Today Canadian society is almost unanimous in condemning violence toward children. It considers the murders and sexual abuse to which they are subjected to be the worst kind of crime, and it even questions the use of corporal punishment in child-rearing. As these lines were being written, the Supreme Court of Canada was imposing very narrow limits on the interpretation of Section 43 of the Criminal Code:
Every schoolteacher, parent or person standing in the place of a parent is justified in using force by way of correction toward a pupil or child, as the case may be, who is under his care, if the force does not exceed what is reasonable under the circumstances.1
The repeal of this article, which some consider unconstitutional and contrary to the Charter of Rights,2 would have represented an official disavowal of a tradition whose origin is lost in the mists of time. However, the highest court in the land did not dare to go that far.
For thousands of years beating has been considered a normal principle of child-rearing. Biblical quotations such as “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” (Prov. 13:24) and “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him” (Prov. 22:15) attest to both the antiquity and the legitimacy of the practice. The same tradition is found in Eastern countries. Rarely has a civilization failed to adopt it, so that the first French missionaries who came to Canada in the seventeenth century were astounded to find that the Amerindians never beat their children.3
With only a few exceptions such as Quintilian and Montaigne, Western advisers on parenting have long recommended that children’s misdemeanours be sanctioned with moderate corporal punishment to teach them the difference between right and wrong. In their eyes, such punishments did not amount to ill-treatment. They were, to borrow Eirick Prairat’s expression,4 a legitimate use of violence that had to fall within “reasonable” limits, a term that has varied considerably in meaning from period to period.
It was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that feelings in the Western world about the various forms of violence inflicted on children began to change. The new attention devoted to social problems and the rise of mass circulation newspapers made it possible to bring the phenomenon of child abuse to the attention of the general public. At the same time, the emergence of psychology and the other behavioural sciences paved the way for the development of child-rearing methods that excluded the use of force. A century later, in 1979, the legal abolition of corporal punishment in Sweden represented an important stage in this evolution.
Since the 1970s numerous historical, sociological, and psychological studies have shown that corporal punishment has harmful consequences in children’s lives, lasting into adulthood. We owe one of the best-known studies to the German psychoanalyst Alice Miller: For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence. This book denounced the ravages of the “poisonous” or “black” pedagogy that was rampant in Germany and in the Anglo-Saxon countries from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. The well-intentioned experts on parenting who conceived this method wished to train children to practise virtue and to root out their “vicious tendencies” as they emerged. The first measure they recommended was to instill in children the habit of total obedience to their parents, starting from the cradle. To achieve this there had to be no hesitation in administering corporal punishment in sufficient doses to obtain total submission or, indeed, to break the child’s will. According to Miller, children treated in this way, being unable to express their anger and revolt against parents they loved and the loss of whose affection they feared, were reduced to repressing these violent feelings in their subconscious. Subsequently, if they were unable to recall their suffering and give it verbal expression, they would be in considerable danger of turning this violence against themselves in the form of masochism, mental illness, self-destructive drug use, or even suicide, or against others by inflicting on their own children or on others a treatment similar to what they themselves had suffered. This explains how violence can be handed down from generation to generation within a family. In certain extreme cases, this repetition compulsion can take the form of sadistic murder or, as in Hitler’s case, by the attempt to exterminate an entire group of human beings made into a scapegoat, like the Jews.5
Other scholars have reached similar conclusions to Alice Miller. In his book entitled The English Vice: Beating, Sex and Shame in Victorian England and After, Ian Gibson has traced back the origins of masochistic sexuality in England and other countries to the practice of beating children on the buttocks.6 In the United States the sociologists Murray Straus and Richard Gelles have carried out large-scale investigations in order to demonstrate, by statistical means, that corporal punishment can easily degenerate into abuse, and that such violence has deplorable long-term consequences. They also condemned myths about violence within the family, especially the beliefs that abusers belong to a different species from ordinary people, that violence is restricted to disadvantaged social classes and minority groups, that alcohol is its real cause, and that it is impossible for love and violence to coexist.7 Finally, Philip Greven has explained how fundamentalist Protestants in the United States have relied (and still rely) on an improper interpretation of the Bible to justify corporal punishment.8 More recently, in parallel with these authors who insist on the harmful effects of violence in child-rearing, others have discovered the resilience of children, who, as long as they benefit from a number of factors, are able to develop a strong personality despite very unfavourable living conditions.9 In one of her last books Alice Miller spoke of the “helping” and “enlightened” witnesses who provide assistance for abused children and previously abused adults.10
Some historians have taken an interest in the evolution of corporal punishment. Elizabeth Pleck has studied the development of social policies aiming to remedy family violence in the United States; Linda Gordon, who carried out a similar study in Boston, has pointed out that punishments which would be considered abuse today were thought acceptable in the past,11 while Anne-Marie Sohn has stressed the increased sensitivity of the French public about corporal punishment, starting from World War I.12 Finally, we would point to the originality of the feminist approach that took its inspiration from the concept of “gender” to bring out, on the one hand, the differences in violent behaviour between men and women and, on the other, the different ways in which violence is applied to girls and boys.13 These studies and many others have served as our guides and sources of inspiration in undertaking this study.
In Quebec, it is possible to trace the transformation of ideas and customs related to violence against children, starting from the mid-nineteenth century. We have chosen the 1850s as our starting point because the first treatise on child-rearing intended for parents written by a French Canadian, Le Manuel des parents chrétiens, by Abbé Alexis Mailloux, was published in 1851,14 while the first pedagogical journal, the Journal de l’Instruction publique, began publication in 1857. Later, two key dates will serve to demarcate the other parts of our book: 1920, the year of the Gagnon trial, which contributed more than any other event to sensitizing the Quebec public to the phenomenon of physically abused children, and 1940, because of the advent of the New Education movement. Our study will end at the time of the Quiet Revolution because of the changes then taking place in the organization of the Quebec family and society, which have profoundly transformed the relations between parents and children. Furthermore, the 1960s correspond to a turning point in the history of violence toward children in North America. In 1962 a group of American pediatricians published an article on the beaten child syndrome and demonstrated the possibility, thanks to radiography, of discovering traces of old or multiple fractures.15 This discovery led to the requirement that doctors report such cases to the police, while at the same time it made the general public aware of the extent of child abuse within families.
The present study will deal only with Quebec, but we will make use of the work of our English-Canadian colleagues in order to make comparisons with the situation in other provinces. We will also restrict ourselves to the violence suffered by children within the family, and not in educational institutions. The latter aspect is equally worthy of interest and we have already devoted two articles to the topic,16 but we have decided to exclude it from the present study, first because the sources of information are different and second because the bond of affection that unites children with their parents poses a special problem. Finally, we will not deal with sexual abuse, a subject to which we intend to devote another book.
In analysing the advice about child-rearing aimed at parents, we will use the family magazines published for them and also books cited in these periodicals. In addition we will look at the advice offered in the columns of popular newspapers and pedagogical journals. Although intended for teachers, the latter do contain articles dealing with parenting. To investigate the various forms of violence suffered by Quebec children we will consult newspapers and legal archives, which will provide information about the most serious forms of ill-treatment. But what can we discover about the violence that remained hidden within ordinary families? To answer this question we shall turn to the life stories previously utilized by Denise Lemieux and Lucie Mercier in their study of family life at the turn of the twentieth century.17 These will be supplemented from another source that allowed people to reveal their problems while remaining anonymous: the advice columns of newspapers and magazines. To this we shall add the oral testimonies gathered informally from people around us, a list of whom appears at the end of the book. Finally, comic strips will help to show the importance of humour as a source of resilience.
This varied documentation will allow us to reconstruct the way in which awareness of the violence inflicted on children grew in the province of Quebec between 1850 and 1970, showing how the public gradually became aware of the existence of physically abused children and of the connection between corporal punishment and abuse, and how the public has come to a constantly diminishing tolerance of such practices. It goes without saying that this evolution did not follow a steady course, for like all human phenomena it has experienced periods of acceleration, turning points, intervals of stagnation, and even regressed at times.
For the purposes of analysis, the word “violence” will refer to the use of force to inflict physical suffering on children, including both ill-treatment forbidden and punished by the law and so-called “reasonable” or “moderate” corporal punishment as allowed by Section 43 and recommended by some authorities.
We shall also use the concept of stereotype. It will occur in discussing types of violence practised by a specific category of people in identical circumstances. We have identified four such stereotypes: the wicked stepmother, the drunken father, the “nervous” mother, and mentally ill parents. Because they correspond to certain aspects of reality, stereotypes do have their uses in that they allow us to recognize dangerous situations and to take necessary preventative and punitive measures. But they also have the disadvantage of obscuring other equally real forms of violence that do not correspond to them.18 Nevertheless, a series of stereotypes has marked the evolution of social attitudes toward violence inflicted on children, so they must be taken into account.