Some Conditions of Child Life in England by Benjamin Waugh

The remedy lies in numerous directions. Many laws and customs and doctrines have been (many of them are still) on the side of the torture of a child.

1. Unhappily, Courts of Law, by their rules of procedure, have not been on the side of the child. They have rather lent security to the inflictor of its sufferings. A mother who has to screen her children from the madness of their drunken father at midnight, since such midnight orgies were introduced into England, has never been allowed -- that is, if she were a married mother -- to give evidence of the fact in an English Court. Boys and girls under ten who witnessed atrocities committed on a brother or sister, they, too, were excluded from Courts. And who can estimate the number of families in which wrongs to children were thus made, legally, absolutely safe!