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He that spareth his rod hateth his
son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.
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Proverbs 13:24
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In the past the Christian Church condoned all manner of evil
done to children. It tried and executed them for witchcraft
and for other offences. It saw nothing wrong in beating them
frequently and severely for minor wrongdoing — even for
other people's wrongdoing. It terrified them with stories
of Hell. It allowed them to contract arranged marriages. It
failed to speak out against child labour because it saw nothing
at all wrong in the practice. For many centuries the Church
opposed the education of poor children, except in the few cases
where boys could be drawn into its own service. Girls were denied
education altogether. In punishing children for sins they had
not committed, there seems to have been almost no concept of
fairness or rights. Thus, the Church made much of the concept
of bastardy:
Bastardy, or illegitimacy, was a condition imposed upon a
child by the canon law as a punishment for the sin of the
parents who conceived it by illicit connection. By a legal
fiction, a child born out of wedlock was no one's child,
filius nullius*.
The idea of punishing children for the acts of their parents
could easily be justified on scriptural grounds:
...I the L ord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity
of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth
generation of them that hate me; Exodus 20:5
Also, as theological authorities pointed out, God had punished
the children of Sodom by death, for the sins of their fathers*,
so the punishment of innocent children was easily justified*.
Good Christians were, as they pointed out, only following God's own precedent.
The stigma of illegitimacy has now virtually disappeared in
secular societies, and the civil law has been amended, but canon
law continues to discriminate against the illegitimate. In the
Church of England they cannot for example become bishops. Other
Churches stick to the traditional line that illegitimacy is
a bar to ordination. In the past the Church punished other children
for the supposed sins of their fathers, and grandchildren for
the sins of their grandfathers*.
The Church has always been strong on punishment and has only
recently adopted a cautious stand on corporal punishment for
children. As usual the worst excess could be justified on biblical
grounds:
The blueness of a wound cleanseth away evil ...
Proverbs 20:30
Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod
of correction shall drive it far from him.
Proverbs 22:15
Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest
him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with
the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell. Proverbs 23:13-14
At the time of writing there is still a steady flow of children
who die at the hands of Christian parents and guardians who
interpret these passages in the traditional way. Several are
reported in national newspapers each year. Under secular pressure
corporal punishment of children in schools was made illegal
in many countries in the late twentieth century. Church schools
— and only church schools — were still mounting legal
challenges to this into the third millennium*.
Their arguments were based on the biblical passages cited above,
which, as the complainants pointed out, not only permit but
also require corporal punishment.
Institutional abuse — physical, emotional and sexual —
also continued well into the twentieth century. The abuse was
widespread, and hardly a secret within the Churches, yet no
one seems to have thought of informing the secular authorities,
or doing anything to stop the abuse. Children without parents
to look after their welfare were particularly vulnerable. The
"orphans" who were taken from their parents and sent
to British colonies were routinely abused, along with real orphans.
To take just one example abuse continued for over 90 years at
an orphanage run by the Sisters of Mercy until it was exposed
in 1976. Nuns had used a red-hot poker on one child to "exorcise
the Devil" and forced another to put her leg in boiling
water (causing permanent damage) as a punishment for not washing
in hot enough water. Another developed a dangerous infection
after a nun used pliers to pull out her toenails. Injured children
were hidden from visitors in an underground cell without bedding,
ventilation or light. Sexual abuse by priests and other men
was "routine". Professor Bruce Grundy, who investigated
the Order's activities, referred to the "Madness,
ruthless and sadistic madness, on the part of at least some
of the nuns, and the depthless depravity on the part of some
of the men who inhabited the place"*.
These activities were far from unusual, and similar behaviour
has been exposed in numerous Christian orphanages throughout
the world.
The Medieval Inquisition was permitted to torture witnesses,
but not if they were girls below the age of 12 or boys below
the age of 14. This of course did not stop its zealous officers,
who believed themselves to be doing God's work, and who
needed to answer to no one when they ignored the rules. In England
children over the age of seven were liable to the death penalty,
and few if any clergymen seem to have found this at all questionable,
at least until the rise of secularism. A 13-year-old was hanged
at Maidstone as late as 1831 and a 14-year-old in 1833*.
For years to come, younger children would be sentenced to death,
but were invariably reprieved, until the death penalty for those
aged under 16 was abolished in 1908.
To listen to the Church's current views on the subject
of sexual abuse of children, one could easily form the opinion
that the Church has always been opposed to sexual activity below
the age of 16, or even older. In fact when the Church had control
of these matters the age of consent to sexual relations was
7 (though marriage contracts were voidable up to the age of
12 for a girl and 14 for a boy). In practice a marriage between
a grown man and a little girl was as good as any other in the
eyes of the Church*. In
England the marriage age was raised to 16 in 1929*,
though many other states that have retained Christian custom
and practice have opted for the ages of 12 and 14. In the US,
the state of Delaware retained 7 as the age of consent well
into the second half of the twentieth century.
The Christian record on children's rights is no better
than its record on other matters. The Churches opposed the education
of poor boys and all girls. European Churches were responsible
for the trial, torture, conviction, imprisonment and execution
of children as young as five or six, often contravening the
civil law. In the nineteenth century the Churches opposed the
abolition of child labour, and continued to be party to a wide
range of abuse, mental, physical and sexual well into the twentieth
century. In short, the Church has never supported the rights
of children. Mainstream Churches made no more effort to end
child labour than they did to end slavery. In England, Anglicans
consistently opposed unbelievers like Jeremy Bentham, J. S.
Mill and the philanthropist Robert Owen (1771-1858), who championed
the improvement of social conditions for working children. Children's rights are an invention of secular philosophers. Elsewhere,
children's champions included almost anyone except the
Churches. For example, the first law in Germany to prohibit
the employment of children (under the age of nine) in factories
was passed in 1839 at the behest of the military authorities,
who were concerned at the poor physical condition of their recruits.
Nowhere did any mainstream Churches lead the move to protect
children.
As in every area of reform, the Churches have followed secular
opinion and few in the west are now prepared to defend the opinions
that they held with absolute certainty in the nineteenth century.
As so often there are exceptions. It is still possible to find
pockets of traditional belief from Church schools insisting
on their rights to beat children to pastors advocating the killing,
torture or abandonment of possessed and bewitched children.
In 2005 it wasestimated that 70% of the street children in Kinshassa
had been abandoned by their parents because of accusations of
witchcraft*. With Christianity
expanding fast across Africa and Kinshasa as a belweather, there
may now be more children being tortured and starved by Christian
leaders and by Christian parents than ever before.
More social issues:
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