The violence and neglect suffered by children today is a common subject of media attention and much political hand-wringing, not just in Britain but in other parts of the western world. As yet, however, there has been no attempt to explore this concern historically and look at how the boundary between good and bad parenting may have changed across time. This book attempts to fill the gap by examining the role of violence and neglect in the relations between parents/carers and children from the Bronze Age to the present. By demonstrating how the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable forms of childrearing has shifted through the ages, and not necessarily in a linear direction, it will emphasise how relatively recent our contemporary understanding of good and bad parenting is, and hence the high likelihood that that understanding has not been completely digested.



The book is divided into six, multi-authored chapters. The first four deal with different manifestations through the centuries of what would be today considered violence and neglect: 1) child sacrifice; 2) infanticide and abandonment; 3) physical and mental cruelty; and 4) exploitation. The fifth and sixth chapters look at the various violent and non-violent strategies used by children as coping mechanisms in what to us seems a very harsh world. Each chapter consists of a number of short chronologically or thematically specific extracts, written by nearly 40 historians, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars and theologians, and knitted together into a coherent narrative by the editors.

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Note
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Child Sacrifice
  • Child Sacrifice in the Ancient World: Blessings for the Beloved
  • Childhood, Sacrifice and Redemption
  • The Blood Libel - Literary Representations of Ritual Child murder in Medieval England
  • Child Sacrifice in Early Modern Europe: Text, Image and Fantasy
  • The Blood Libel against the Jews in Poland
  • The First World War and Child Sacrifice
• 2. Infanticide, Abandonment and Abortion
  • Infanticide, Abandonment and Abortion in the Graeco-Roman to Early Medieval World: Archaeological Perspectives
  • Infanticide in Late Medieval and Early Modern England
  • Infant Abandonment in Europe 1700-1850
  • Unwanted Children and Adoption in England
  • Stigmatising and Removing Defective Children from Society: The Influence of Eugenic Thinking
  • Abortion in the Twentieth Century in England
• 3. Physical Cruelty and Socialisation
  • Violence in the 'Upbringing' of Ancient Sparta
  • Corporal Punishment and the Two Christianities
  • Abusive Parenting: The Case of Jacques-Louis Ménétra
  • Children and Physical Cruelty - The Lockean and Rousseauvian Revolution
  • Childhood and Violence in Working-Class England 1800-1870
  • Corporal Punishment in the English Public School in the Nineteenth Century
  • Children, Cruelty and Corporal Punishment in Twentieth-Century England: The Legal Framework
• Photo Gallery
• 4. Child Exploitation
  • Children at Work in Mycenaean Greece (c. 1680-1050 BCE): A Brief Survey
  • Apprenticeship in Northwest Europe 1300-1850
  • The Royal Navy's Commissioned Sea Officers 1700-1815
  • The Rural Child Worker
  • What was the Effect of Compulsory Schooling on the Phenomenon of Working Children?
  • For Love, not Money: Children's Unpaid Care Work in Modern Britain
• 5. Violent Children, Youth Enforcers, and Juvenile Delinquents
  • Pupil Violence in the French Classroom 1600-1850
  • Bullying in English Schools and Universities
  • Student Violence in Early Modern Cambridge
  • Masterless Children during the Thirty Years' War
  • Juvenile Delinquents in Early Nineteenth-Century London
  • Juvenile Delinquents in the Post-War Soviet Union
  • Juvenile Crime in Post-war Britain
• 6. Coping Strategies and Exit Routes
  • Pavel Morozov: Soviet Hero
  • Child Runaways in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
  • Child Witches in Seventeenth-Century Germany
  • The War Games of Children in Nazi Germany
  • Child Suicide in Jude the Obscure
  • Self Harm - The Curse of Modern Britain
• Index