to enable children to be reached in practice in particular times. Compared to the mobilities that constitute effective child protection and the speediness with which children are reached today, nineteenth-century social practices were decidedly static and plodding. Yet, it is only by going back to these formative years in the construction of child protection that we can begin to fully understand it as a modern social practice.