I have read somewhere that there were laws against animal abuse before there were laws against child abuse. It seems there was a child (female, I think) who was badly physically abused and the judge had to have her declared an animal so the laws would apply. Is this true or is my memory faulty?
Mary Ellen Wilson. The part about her being declared an animal is not true. What happened was that neighbors and a local missionary became concerned about her, and since no child welfare organizations existed at the time, they asked the SPCA for help. Her case did lead to the formation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
In the UK, the RSPCA was founded in 1824; the National Society for the prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded in 1881.
In the US, the ASPCA was founded in 1866, the equivalent for children was from 1874.
So there were animal abuse organizations created first in both countries.
I don’t know about the USA but in general to go on from RealityChuch there is a hilarious list of differences between the way the UK is with animals and how it is with humans in terms of law by law. The UK probably leads the world in terms of legislation for cute fluffy things’ welfare (as opposed to laws alleviating animal suffering). Meanwhile by European standards it’s not particularly into employee rights (although in reality it gives employees loadsa rights, but other European countries get nuts - also note it’s a lot easier to start a company in the UK and in general there is more labour mobility than most of Europe so there is less reason for employee rights than in say Belgium).
So this brings me to the end, or near the end, of the list I’m talking about. The two contrasting items were something very much like:
a) opting out of a portion of the EU Social Chapter which guaranteed a short working day (or something like that)
while at the same time
b) unilaterally introducing legislation to ensure that animals being transported were on the back of a lorry for shorter than whatever the human work day was going to be.
Er, anyway, it was a lot funnier when you saw the list in its entirety - but a minute or two on google hasn’t found it.
Before we draw too many conclusions about this fact, it’s worth noting that the same guy was instrumental in both – Henry Bergh. He was interested in the welfare of both children and animals.
The article notes that child cruelty laws did exist in the state of New York. Furthermore, it was not the SPCA that got involved it was the society’s founder inna private capacity.
And, I’m no expert in the history of either animal or child cruelty laws, but I’m sure authorities could (and I’m sure did, to some extent) punish child cruelty before explicit child cruelty laws, using existing statutory and common-law charges of assault, battery, murder (if it got that far), and probably some sort of failing to fulfill a duty of care.
Not to say that child cruelty laws didn’t help, or that in some cases authorities had legal issues in prosecuting someone, but want to point out that lack of a child cruelty law doesn’t mean society was all perfectly A-OK with abusing children, and certainly having an explicit animal cruelty law but not an explicit child cruelty law isn’t very good evidence that animals were more valued than children. In fact, it might be evidence that children were valued enough that of course everyone knew that abusing them was bad and illegal (under various existing crimes), but animals were held in low enough regard that legislators had to make it very explicitly clear that abusing them was a crime.
That was later turned into an episode of Dr Quinn: Medicine Woman; the town council had to resort to declaring a girl an animal to remove her from her father’s care.
This is a good point. Any country that has general laws against violent/abusive behavior already has laws against child abuse. They just don’t have laws which specifically deal with the abuse of children. “Child abuse laws,” per se, arise because normal criminal laws are perceived as inadequate, not because children didn’t have any right before the child abuse laws were written.