Social Work and Violence in the Home

Battered children and battered Wives had always existed. In the 1950s and 1960s the children slowly became more ‘visible’ in the public eye through the work of individual paediatricians, the NSPCC and others. Some were removed from their homes under place of safety orders and brought before the juvenile courts under the Children and Young Persons Act, 1933 as being in need of care or protection. The co-ordinating committees of the 1950s (discussed in volume 1, chapter 15, section on ‘Co-ordinating Committees’) were a first step towards earlier identification and co-ordinated action by different professionals and services, both statutory and voluntary. Then came the Ingleby Committee ( 1960 ), charged to suggest how to prevent ‘cruelty to . . . juveniles’. Its Report led to the Children and Young Persons Act, 1963 which gave children’s departments wider powers to do preventive work.