Criminality and economic conditions

by Willem Adriaan Bonger

Then children need to grow up in an environment not poisoned by cares, one in which poverty does not harden the heart, and extinguish all gayety, and where the knowledge necessary for education is not wanting. Further, in this class the father has generally no opportunity to busy himself with the education of his children in consequence of the long duration of his hours of labor outside of the home. A great many working men have to leave home in the morning to go to work long before their children are awake, to return only after the little ones have already been put to bed; and the situation is much the same where the laborer works at night, and consequently sleeps during the day.

The development of capitalism has led to the paid labor of married women, and consequently to one of the most important causes of the demoralization of the children of the working class. When there is no one to watch a child, when he is left to himself, he becomes demoralized. In his work, “The Condition of the Working-Class in England”, F. Engels has put the situation briefly: “The employment of the wife [in the factory] dissolves the family utterly and of necessity, and this dissolution, in our present society, which is based upon the family, brings the most demoralizing consequences, both for parents and for the children. A mother who has no time to trouble herself about her child, to perform the most ordinary loving services for it during the first year, who scarcely indeed sees it, can be no real mother to the child, must inevitably grow indifferent to it, and treat it unlovingly, like a stranger. The children who grow up under such conditions are entirely ruined for later family life, can never feel at home in the family which they themselves found, because they have always been accustomed to isolation, and they contribute therefore to the already general undermining of the family in the working class.”[80] [[319]]

Finally, when, through death or otherwise, the parents are no longer in a position to support and raise their children, they are left to their fate, unless there are charitable persons or benevolent institutions that wish to take charge of them. For the state, for reasons shown above, does not lay upon itself the duty of caring for such children.

It remains now to speak of the lower proletariat, among whom prostitutes and criminals are included. The education of these persons is not only much neglected, as is often the case with the children of the proletariat, of whom it may be said that they receive a negative education—but these receive in addition a positive education in evil. It might be possible to dispute the advantages of a good education, but it is indisputable that children brought up by immoral people, or even incited to evil (prostitution or crime) run the greatest risk, unless exceptional circumstances present themselves, of becoming persons hurtful to society.

In this connection it is necessary to fix our attention, finally, upon the situation in which illegitimate children find themselves. Since marriage, at once the consequence and support of existing social conditions, is the only form of sexual union legally recognized, illegitimate children are legally and socially treated as pariahs.[81]

It is difficult to form an idea of the great number of children who, in our present society, are neglected or abandoned. The following passage may help form some conception of it: “If the reader will imagine a procession of 109,000 children marching past him, and notice attentively child after child as it goes by, he will get some idea of the extent of the suffering of children with which the ‘National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in England’ has actually had to do during the first ten years of its existence.

“The first 25,437 are sufferers from injuries inflicted upon them with boots, crockery, pans, shovels, straps, ropes, pokers, fire, boiling water, in short with every imaginable instrument that came to the hand of the brutal and vindictive parents—covered with wounds and bruises, burned, scalded, and covered with plasters and bandages.

“Then come 62,887 sufferers from neglect and starvation—covered with dirt, eruptions, and sores, trembling, in rags, half-naked, pale, weak, faint, feeble, pining, starving, dying—many of them borne in the arms of the nurses of the hospitals. [[320]]

“Then come 712 funeral processions, where the maltreatment ended fatally.

“Then come 12,663 little beings, their sufferings displayed to turn the lazy and cruel benevolence of the street to those who are answerable for their pallor, leanness, and coughs—most of these, too, are still in arms, but in the arms of vile drunkards and vagabonds.