Unique guide to the main developments in adult-child relations during the last one hundred years.

This book is intended to be a guide to the burgeoning literature on the history of childhood. Harry Hendrick reviews the most important debates and main findings of a number of historians on a range of topics including the changing social constructions of childhood, child-parent relations, social policy, schooling, leisure and the thesis that modern childhood is "disappearing." The intention of this concise study is to provide readers with a reliable account of the evolution of some of the most important developments in adult-child relations during the past one hundred years. The author draws his material not only from historians but also from sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and children's rights activists.

This book aims to document and analyse the enduring involvement of children in the commercial sex trade in twentieth-century England. It uncovers new evidence to indicate the extent of under-age prostitution over this period, a much-neglected subject despite the increased visibility of children more generally. The authors argue that child prostitution needs to be understood within a broader context of child abuse, and that this provides one of the clearest manifestations of the way in which 'deviant groups' can be conceived of as both victims and threats. The picture of child prostitution which emerges is one of exclusion from mainstream society and the law, and remoteness from the agencies set up to help young people in trouble, which were often reluctant to accept the realities of child prostitution. The evidence provided in this book indicates that the circumstances which have led young people into prostitution over the last hundred years amount, at worst, to physical or psychological abuse or neglect, and at best as the result of limited choice.

In this pioneering work about the precursor to the comic book, Kelly Boyd traces the evolution of the boys' story paper and its impact on the imaginative world of working-class readers. From the penny dreadful and the Boy's Own Paper to the tales of Billy Bunter and Sexton Blake, this cultural form shaped ideas about gender, race, class and empire in response to social change. This study is an important analysis of a neglected part of popular culture.

This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This open access book explores how children, parents, and survivors reshaped the politics of child protection in late twentieth-century England. Activism by these groups, often manifested in small voluntary organisations, drew upon and constructed an expertise grounded in experience and emotion that supported, challenged, and subverted medical, social work, legal, and political authority. New forms of experiential and emotional expertise were manifested in politics – through consultation, voting, and lobbying – but also in the reshaping of everyday life, and in new partnerships formed between voluntary spokespeople and media. While becoming subjects of, and agents in, child protection politics over the late twentieth century, children, parents, and survivors also faced barriers to enacting change, and the book traces how long-standing structural hierarchies, particularly around gender and age, mediated and inhibited the realisation of experiential and emotional expertise.

In the consciousness of politicians, professionals and the public, children and young people loom increasingly large as a challenge to be faced. This problematic image includes not only the inevitable and traditional difficulties faced by the young in negotiating a role in society, but also an increasing tendency for children to be problematized, even vilified, and for state intervention in their lives to reflect this trend. Indeed, the increasing scale and scope of central and local government policy responses to the age group can sometimes result, both intentionally and unintentionally, in additional challenges for children to overcome. The text starts with the assumption that we cannot assume that state intervention in the lives of young people will always lead to positive outcomes. The contributors explore the key policy areas such as health, education and the youth justice system, within the broader social and economic context, including race and culture, the economy and European integration.

This book seeks to place children and young people centrally within the study of the contemporary British home front, its cultural representations and its place in the historical memory of the First World War. This edited collection interrogates not only war and its effects on children and young people, but how understandings of this conflict have shaped or been shaped by historical memories of the Great War, which have only allowed for several tropes of childhood during the conflict to emerge. It brings together new research by emerging and established scholars who, through a series of tightly focussed case studies, introduce a range of new histories to both explore the experience of being young during the First World War, and interrogate the memories and representations of the conflict produced for children. Taken together the chapters in this volume shed light on the multiple ways in which the Great War shaped, disrupted and interrupted childhood in Britain, and illuminate simultaneously the selectivity of the portrayal of the conflict within the more typical national narratives.