ABSTRACT
Child labour then and now The exploitation of children was outlawed in the UK by a series of laws including the 1819 Cotton Mills and Factories Act which prohibited children under the age of nine years from working in cotton mills, and restricted those over the age of nine to a 12-hour day. The special status for young people in these laws reflected a changing view of childhood. If only all international clothing companies could follow suit today.
Romanian orphanages It is now more than 20 years since the world found out about the thousands of children locked away in Romania’s state institutions. When British teacher Monica McDaid first came across the orphanage in Siret she was horrified. ‘One thing I particularly remember was the basement. There were kids there who hadn’t seen natural light for years. I remember when they were brought out for the first time. Most of them were clinging to the wall, putting their hands up to shield their eyes from the light’ (BBC website, 2005). Many children were adopted by families across Europe and the USA, but did they manage to adapt and recover? A group of these children, adopted by UK parents, has been studied by Michael Rutter from the Institute of Psychiatry in London. When they arrived in the country as babies, more than half the 165 children he studied showed severe delays in development compared with British children. Later he found that, even at the age of 11, many of these children had not caught up. ‘Contrary to popular opinion at the time, we found there were definite long-term effects from being in an institution’ (Rutter, 2005) and the effects were more damaging the longer the child had spent in institutionalised care.
