Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home by David Cohen Page A
Authors: David Cohen
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better in respect of their most vulnerable lives. Beck was determined to show the way by fashioning a Child Welfare Branch whose main objective was to ensure that the kids it dealt with required no future contact with the authorities. Taking their cue from both developments, officials soon stopped using the term ‘industrial school’ altogether. By 1920 there was only one such institution for boys anyway, in Caversham, Dunedin, with another centre for older boys located in Levin. Institutionalisation had come to be seen as a last resort.
At the same time the government decided to systemise what residential work it did control by promulgating the Child Welfare Act of 1925, arguably Beck’s most enduring legacy, which gathered pace with the introduction of the notion of the social security system introduced in the 1930s and was to hold sway for the next 60 years. This Act also legislated for a separate children’s court for offences other than manslaughter or murder — typically a small room in a regular courthouse where a uniformed cop readout the evidence to a magistrate seated behind a small desk facing the relevant guardians and social workers, and the child, who was usually required to stand in front of him while the case was heard.
Here again, the word ‘court’ was a bit misleading, since those who appeared in them enjoyed no presumption of innocence, had no right of appeal and sometimes were not even informed what decision had been made, except in cases where the court decided to show leniency and place a child under supervision, in which case a copy of what became known as Form E. 5/118 was duly sent to the ‘offending’ parents:
Today your child .............................. was placed under the supervision of a Child Welfare Officer for .......... year(s), and this information in the form of a legal order will be sent to you later .
During the period of supervision, any instructions of the Child Welfare Officer, or any conditions imposed by that officer, must be complied with. If the Child Welfare Officer is not satisfied with your child’s conduct, or with living conditions, your child may again be brought before the Court .
If this should happen, the child could possibly be taken away from home, a step best avoided by your co-operation with the Child Welfare Officer in the interests of the child .
Legislation provides for a right of appeal against the Order, and should you wish to exercise this right, I suggest you consult a solicitor immediately .
However, the government remained a stern taskmaster. The petty nature of much of the offending — theft, truancy, drunkenness — disproportionate to the very considerable power of the children’s courts; as well as dispatching these high-handed edicts in minorcases, they committed children to institutions and could order that the names of boys be gazetted by the police in order that their occupational movements could be tracked through their adult years, thus making whatever sentence they passed a lifetime ruling. The child welfare agency also had its functions expanded; the Act granted institutional managers the right to administer whippings, for example, a practice only outlawed in the early 1940s but still permitted to be administered by the agency’s own welfare officers.
Following the war, and especially from the time of the country’s first National government in 1949, the so-called child savers began agitating for even more emphatic solutions to the problems that were now dominating the political chatter.
According to a report presented to Parliament in June 1949, the preceding year had seen 2520 young people in residence in ‘orphanages’ — just 104 of these cases related to children whose parents were in fact deceased. Rather, these kids were in institutions because some perceived weakness, ill fortune or irresponsibility on the part of the parents had led to their offspring being committed to care. And their number was clearly on the
At the same time the government decided to systemise what residential work it did control by promulgating the Child Welfare Act of 1925, arguably Beck’s most enduring legacy, which gathered pace with the introduction of the notion of the social security system introduced in the 1930s and was to hold sway for the next 60 years. This Act also legislated for a separate children’s court for offences other than manslaughter or murder — typically a small room in a regular courthouse where a uniformed cop readout the evidence to a magistrate seated behind a small desk facing the relevant guardians and social workers, and the child, who was usually required to stand in front of him while the case was heard.
Here again, the word ‘court’ was a bit misleading, since those who appeared in them enjoyed no presumption of innocence, had no right of appeal and sometimes were not even informed what decision had been made, except in cases where the court decided to show leniency and place a child under supervision, in which case a copy of what became known as Form E. 5/118 was duly sent to the ‘offending’ parents:
Today your child .............................. was placed under the supervision of a Child Welfare Officer for .......... year(s), and this information in the form of a legal order will be sent to you later .
During the period of supervision, any instructions of the Child Welfare Officer, or any conditions imposed by that officer, must be complied with. If the Child Welfare Officer is not satisfied with your child’s conduct, or with living conditions, your child may again be brought before the Court .
If this should happen, the child could possibly be taken away from home, a step best avoided by your co-operation with the Child Welfare Officer in the interests of the child .
Legislation provides for a right of appeal against the Order, and should you wish to exercise this right, I suggest you consult a solicitor immediately .
However, the government remained a stern taskmaster. The petty nature of much of the offending — theft, truancy, drunkenness — disproportionate to the very considerable power of the children’s courts; as well as dispatching these high-handed edicts in minorcases, they committed children to institutions and could order that the names of boys be gazetted by the police in order that their occupational movements could be tracked through their adult years, thus making whatever sentence they passed a lifetime ruling. The child welfare agency also had its functions expanded; the Act granted institutional managers the right to administer whippings, for example, a practice only outlawed in the early 1940s but still permitted to be administered by the agency’s own welfare officers.
Following the war, and especially from the time of the country’s first National government in 1949, the so-called child savers began agitating for even more emphatic solutions to the problems that were now dominating the political chatter.
According to a report presented to Parliament in June 1949, the preceding year had seen 2520 young people in residence in ‘orphanages’ — just 104 of these cases related to children whose parents were in fact deceased. Rather, these kids were in institutions because some perceived weakness, ill fortune or irresponsibility on the part of the parents had led to their offspring being committed to care. And their number was clearly on the
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