[Report 1946] / School Medical Officer of Health, Cumberland County Council.

  • Cumberland County Council
Date:
1946
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Credit: [Report 1946] / School Medical Officer of Health, Cumberland County Council. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The report, of course, also gives instances where children live in happy and cheerful surroundings not open to criticism. The total number of children in- volved is some 125,000. No attempt is made, and per- haps this would have been difficult, to divide the 125,000 children into those whose circumstances are satisfac- tory and those whose circumstances are not. It is well- known that there are many institutions, voluntary and otherwise, and many foster homes, in which the chil- dren are looked after with intelligence, care and affec- tion, and there are many children for whom their ad- mission to such institutions has brought the first ray of decency into their lives. There have been several re- cent cases in which the removal of a child from an insti- tution back to the care of parents or relatives has been to his, or her, grave disadvantage. However, let us assume that 50% of the 125,000 children are satisfactorily looked after and that 50% are not. This would mean that there are some 60,000 chil- dren in the country living in institutions or homes which are drab, uninteresting, and not conducted on intelligent and sympathetic lines. Nevertheless, all these things can be put right comparatively easily and in a com- paratively short space of time. Even if every institu- tion or home were to be transformed by a fairy’s wand into a little heaven on earth to-morrow, the real prob- lem would still remain untouched. In other words the report of the Curtis Committee has dealt only with a symptom and not with the disease. It is merely what is known in medical circles as a palliative, a palliative being something which is employed to relieve the symptoms when the original disease is beyond cure. What is the original disease? It is the neglect of and cruelty to children in their own homes. There is one organisation — and so far as I know only one — which has attempted to grapple with this matter on a national scale. That is the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty tp Children, and the annual re- ports of that Society are illuminating, and at least as worthy of national attention as the Curtis Report. Un- fortunately they do not get the same attention. What are the facts? The annual reports of the N.S.P,C.C. show that over 9 period of years over
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