Casey Anthony was almost a saint compared to some of our early Americans

[Rozlee]

It's America's dirtiest secret. Maybe because back then, it wasn't considered a crime or even out of the norm. "Children should be seen, not heard," was still centuries away and a heavenly concept to the childen living in the American colonies and during the 1800s and even the early 1900s. Both child and spousal abuse were the norm. In the realm of spousal abuse, the Code of Hammurabi states that a wife should be subservient to her husband; he can inflict any punishment he desires on her. During the American colonial period, child abuse was rampant. A child that died by mischance during a beating by a parent was considered saved and gone to Paradise. He had died while receiving grace. The parents weren't ostrasized; they were comforted that they had done right according to scripture. After all, doesn't the New Testament in Matthew 15:4 say: "Honor thy father and thy mother; he that curseth his father or mother, let him die"?
In the Colonial period, spousal abuse was deemed illegal. But, it was a law that was never prosecuted as the magistrates felt it would cause more bad publicity than the situation warranted and possibly even ruin the man's good name. Incest was another thing that we'd like to not think about relating to that period of time. But, the fact remained that several members of an extended family would live in close confines, with adults sleeping with children and with children witnessing sex acts between adults. Did it happen? You tell me.

Child labor was another type of horrific child abuse. Children of the desperately poor or even from unscrupulous parents looking for easy money, would sell their children to be street sweepers, bricklayers, even coal miners from the colonial period to the early 20th century. Many times, they were being sold into sex slavery. Churches at the time had potter's fields crammed with tiny bodies that had been laid outside of places of employment or even thrown carelessly by street sides; children that had died in industrial accidents, from illness or, I have no doubt, from beatings.

Women in colonial and Old West days were still considered chattel by their husbands and fathers. The age of consent was 10 years old until the late 1800s in many places. In Texas, the 10 year statute was still on the books until the 1950s (go figure). My husband's great grandmother was married at 12. I can't conceive this. Child abuse and beatings were the norm. Child murder was considered a crime, but very rarely prosecuted. Kit Carson, the sheriff that brought down Jesse James, was once looking for citizens to deputize. He approached a rancher to recruit him and his sons. The rancher commented regretfully that he only had 2 kids left out of 14 and the 2 were simple-minded. Kit indicated the 12 graves and crosses in the man's field and told him that if he hadn't had such a heavy hand in correcting his children, he might still have them with him. No condemnation. Just an observation. Back then, lawmen and sheriffs had large areas to cover and didn't have the convenience of modern vehicles to cover them. They also rarely responed to anything that didn't involve a train robbery, cattle rustling, horse theft, a bank robbery, or any crime that wasn't one of property. In poor areas, there usually wasn't even a sheriff. The well-to-do were the ones that needed their interests protected. Among the riff-raff, if someone shot his brother, it was considered a family matter and the family could handle it. If there was a bar fight and someone shot someone else, let the families of the two hash it out. Sometimes the sheriff would respond, sometimes he wouldn't. Who knew? And among it all, the children got beaten. They got head injuries and died. They got internal injuries and died. Oh, well. There were always more where they came from.

In 1910, the Supreme Court ruled in Thompson v. Thompson that a woman had no cause for action on an assault and battery charge against her husband because it "would open the doors of the courts to accusations of all sorts of one spouse against the other and bring into public complaints for assaults, slander and libel." I remember corporal punishment in school being severe enough to draw blood and leave bruises, but nothing was done about it. My much, much older brothers and sisters, who went to school in the 40s and 50s, tell tales of teachers hair pulling, slapping and throwing students against walls. This was in rural Texas, though. I'd like to think that it was only because Texas kinda has a great deal of Troglodytes. Again, you tell me.

Casey Anthony may, or may not have murdered her daughter. I hope whoever did winds up on a rotisserie in hell. I hate it when people tell me that things like this never happened when they were growing up. That people were more decent and god-fearing. Tell me another one. The children have always been victims. They're victims still.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. Or our latest ones.

:(

[david_vincent]

2. And the governor of Maine

wants to bring back child labor. What a thought leader !!

[bemildred]

3. Women, children, and 90% of the men have been considered chattels since the rise of "civilization."

It is only quite recently that such arrangements have been called into question, and reform is far from done.

[SteppingRazor]

4. I have a couple problems with the historical value of this.

First, yes it's true that "several members of an extended family would live in close confines, with adults sleeping with children and with children witnessing sex acts between adults."

This was the norm. Single family homes on the frontier meant one long room, often built with sod, in which parents would live with their entire brood, which often greatly outnumbered typical families today. It's an absurd leap in logic to assume that, just because these folks were sleeping in the same room with their children and, yes, making more children, it follows that sexual abuse must have been de rigueur.

Second, your one and only distinct historical fact regarding the Old West period, that Kit Carson was "the sheriff that brought down Jesse James" is so ridiculously off the mark that anyone with even a passing interest in the history of the 19th century American west would do a spit-take upon reading. Kit Carson died in 1868 when Jesse James was just beginning his career as an outlaw in the post-Civil War era, a career that continued well into the 1870s. Moreover, James was not "brought down" by the law, but was instead murdered by a member of his own gang in 1882, more than a decade after Carson's own demise.

I don't dispute that women and children -- children even moreso than women -- lived essentially as "chattel" (your word) in the years before the modern era. Indeed, I would argue that going back even further, abuses against children were even more horrifying than any that can be cited in the colonial or early American periods. (examples that spring immediately to mind include the Children's Crusade of the 13th Century and a multitude of examples throughout the Mongolian and Mogul dynasties in Asia.) I totally agree with you that women and children in early America lived lives far different, and far more oppressive, than women and children in contemporary life. But you don't do your argument much service with shoddy scholarship.

On edit: Also, as far as Carson, worth noting that the man was never a sheriff, or any other form of peace officer. He was a trapper, soldier, scout and all-around frontiersman, especially in the pre-Civil War Old West, an era in which Jesse James was in diapers. (Had diapers existed then.)

[Rozlee]

6. You're right. I got my facts wrong.

I meant Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, not Jesse James and Kit Carson. I heard that one on the History Channel a year or so ago and it stuck, but I got the two mixed up. The show was talking about Old West laws and mentioned some quirky stuff. I also liked the one about how indiscreet and insensitive death notices were. Something like: "John Smith died when he got drunk and fell and hit his head."

[SteppingRazor]

7. Now You're talkin'.

I can't speak to the historicity of Pat Garrett telling a family what you have him saying, but that's definitely a lawman who killed the outlaw in question. I've read the man's autobiography, though, and there's no mention of anything like what you're saying (which doesn't mean it's not true. Garrett's autobiography is a dubious source, despite the first-person account)

[Lionessa]

5. Colonial times? My grandmother was sold to a family as a servant

when she was 9, that would be in 1919. Now the family that purchased her were nice enough by her telling of it, but she got no wage, she got a bed and some education, but otherwise not much till she left at age 16. She was so accustomed to being that slavish girl, that she then married a hotly mean Armenian 48 years old who she slaved for till he died at age 99.

Much of what you say is true enough, and carried on long after the colonial times. Hell even my father, who was extremely physically abusive to us kids, never had any interference because of his financial stature (?). IE rich don't get prosecuted when they beat their kids to the point of hospitalization numerous times. Also I have just left Idaho, and the amount of sexual and physical abuse received by LDS women and girls seems to be rampant, yet they are also rarely turned in to the authorities...well from the stories I've been told, the church authorities were informed but they don't think incest and child abuse are bad things apparently and it never seems to proceed to the "real" authorities.

These things have been happening throughout time, still go on today here and even worse in some other countries and on reservations here in the US (see the Vanguard documentary "Rape on the Reservation" on CurrentTV). Man is a violent species.

[indurancevile]

8. The British government's policy was to ship children in social services off to the colonies

as labor INTO THE 1960S.

Speaking of horrific.

Child migrants, 1618-1967

These are the children sent from Britain and Ireland to colonies and former colonies with the express intention of helping to culturally swamp the native peoples by increasing the white population.

The practice began in 1618 with a shipment of children to Virginia, and did not stop until 1967. The shameful history of the practice was almost forgotten until recently, when Margaret Humphreys and the Child Migrants' Trust began investigating and trying to reunite surviving children with their parents.

The 1930s to 50s were the period of greatest activity, when the primary destinations were Australia, Canada, Zimbabwe and New Zealand. The children were usually aged between five and 12 years. Mainly they were taken from children's homes and orphanages. Children were told that their parents were dead or had abandoned them (often a deliberate lie, as most in fact still had parents); the parents were seldom consulted: their children simply disappeared. The children were shipped overseas and usually housed in large children's homes instead of being fostered or adopted. This compares unfavorably with the treatment of the children on the US Orphan Trains.

Investigations over recent years have revealed large-scale physical, emotional and sexual abuse in the destination institutions, with children being used as virtual slaves before being shoved out the doors when they were considered old enough to fend for themselves.

http://famous.adoption.com/famous/child-migrants.html


Also the US orphan trains: a pretty face is sometimes put on the practice but it wasn't pretty.

Eighty years ago, Elliot Bobo was taken from his alcoholic father's home, given a small cardboard suitcase, and put on board an "orphan train" bound for Arkansas. Bobo never saw his father again. He was one of tens of thousands of neglected and orphaned children who over a 75-year period were uprooted from the city and sent by train to farming communities to start new lives with new families. Elliot Bobo's remarkable story is part ofThe Orphan Trains.
Photo of orphans The story of this ambitious and finally controversial effort to rescue poor and homeless children begins in the 1850s, when thousands of children roamed the streets of New York in search of money, food and shelter--prey to disease and crime. Many sold matches, rags, or newspapers to survive. For protection against street violence, they banded together and formed gangs. Police, faced with a growing problem, were known to arrest vagrant children--some as young as five--locking them up with adult criminals.

In 1853, a young minister, Charles Loring Brace, became obsessed by the plight of these children, who because of their wanderings, were known as "street Arabs." A member of a prominent Connecticut family, Brace had come to New York to complete his seminary training. Horrified by the conditions he saw on the street, Brace was persuaded there was only one way to help these "children of unhappy fortune."

"The great duty," he wrote, "is to get utterly out of their surroundings and to send them away to kind Christian homes in the country."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan/

The actual agenda of these "good works" was to provide cheap labor for imperial expansion.

[Rozlee]

9. Thank you for your input. Those are such horrific stories.

Another thing I didn't put in was the plight of the Brazilian orphans since I was concentrating on mainly the early U.S. It's heart-rending since Americans are also to blame in part for continuing this useless war on drugs. The urban streets of Brazil teem with unwanted children. The United States hasn't done much about it as have UNICEF and other humanitarian groups in the last decade or so. The children are recruited by drug dealers since they're expendable if they're caught in the middle of deals that go bad. They sniff glue, they steal for food, pick pockets from tourists and offer themselves up for prostitution. There were even bounties from business owners and many even suspected, the police, to kill them. Many of them die violent deaths. It's sickening to think of these things still happening all over the world. And of the greedy men and politicians that keep the policies in place that create wars, dictators and the poverty that causes so much of this suffering.

[Warpy]

10. Childhood as a separate age is a fairly recent phenomenon

I recall reading that children were considered infants and completely dependent on Mom until about the age of three, at which time they were considered miniature adults and had to start learning the family trade. Many were self supporting by the age of eight. Female children were often promised in marriage before puberty and married at puberty, so they had to spend what we call childhood learning how to manage a home and care for younger children.

Really, we have mostly the Victorians to thank for the establishment of childhood as a separate age that should be spent learning and engaged in play rather than working, although of course this was entirely class based until women got the vote.

However, even now children are being born to women who don't want them, blocked from abortion by religious and other bullying or lack of funds. While that is allowed to continue, we're going to continue to see abuse, murder, and abandonment in trash cans and dumpsters.

[Cherchez la Femme]

11. Ah, but you see, the time is NOW

And we don't fucking kill our kids for whatever reason -- to go partying or to make life easier for us.

I swear, it takes this upside-down Democratic Party to try to turn such a ...being... as Casey Anthony not only into a victim

but a hero. :puke: