A Year's.Record of Child Torture.

Manawatu Herald, 8 December 1892, Page 2

A Year's. Record of Child Torture.

The report of the National Society tor the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 13 issued this year^ (says the Home New*) under the title of " The Crown and the Child," and it contains its customery budget of examples of parental wickedness, temu pered by philanthropic effort. The following is a brief note on " The Small Inventiveness of Cruelty " :— " Punishing a child by putting pins into its nostrils ; putting lighted matches up them ; biting a child's wrist till a wound was made, and then burning the wound with lighted matches ; burning the hands of a boy of six with matches ; biting till they bled the limbs of a 7-months-old baby : forcing bone ring of a i feeding "bottle up and down the j thro .it of a three -months old baby j till it bin i ; throwing a little girl of I 2 years, ill of bronchitis, out of its j bedroom window, breaking its bones, j and ending its life ; breaking a j 2 year-old baby's limbs in three j places — both, arms and a thigh, I leaving them untc.-nd.ed, when it moaned in its pain irritably taking it up from its cradle by the broken arms, shaking it by them, and throwing it down again ; leaving a baby un lifted out of its cradle for' weeks, till toadstools grew around the child out of the rottenness ; leaving another to lie for daya and nights on a mattvess alive with maggots ; keeping the stumps of little amputated legs sore, to have the child, with its little face puckered up in pain, to excite pity ; tying ft rope . round a boy of six, dipping him into ! canal, leaving him immersed till exhausted, bringing him np, recovering him, and putting him in again, repeating the misery time, after time ; shutting up for hours in a dark closet a two year-old child ; tightly binding the arms together of a five year old child, and doing the same and ending its life ; keeping a child always in cool cellars till its flesh became green ; knocking down with the fist a dying boy ; driving out the first teeth of a baby with the fist ; cooping up a child for months in a room without conveniences, punishing it for § filthing the floor ' for food, throwing the '• leavings of olates 'on to it ..' as, you wouLi throw them to fowls ' ; scourging a child till it is a mass of bruises, then breaking its little jaw in two ; tying cords tightly round little thumbs, then tying them, with extended arms, to the foot of a bedstead, then beating them with a thorn bush*" The following story is terrible in its tragic irony : — " A little girl ot five, who had been tortured by her father and mother by being tied crusifixwise to the foot of an iron bedstead in the morning with her face to it, and then beaten from the neok to the heels, in her one thin garment, with a buckled strap, and in the evening turned and tied again with her back to the hedstead in the same fashion, and then flogged with the same strap from the throat to knees ; in the morning being left all day, and in the evening all night, this child in the new home to which, after imprisoning her tormentors, she was sent by the society, on seeing a crucifix, slowly, solemnly said, ' j was once like that !' " Cruelty, Mr Waugh urges, is not the monopoly of " the poor " The society (he says) has had to interfere in the families of clergymen and military men, barristers and "the gentry." After adverting to the Montague case, the report continues :— " The habitations of the

poor, -as a class, do not one whife more deserve to be called ' habitations of cruelty ■' than do the habitations of the rich ; and never does the drunkard surpass, seldom is he deliberate enough to equal, in diabolical inventiveness the cruelties of the sober. The society's work has rendered it clear that education,rank, and practice of religious rites are fully compatible with even fervour and devotion in cruelty to children. To stamp any of the classes of life with its practice, or to exempt any of them from its practice your committee'a experience has rendered impossible to it/