ABSTRACT
“The Christianity and the civilization of a people may both be measured by their treatment of childhood,” Benjamin Waugh, chairman of the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, wrote in 1886. 1 Of the eight Millennium Development Goals that the United Nations has set for 2015, half are directly or indirectly related to children. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, child welfare became not only an objective that featured prominently in the range of state (and supra-state) missions worldwide, but also a yardstick of civilization – the criterion by which one could measure a country's development. In that sense, child welfare is a fundamental element of our modernity.
