One woman’s dying wish...
THE CHILDREN1st story began in a dilapidated NewYork tenement in the 1870s.
A voluntary missionary visited a woman dying of tuberculosis in the notorious Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood and asked her if there was anything she could do for her.
The frail woman whispered:“My time is short. But I can only die a peaceful death if you save the child next door.”
At that moment, the missionary heard blows being struck and the screams of a child in the home next door.
The dying woman said the girl, eightyear-old Mary Ellen, was beaten night and day by her adoptive parents.
The missionary, shaken to the core, was quick to act. She knocked on the door of the girl’s home and it was answered by a brute of a man. He let loose a torrent of abuse and threatened to throw the woman down the stairs.
Refusing to leave the lass to her fate, she immediately went to the police to plead with them to do something to protect the girl, but she faced an uphill battle. There were no laws allowing intervention in a case like this and the agencies were powerless to help.
In desperation, the missionary turned to the NewYork Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Their officers went to Mary Ellen’s house and removed her, successfully prosecuting the parents by citing cruelty to ‘a little animal of the human species’.
Until Mary Ellen’s case, the law treated children as their parents’ property – in other words, parents could do as they wished to their child.
As a result of Mary Ellen’s case, the NewYork Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was established in 1875 and a few years later provided the inspiration behind James Grahame’s determination to set up an identical organisation in Scotland.
Without Mary Ellen the story of child protection, and the history of CHILDREN1st, may have been very different
indeed.