Child Welfare Era

Child welfare has been a social issue that we have been struggling with for a long time. According to University of the Pacific Law Professor John Myers, child protection in America can be divided into three eras. The first era is from colonial times until 1875. At this time, there were no child protection laws. The Humane Society was established in 1835 by the National Federation of Child Rescue to investigate cases of child abuse and neglect. Almost twenty years later, in 1853, the Children’s Aid Society was founded in New York as a response to the states problem of orphaned and abandoned children. The first case of child abuse that was criminally prosecuted was in New York in 1874. It involved a little girl named Mary Ellen who was repeatedly

Because of this case, Henry Bergh, an animal protection advocate and his attorney Elbridge Gerry who both helped in the rescue of Mary Ellen started a charity for child protection that they called the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC). This charity was the first of its kind as it was solely devoted to child protection and by 1922; there were almost 300 child protection agencies across the United States although most were in urban and suburban communities. In 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt assembled the White House Conference on Child Dependency which was created to “publicize standards of child care.” By 1926, 18 states had some sort of law regarding child maltreatment and the issues surrounding it. In 1912, the Children’s Bureau was founded to manage the child welfare efforts which included giving services to victims of child maltreatment. That was closely followed by the Sheppard-Towner Act which provided money from the federal government to mothers and babies for health services from 1921 to

The last three states eventually followed suit. There was a big push towards making children’s charities public so they can reach more children especially the ones that lived in rural areas. In 1935, Douglas Falconer, the author of Child and Youth Protection said, “For many years responsibility for child protection was left almost entirely to private agencies….Great sections of child population were untouched by them and in many other places the service rendered was perfunctory and of poor standard….The belief has become increasingly accepted that is children are to be protected from neglect the service must be performed by public agencies.” Before this time, there were next to no public child protection agencies, but the push to make it public was successful and more and more states began to adopt child welfare services. That same year, in 1935, as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, Congress passed the Social Security Act. In the Social Security Act, there was a vague clause that gave the Children’s Bureau the authority to cooperate with public welfare agencies to ensure child welfare services to children especially those living in rural