Crime And the Family
Abortion, Baby Farming, and Gender Violence
Curing Crime dives into Crime, Criminality, and the Family and highlights the work of four academics.
I wanted to discuss some work that I saw presented at ESSHC in Leiden last April. Therrefore, this post explores how child homicide cases affected the public view of fostering through Daniel Grey’s work; the complicated role of domestic abortion providers in the UK through Charlotte Wildman’s research; and the importance of both qualitative and quantitative analysis in Anna Kantanen's investigation into the homicide of women in Finland. These three cases help us think deeper about Crime, Criminality, and the past, and how we can study them.
Child Homicide, Baby-Farming, and the Changing Representation of Foster Care
In the United Kingdom during the early twentieth century, fostering children was perceived as “inherently suspicious.” By 1975, this view changed, and fostering started to be seen as an undervalued part of the welfare state. Daniel Grey argued that a major shift has occurred in how the general public has interpreted adoption. Both of these views flatten a complex issue. He studied this shift through an analysis of child homicide cases in England and Wales.
The 1973 Case That Changed Policy
Maria Cowell, a seven-year-old girl, was killed by her stepfather, William Kepple, in January of 1973, sparking national outrage. Kepple had mistreated and neglected Maria for thirteen months. Kepple was convicted of manslaughter. This scandal contributed to the Children Act of 1975. The outrage also helped the professionalization and recognition of social workers. In Curing Crime’s view, this again highlights the importance of medical models in making these determinations.
Maria thrived in foster care, where she was placed when she was very young. Grey unveils that, while often overlooked, the “abuse and eventual death only occurred” after she was returned to her biological mother. This decision prioritized “natural” relationships rather than other forms of care. Grey notes that most early or mid-century readers would assume that carers, and not biological parents, were responsible when they read about the “unnatural death of a former foster child.”
Scandals like this one were not particular to the 1970s. In the early 20th century, several baby farmers were executed after having been found guilty of killing children under their care.
A moral panic about baby farming occurred between 1865 and 1900. Some skipping rhymes that persisted until the 1950s or 1960s were composed in that period. At the time, it was also true that British society relied on a framework of foster care for the care of illegitimate children. Yet it was not until 1926 that there was legal adoption in the UK, and adoptive parents thus had no rights.
Baby farming included cases of murder and fraud. Some women, like Louse Massey (1863-1900) blamed baby farming for the death of her child. She claimed that she had hired a baby farmer to procure an adoption for her child, but instead the baby farmer killed her infant. This case is strange because her family did not reject her despite having an illegitimate child. Her baby’s corpse was discovered at a station where she had been seen catching a train to Brighton to spend time with a lover. She was found guilty and executed for murder on January 9th, 1900. This story demonstrates how easy it is to craft a story, and how many other women tried to blame baby farmers for the death of their child.
Another baby farming case is that of Amelia Sach and Annie Walters. Sach was a qualified midwife who was said to be attractive and glamorous. Walters was an alcoholic with disabilities. They were caught, in part, because Walters made extremely poor choices.
For example, she chose to lodge with the wife of a police officer. While she stayed there, she wanted no one to see the baby and asked for help procuring substances that appeared to be drugs. Later, she returned to the house with a different baby. When arrested, she suggested looking for a “coastguard that lives in Kensington,” a silly suggestion given their geographical locations. In contrast, Sach was qualified and was well known by doctors. She had a reputation for not being shy about calling for medical help if she thought a child or a woman was in danger. She was happily married to a builder. When they were caught, her husband did not excuse her actions, but unsuccessfully pleaded clemency because of how much he loved her. This case drew much attention, partly because Sach was middle-class and professional. In contrast, Walters was addicted and hence fitted well with the “witch-like interloper” stereotype. They were executed for murder on February 3rd, 1903.
By the 1930s, baby farming was considered a crime of the past, but was still portrayed as an “especially heinous” act and thus “uniquely deserving of capital punishment.”
The only woman executed in the 20th century in the UK was charged with killing a child. Most of the women executed in the 19th century were accused of a similar crime. This suggests the kinds of crimes women were seen to commit and how society views this particular crime as especially heinous.
In 1908, the Children Act was passed. This act covered everything from juvenile smoking to children's courts, and mandates that foster parents register their fostered child. The act called for stricter enforcement of current laws and helped remove fears about baby farming as an epidemic.
It was only in 1975 that the law changed to give primacy to the child's welfare. Here again, we suspect that models of welfare enter into the discourse and processes of evaluation.
Grey’s investigation provides valuable insights into how crime, crime reporting, and the public interact to shape the public’s imagination. The differing assumptions about who is most likely responsible for the murder of a previously fostered child reveal the significant effect of culture on an individual's imagination. Are similar assumptions at play today? Secondly, giving primacy to biological parents also betrays assumptions about the importance of biological connection and the alleged danger of others.
“Murder, robberies, homicides, and Women Victims in late 19th and early 20th Century Finland”
Some historical dates always make me quiver. Sometimes, I forget how quickly the zeitgeist moves.
It was only in 1889 when the Finnish Criminal Code “abolished husband's rights to the use of corporal punishment toward his wife, which had previously been regulated by the law only in the most extreme cases.” This sharply contrasted with an earlier law from 1734, which explicitly “enabled a husband’s right to chastise his wife and children because he was the head of the household.”
Anna Kantanen’s historical research seeks to shed light on the history of “severe violence against women.” She has collected every Finnish homicide or case involving severe violence against women between 1800 and 1900 at the Vaasa and Turku Courts.
She argues that these cases can be classified into six categories of crimes related to murder:
Murder and robbery;
Intimate partner violence;
Violence with family and household;
Accidental deaths;
Violence connected to sexual assault;
Homicides caused by mental health problems.
Kantanen traced how sometimes feuds between drunken men would result in the accidental death of some women. She concluded that only some of this violence “represents gender-based violence,” and in some cases, “gender was not a crucial factor to the crime.” She highlights the need for qualitative analysis on records to understand such data correctly.
This is just the kind of approach that CuringCrime celebrates – a mix of statistics and historical insight to try to explain the past. This paper highlights that merely looking at quantitative data can mislead historians trying to understand violence against women.
“I have only done it out of pity.” Illegal Abortion in the United Kingdom.
By the 1930s, abortions were widespread around Liverpool. Wildman's research on abortion providers in midcentury Northwestern England is fascinating.
The 1937 Report on Maternal Mortality by the British Ministry of Health expressed concern about increased maternal mortality. Charlotte Wildman’s presentation challenged conventional narratives about abortion providers in which narratives of care predominate.
Wildman challenged the “broadly accepted” narratives that tend to portray abortion providers' figures as nice, and as if they had “genuine sympathy” for those they treated. Recent scholarship has also painted some abortion providers as exploitative and sometimes as something done by “unscrupulous foreign doctors” who exploited vulnerable women in “unsanitary conditions.” In general, illegitimate pregnancy still brought shame and was thus dealt with in secrecy. Wildman looked at domestic providers in an urban working-class setting.
In this context, these providers were part of a “wider culture of support and help within female networks.” She finds similarity with other crimes committed by women in these neighborhoods, like the “buying and selling of stolen goods.” Thus, she presents the home as an “active site in shaping, facilitating and producing offences,” hence showing that “familial domesticity” had some degree of compatibility with criminal activity. Wildman draws from the history of emotions to analyze court records, depositions, and newspapers.
In one example, Phoebe H was arrested in Liverpool in 1950 for providing abortion services. At first, she claimed, there is “nothing I can say,” but she later confessed to providing abortions at home and remotely. She was given an 18-month prison sentence. Phoebe added, “I did this because I felt sorry for them.” She had not had any official training.
These practitioners, Wildman suggests, stood to benefit from the language of care and also belonged to networks of women that supported each other. The paper provided novel ways of thinking about how women abortionists could justify their practice through the use of the language of care. These efforts would shape approaches to state welfare into the latter parts of the century.
Two aspects of this investigation surprised me. First, I had only encountered the kind of narrative that Wildman attacked. Upon thinking a little more, it seems likely that many abortion providers were motivated by profit. Second, the importance of the language of justification, and in this case, how working-class urban women adopted a language of care to justify their acts. Categories make a difference, and the language used to speak about crime, or that those who commit crimes use to discuss their actions, is powerful, and its study can be used to understand their time further.
Last April I attended the ESSHC conference in Leiden, and saw some great researchers present some fascinating work. This post is based on my notes and recollections of those talks. While I took notes on my iPad, these are short talks, and the pace is relatively quick. Hence, I may have inadvertently made a mistake in transcribing or interpreting my notes.
Super interesting!