ABSTRACT
Since at least the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989, renewed discussion of the status of childhood was markedly evident at the conclusion of the twentieth century.2 This was accompanied by debate on child abuse and protection, fuelled by media enquiries that stretched from the speculation surrounding the longest criminal trial in US history, ‘The McMartin Pre-School Case’, on child molestation, concluded in January 1990, to the attention devoted to the murder of two ten-year-old girls by Ian Huntley in the English village of Soham in 2002. In between were vociferous concerns expressed over children’s physical and sexual safety from relatives and strangers, their too-fast development into adults, their commodification within consumerist society, their exploitation over the Internet, their increased exposure to and use of drugs and violence, and also their supposed neglect, especially in single-parent families.3 The Child Support Agency was established to deal with the latter, while analysis of repressed-memory syndrome was said to have unearthed past child abuses. The Catholic Church and foster homes were the subject of scandals, and investigations of infant death started to suspect or detect newly discovered abuses such as shaken-baby syndrome and Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy. Media interest in children’s bodies also ran a gamut of concerns from anorexia in the early 1990s to obesity at the end. In the UK, the culmination of the 1990s increased interest in protecting the child came in June 2003, when Tony Blair appointed the first minister for children and in March 2004, when the Children’s Bill created a children’s commissioner for England to champion their rights, after the investigation into the death, at the hands of her carers, of Victoria Climbié in 2000.
