20th Century
| Timeline of 20th century events related to Children's Rights in the UK in chronological order | |||
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| Date | Parties | Event | Image |
| 1904 | UK Government | The Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act gave the NSPCC a statutory right to intervene in child protection cases. | |
| 1905 | UK Government | A specialist juvenile offenders court was tried in Birmingham, and formally established in the Children Act 1908, along with juvenile courts. Borstals, a kind of youth prison, were established under the Prevention of Crime Act, with the aim of separating youths from adult prisoners.
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| 1910 | Home Office | Allegations in John Bull of abuse at a boys' reformatory, the Akbar Nautical Training School, Heswall, included accusations that that boys were gagged before being birched, that boys who were ill were caned as malingerers, and that punishments included boys being drenched with cold water or being made to stand up all night for a trivial misdemeanour. It was further alleged that boys had died as a result of such punishments. The Home Office investigation rejected the allegations, but found that there had been instances of "irregular punishments". | |
| 1915 | A. S. Neill | In 1915 the teacher A.S.Neill wrote his first book in his Dominie series of semi-autobiographical novels, 'A Dominies Log'. This was the first of his writings to promote and advocate for children's rights in UK schools, especially the rights to play, to protection and to control their own learning. He went on to found what is now the oldest school based on children's rights, Summerhill (1921). The school and Neill's writings went on to influence schools and education systems around the world, including the UK | |
| January 1916 | UK Government | In the early years of the 20th century the National Service League had urged compulsory military training for all men aged between 18 and 30. After the outbreak of World War I some two million men enlisted voluntarily, some in Pals battalions, but mostly in regular regiments and corps. Enthusiasm diminished as casualties increased, and the Military Service Act of January 1916 introduced conscription. Boys from the age of 18 were liable to be called-up for service Men of Class 1 (that is, 18 year olds), once enrolled, were given the option of returning home or remaining with the Colours and undergoing special training until they were 19. At the start of 1914 the British Army had a reported strength of 710,000 men including reserves. By the end of the war almost 1 in 4 of the total male population of the UK had joined, over five million men, and almost half the infantry were 19 or younger.
Conscription ceased with the termination of hostilities on 11 November 1918 and all conscripts were discharged, if they had not already been so, on 31 March 1920. |
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| 1918 | Maternity and Child Welfare Act | The War prompted the government to direct funds towards infant welfare centres, and the Act encouraged local authorities to continue this work by introducing the principle of free ante-natal care and free medical care of under-fives. Most of the work was undertaken by volunteers, who were able to claim support for the resources they used. These measures taken together contributed to an astonishing decline in infant mortality in the first three decades of the 20th century. | |
| 1919 | Save the Children Fund | In the aftermath of the Great War social reformer Eglantyne Jebb and her sister Dorothy, who married Labour MP C.R. Buxton, documented the terrible misery in which the children of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe were plunged, and believing there was no such thing as an "enemy" child, founded the Save the children Fund in London to address their needs. The Save the Children International Union (SCIU) was founded in Geneva in 1920 with Save the Children and Swedish Rädda Barnen as leading members. Jebb went on to draft the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in collaboration with Lady Blomfield. | |
| 1921 | Summerhill School | As portrayed in his Dominie book, A Dominie Abroad (Herbert Jenkins, 1923), A.S.Neill founded what would become known as Summerhill School in Hellerau, a suburb of Dresden. It was part of an International school called the Neue Schule. Neill moved his school to Sonntagsberg in Austria.
By 1923 Neill had moved to the town of Lyme Regis in the south of England, to a house called Summerhill where he began with 5 pupils. The school continued there until 1927, when it moved to the present site at Leiston in the county of Suffolk, taking the name of Summerhill with it. The Secretary of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child wrote in support of the school when it faced closure from Government inspectors, that it 'surpasses all expectations' in its implementation of children's rights, particularly Article 12. Children's BBC made a four part drama called Summerhill based on its fight for survival against the government. |
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| March 1921 | Family Planning | Marie Stopes opened the UK's first family planning clinic in London, the Mothers' Clinic, offering a free service to married women and gathering scientific data about contraception. The opening of the clinic created a major social impact on the 20th century, marking the start of a new era in fertility control by promising an opportunity for the modern world to break out of the Malthusian Trap. An admirer of Hitler's Nazism and a Eugenicist, Stopes' brand of Feminism sought selective breeding to achieve racial purity, sterilisation of those 'unfit for parenthood' and consigned the Rights of Children to the backwaters of the Pro/Anti Abortion debate. | |
| 1932 | Children and Young Persons (Scotland) Act | The Act provided for young offenders, to be sent to an Approved School, put on probation, or put into the care of a "fit person". Courts could, in addition, still sentence male juvenile offenders, as previously, to be "whipped with not more than six strokes of a birch rod by a constable". | |
| 1932/33 | UK Government | The Children and Young Persons Act 1932 broadened the powers of juvenile courts in England and Wales and introduced supervision orders for children at risk. The Children and Young Persons Act 1933 provided for young offenders, to be sent to an Approved School, put on probation, or put into the care of a "fit person". Courts could, in addition, still sentence male juvenile offenders, as previously, to be "whipped with not more than six strokes of a birch rod by a constable". The Act also introduced Remand Homes for youths temporarily held in custody, to await a court hearing. The Home Office maintained a team of inspectors who visited each institution from time to time. Offenders, as well as receiving academic tuition, were assigned to work groups for such activities as building and bricklaying, metalwork, carpentry and gardening. Many approved schools were known for strict discipline, and were essentially "open" institutions from which it was relatively easy to abscond. This allowed the authorities to claim that they were not "Reformatories", and set them apart from Borstal.
The age of criminal responsibility was raised from 7 to 8, and no-one could be hanged for an offence committed under the age of 18. The Act consolidated most existing child protection legislation, enforcing strict punishments for anyone over 16 found to have neglected a child. Guidelines on the employment of school-age children were set, with a minimum age of 14 for full-time employment. |
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| November 1938 | Kindertransport | A few days after Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, a delegation of British Jewish leaders appealed in person to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, on the eve of a major Commons debate on refugees. They requested that the British government permit the temporary admission of Jewish children and teenagers who would later re-emigrate, among other measures. The Jewish community promised to pay guarantees for the refugee children. The Cabinet decided that the nation would accept unaccompanied children ranging from infants up to teenagers under the age of 17. | |
| April 1939 | UK Government | The Military Training Act sought to 'call up' boys from age 18 as 'militiamen', to distinguish them from the regular army. The intention was for conscripts to undergo six months basic training before being discharged into an active reserve, for subsequent recall to short training periods and an annual camp. Superseded by the National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1939 enacted immediately by Parliament on 3 September 1939 - the date of declaration of war on Germany. Liability to full-time conscription was enforced on all males between 18 and 41. By 1942, all male British subjects resident in Great Britain aged 18–50 were liable to call-up, with only a few categories exempted, and female subjects aged 20–29.Template:National Service (No 2) Act 1941 | |
| 1944 | UK Government | In 1939 the government had considered raising school leaving age to 15, but this was delayed by the onset of World War Two. The Education Act succeeded in extending compulsory education to age 15, which took effect from 1947. | |
| 1945 | UNESCO | Following dissolution of the League of Nations, the United Nations was founded on 24 October, but had already in 1943 begun operating UNRRA, a relief organization to combat famine and disease in liberated Europe.
UNESCO was also established with Julian Huxley as the first Director General, standing at the centre of the post-World War II revival of education. Huxley was a prominent member of the British Eugenics Society, and one of the liberal intellectual elite of the time who believed in birth control and 'voluntary' sterilization for the "virtual elimination of the few lowest and most degenerate types". Huxley's six-year term of office, defined in the Charter, was reduced to two years, and UNESCO's education program became a collaboration with the International Bureau of Education, of which Jean Piaget was Director from 1929 until 1968. Piaget had declared during the second world war in 1940: "The common wealth of all civilizations is the education of the child." |
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| 11 December 1946 | United Nations General Assembly | The first major step on behalf of children taken by the United Nations, was UNICEF's creation in 1946 co-founded by Maurice Pate and Ludwik Rajchman to provide emergency food and healthcare to children in countries devastated by World War II. Two years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly. | |
| 1947 | UK Government | After World War II the National Service Act 1947 and subsequent measures ordained peacetime conscription of all males aged 18 for a set period (originally 1 year, later two years) until National Service ceased in 1960, with final Demobilization in 1963. Post-1945 some 1,132,872 men were conscripted to serve the British Army on reaching the age of 18. About 125,000 served in an active theatre of operations, and were expected to fight guerrillas or cope with riots or civil war situations with minimal training in such combat situations as Korea, Malaya, Suez and Aden. | |
| July 1948 | UK Government | The War landed more than a million children, evacuated from town centres, on to local councils with inadequate resources to care for them. Many were placed in foster homes and became emotionally disturbed, reacting by bed-wetting, stealing and running away. After the war, many children who had no families to return to, became 'nobody's children'.
The Children Act 1948 finally brought together responsibility for children without adequate parents, formerly dealt with under the Poor Law, and responsibility for delinquent children in Remand Homes+, formerly under the aegis of Local Education Authorities, with the requirement for every County and County Borough to establish a Children's Committee and appoint a Children's Officer. This has been the basis on which social workers have acted on behalf of children ever since. Detention Centres, under the Prison Department of the Home Office, were later introduced for miscreants, designed to administer a "short sharp shock" to older teenagers through drilling, physical jerks, military-style discipline, and cold showers before dawn. |
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| 20 November 1959 | United Nations General Assembly | The Declaration of the Rights of the Child, covering children's rights, maternal protection, health, adequate food, shelter and education, was adopted by the General Assembly in 1959 as a milestone in the commitment of world governments to focus on the needs of children — an issue once considered peripheral to development, but serving as a moral, rather than legally binding framework. | |
| 1967 | Court Lees Approved School | The Gibbens report into allegations of excessive punishment at the school prompted Home Secretary Roy Jenkins to announce its immediate closure, and the need to phase out corporal punishment in all Approved Schools. Under the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 responsibility for Approved Schools was devolved from the Home Office to local social services authorities, and they were renamed "Community Homes with Education". | |
| 1968 | Scotland | Following publication of the Kilbrandon report in 1964, the Social Work (Scotland) Act 1968 set up the Scottish Children’s Hearings system and revolutionised juvenile justice in Scotland by removing children in trouble from the criminal courts. The institutional framework for supporting children and families established on the basis of the key recommendations of the report has been largely unchanged since it was introduced in 1971. Changes from the latest review, currently under way in 2008, are planned for implementation from 2010. | |
| 1970 | United Kingdom | Having concluded that the historical causes for fixing 21 years as the age of majority were no longer relevant to contemporary society, the Latey Committee's recommendation was accepted, that the Age of majority, including voting age, should be reduced to 18 years. | |
| 1972 | UK Government | The Children Act 1972 set the minimum school leaving age at 16. After the 1972 Act schools were provided with temporary buildings to house their new final year, known as ROSLA (Raising School Leaving Age) buildings and were delivered to schools as self assembly packs. Although not designed for long-term use, many schools continued using them. | |
| 1981 | 1981 Brixton riot | One of the most serious riots in the 20th century fuelled by racial and social discord, brought black and white youth into violent confrontation with thousands of police. Further riots ensued that year throughout Britain. The Scarman Report detailed a loss of confidence and mistrust in the police and their methods of policing after liaison arrangements between police, community and local authority had collapsed. Recommendations for policing reforms were introduced in 1984. However, the 1999 MacPherson Inquiry into teenager Stephen Lawrence's murder, found that Scarman's recommendations had been ignored, and concluded that the Metropolitan Police Service was institutionally racist. | |
| 1984 | UK Government | Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 Part IV 37(15). A child is defined as under 17 years old. The Act provides for an Appropriate adult to be called to the police station whenever a child has been detained in police custody. | |
| 1985 | The Children's Society | The first refuge is opened for runaways. After 20+ years of campaigning, the government in 2008 set out plans to improve work with the estimated 100,000 under-16s who run away from home or care each year. | |
| 1985 | House of Lords | Gillick competence ruling in the case Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority, which sought to decide in medical law whether a child is able to consent to his or her own medical treatment, without the need for parental permission or knowledge. A child is defined as 16 years or younger. The ruling, which applies in England and Wales (but not in Scotland), is significant in that it is broader in scope than merely medical consent. It lays down that the authority of parents to make decisions for their minor children is not absolute, but diminishes with the child's evolving maturity; except in situations that are regulated otherwise by statute, the right to make a decision on any particular matter concerning the child shifts from the parent to the child when the child reaches sufficient maturity to be capable of making up his or her own mind on the matter requiring decision. | |
| 1986 | Child Migrants Scandal | Social worker Margaret Humphreys' received a letter from a woman in Australia who had been sent on a boat from the UK to a children's home in Australia, age four, and wanted help in tracing her parents in Britain. Humphrey’s subsequent research exposed the abuses of private emigration societies operating under the 1891 Custody of Children Act - a key subtext of which was the aim of supplying Commonwealth countries with sufficient "white stock" particularly in relation to Australia. A Department of Health Report shows that at least 150,000 children aged between 3 and 14 were sent to Commonwealth countries, in a programme that did not end until 1967. The children – the majority of whom were already in some form of social or charitable care – were cut off from their families and even falsely informed that they were orphans. Most were sent with the promise of a better life – but the reality was often very different, with many facing abuse and a regime of unpaid labour. A number of organisations, including Fairbridge, Barnardo's, the Salvation Army, the Children's Society and some Catholic groups, were involved in sending children abroad. | |
| 1986 | Wales, Bryn Estyn | Although Care workers in Clwyd had been convicted of sex abuse as long ago as 1976, with allegations and investigations in Gwynedd in the 1980s, the scandal was only exposed after Alison Taylor, a children's home head in Gwynedd, pressed her concerns at the highest levels. During police investigations into Ms Taylor's concerns in 1986-87, the authorities constructed a "wall of disbelief" from the outset. An inquiry ordered by the Home Secretary in 1996 into quality of care and standards of education, found both to be below acceptable levels in all the homes investigated. | |
| 1989 | United Nations General Assembly | The UN Convention on Children's Rights was adopted into international law. | |
| 1989 | UK Government | The Children Act 1989 was intended as the main piece of legislation setting out the legal framework for child protection procedures e.g. enquiries and conferences and introduced the notion of parental responsibility. Provisions apply to all children under 18. It was very wide-ranging and covered all paid childcarers outside the parental home for under-8's, adoption and fostering, and many aspects of family law including divorce. Although the Act aimed to enshrine consistency with the UNCRC approach that 'the best interests of the child are pre-eminent', UN monitoring committee reports issued in 1995 and 2002 noted that the principle of primary consideration for the best interests of the child was not consistently reflected in legislation and policies affecting children. | |
| 1990/1991 | The Pindown Enquiry | Allan Levy QC inquired into a method of discipline used in Staffordshire children's homes in the 1980s. Pindown was named after the notion that it would "pin down the problem" relating to a particular "difficult" child, and involved locking children in "pindown rooms", sometimes for periods of weeks or months. The 2000 Kilgallon report into Northumberland housing for children with special needs revealed that Pindown tactics were employed between 1972 and 1984. | |
| 12 July 1990 | Phillip Knight | The 17-year-old died in custody at HM Prison Swansea as a result of self-inflicted injuries. An inquest yielded an open verdict. Knight was the first of 30 children to die in custody since 1990. The inquest into 16 year old Joseph Scholes' death in custody in March 2002, led the coroner to support the call for a public inquiry. | |
| 1991 | United Kingdom | UK ratification of United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, with a number of reservations. UNCRC defines a child as under 18 years old, unless an earlier age of majority is recognized by a country's law. | |
| February 1993 | James Bulger | The murder of two-year old James Bulger, by Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, both aged 10, prompted national debate about the relationship between Childhood and criminality, which led to abolition in 1998 of the distinction with regard to criminal responsibility between young persons aged at least 14 and children aged between 10 and 14. | |
| June 1994 | Fred West | After their children alerted authorities to the West's rape of their daughter, investigations revealed that between 1967 and 1987, Fred and his wife Rosemary tortured, raped and murdered at least 12 girls and young women, whose disappearance had previously gone unnoticed. The case highlighted the inadequacies of the National Missing Persons Bureau and eventually gave rise to the National Policing Improvement Agency established in 2007. | |
| February 1995 | United Nations | The committee responsible for monitoring implementation of UNCRC issued first concluding observations on the UK's progress. | |
| 1990–1996 | UK Government | Concerns about children in residential care led to the commissioning of 10 public enquiries between 1990 and 1996, including the Utting report (1991) and the Warner report (1992), which exposed large-scale institutional abuse of children and young people. Sir William Utting CBE was Chief Inspector of Social Services during the period when some of the worst cases of abuse happened. Asked why safeguarding steps were not taken when he was directly responsible for overseeing Social Services, he replied: "...the crude answer to that question would be ignorance. There were tremendous pressures, I think, on everybody in the system at that time to deny that those of us working in the system and accepted by the community as being 'devoted to the interests of children' were in fact exploiting them and abusing them. So there was a period of ignorance and...denial and then the ...process of the revelation of these awful things that had gone on for a long time." | |
| 1998 | UK Government | The Human Rights Act 1998 received Royal Assent, mostly coming into force in 2002. | |
| January 1998 | UK Government | The Public Interest Disclosure Act received Royal Assent, paving the way for whistleblowers of child abuse and other illegal corporate activities to receive support and protection via the industrial tribunal system. Some employees are excluded e.g. those in the army. | |
| 1998 | UK Government | The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 abolished the distinction in England and Wales with regard to criminal responsibility between young persons aged at least 14 and children aged between 10 and 14. Hitherto, a child over 10 but under 14 was deemed in law to be doli incapax, i.e. incapable of crime, unless the prosecution could satisfy the court that a particular child was in fact of such maturity, education and social development as to rebut that presumption. (Children under 10 in England and Wales remain doli incapax, as they have been since the minimum age for criminal responsibility was raised from 8 to 10 under the Children and Young Persons Act 1963; power under the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 to raise the minimum age from 10 to 14 has never been implemented. In Scotland the mimimum age remains at 8, but the presumption of doli incapax also remains). Describing Youth Courts as the 'secret garden' of the legal system, Home Secretary Jack Straw established the Youth Justice system, with Restorative Justice premised as the key underlying principle for resolving youth crime. | |
| 1999 | UK Government | Protection of Children Act 1999 required a list to be kept of persons considered unsuitable to work with children. | |
| 1999 | Professor Sir Roy Meadow | In the trial of Sally Clark for allegedly murdering her two babies at age 11 weeks and 8 weeks, Meadow's testimony as expert witness postulated Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, or MSbP, convinced that many apparent cot deaths were in fact the result of child abuse brought on by MSbP. Clark's conviction was overturned in 2003, after 3 years of wrongful imprisonment. Throughout the 1990s Meadow had contributed to a number of convictions of (mostly) women whose children had suffered apparent cot deaths and a greater number of parents, whom Meadow suspected of MSbP, had their children forcibly removed and taken into care. Meadow was struck off the medical register, but reinstated in 2006 after an appeal. The Society of Expert Witnesses had commented that the severity of his punishment would cause many professionals to reconsider whether to stand as expert witnesses. | |
| 1999 | UK Government | Prime Minister Tony Blair announced the historic aim to end child poverty in a generation. At that time, the UK had the worst child poverty rate in the European Union. The Government set ambitious targets to cut child poverty by a half by 2010, en route to eradicating it by 2020. | |
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Young People's Rights In The United Kingdom
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—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)