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648 Special Articles CARE OF CHILDREN THE CURTIS REPORT SOME 125,000 children, being deprived of a normal home life, have come within the terms of reference of the Curtis Committee.1 This great company of children are provided for in many ways, and-in the usual British manner-according to widely differing standards. As it is with convalescent homes, with nurses in training, with hospital food, with treatment in sanatoria, so it is with children : those in authority are willing to do their best according to local custom and their own lights ; but where lights are dim there are few precedents and no enthusiasm for borrowing a drop of oil from a neigh- bour. Thus Miss Myra Curtis and her colleagues found some children well placed and happy in good foster homes, and some cheerful and comfortable in homes, schools, and institutions ; but they also found many living a dreary and stultifying life in " drab and scoured " surroundings, others overworked and weary in the service of the " home," and, worst of all, some neglected, dirty, ill-clad, and underfed, sharing workhouse wards with senile and mentally affected patients. FORMS OF NEGLECT If the overall picture is not as bad as it would have been a hundred years ago, yet it is a great deal worse than most of us have been complacently assuming ; and it is right to repeat here some of the forms of neglect to which children are subject, including some of the worst examples, because the best safeguard against their perpetuation is well-informed public opinion. The committee found that though nurseries for small children are often-perhaps usually-well run and well equipped, older children are likely to live in comfortless surroundings, with nothing to delight the eye, often with no convenient place to play, and with no toys or play materials, such as sand or clay. Their clothes are sometimes pleasant and individual (the sort of uniform which afflicted Rob when Mr. Dombey made a " Charitable Grinder " of him seems to have gone at last) but sometimes scanty or ugly. Their food is usually, but not always, adequate. They may be given no choice in their final career, being made, perhaps, into farm hands if they are boys, and almost inevitably into domestic workers if they are girls. Though it is often claimed that girls are " trained " in this work, in fact they may be given nothing but the dull chores, without training or responsibility in cooking or other skilled work. Owing to lack of domestic staff children in some homes are doing daily as much as four hours’ domestic charing in addition to school work. In some homes run by religious bodies the need for relaxation is scarcely recognised, and children rise at six and go to bed at eight, spending the intervening hours in a solid round of domestic duties, school work, and religious exercises. In some girls’ homes administered by a religious order 14-year- olds on leaving school are employed in the homes as laundry hands. In one case the laundry earned jE85 a week by work . for outside customers, while the girls seemed to be getting 2s. 6d. a week-" five shillings if they are very good." The committee name the means of providing normal children with a home, in order of preference, as adoption, boarding-out, and institutional care. Yet one large voluntary body discourages adoption and insists on children who have been boarded out returning to the home for training in their teens-a rule naturally objec- tionable to good foster-parents who wish to take a share in settling " their " child in life. - Inspection should prevent serious abuses of children in homes, but the committee found repeatedly that the recommendations of inspectors had not been followed, and moreover that during the war inspection had often been desultory, years lapsing between visits. 1. Report of the Care of Children Committee. Cmd, 6922, H.M. Stationery Office. Pp. 195. 3s. WORKHOLTSES AND HOMES The worst examples of neglect were found among children in workhouses, taken there as a temporary measure, but kept there because no better quarters could be-or had been-found for them. In one century-old poor-law institution a family of five normal children were sleeping on the same corridor as senile men and women and sharing a room with an unsightly hydro- cephalic idiot. " They had been admitted in the middle of the night, when their mother had left them under a hedge after eviction from their house. No plan appeared to have been made for them." In a nursery (noted as exceptionally bad), linked with a public-assistance institution, eight sick children were being nursed in a ward adjacent to the adult sick ward which contained, among other chronic sick, a woman with advanced cancer of the face and also a child with chickenpox. Among the sick children was a low-grade mentally defective girl, who spent most of the day on a chair commode, and two babies with rickets. The children wore cotton frocks, cotton vests, and dilapidated napkins. The room smelt foul. A premature baby had been isolated in-a large very cold ward opposite. Some 16 healthy children in the same institution were living in a corrugated hutment, feeding, playing, and using their pots in a bare day-room devoid of toys. They wore dirty cotton or flannelette frocks and no knickers, and most of them had lost their shoes ; their faces, but not their bodies, were clean. Under the present law, healthy children over the age of 3 should only be received temporarily, or as an emer- gency measure, in public-assistance institutions; but the committee found many who had been there longer than the permitted 6 weeks, and some who had been there for months at a time. These children were not attending school. The committee formed the opinion that in most such institutions the general care of children was poor ; the excuse offered was that good foster homes are hard to nnd. But " the worst feature was often the complete failure to provide any kind of individual interest or notice." ‘ The same weakness is found in some children’s homes, whether provided by voluntary or municipal bodies. Homes are of various kinds : large barrack institutions left over from the last century ; grouped " cottage " homes ; small homes in ordinary dwelling-houses, scattered through a district : and receiving homes, usually small, where children stay while permanent arrangements are being made for them. Some of the children in them are (like the children in workhouses) destitute and maintained under the poor-law, some are homeless children from evacuation areas, some physically or mentally handicapped, some in need of care or protection. Besides these children there are some, including war orphans, in foster homes and some in approved schools and remand homes. The ultimate responsibility for these children lies in several different departments : war orphans are the concern of the Ministry of Pensions : children cared for by local authorities come under the Ministry of Health ; approved schools and remand homes, and also voluntary homes receiving public grants, are inspected by the Home Office; and voluntary homes certified as suitable for poor-law children are inspected by the Ministry of Health as well ; mental defectives, most of whom are cared for by local authorities, come under the Board of Control. REFORMS Thus " the problem of providing for children deprived - of a normal home life has not hitherto been dealt with as a single one." The committee have given much thought to devising means of simplifying and unifying the exercise of public responsibility. Such central control should apply, they think, not only to the classes of deprived children already recognised but to some groups’ who now fall outside the range of public care. These include children over 9 who have been taken
