A YEAR’S RECORD OF CHILD TORTURE.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2432, 1 December 1892, Page 3

A YEAR’S RECORD OF CHILD TORTURE.

The report of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children is issued this year (says the Home .News) under the title of “ The Crown and the Child,” and it contains its customary budget of examples of parental wickedness, tempered 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 seven-months-old baby; forcing bone ring of a feeding bottle up and down the throat ' of a three-months-old baby till it bled ; throwing a little girl of two years, ill of bronchitis, out of its bedroom window, breaking its bones, and ending its life; breaking a two-year old baby’s limbs in three places—both arms and a thigh, leaving them untended, when it moaned in its pain irritably taking it up _ from its cradle by the broken arras, shaking it by them, and throwing it down again ; leaving a bady unlifted out of its cradle for weeks, till toadstools grew around the child out of the rotten ess; leaving another to lie for days and nights on a mattres 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 a rope round a boy of six, dipping him into a canal, leaving him immersed till exhausted, bringing him up, 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 three-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 ‘leavings of plates,’ on to it ‘ as you would throw them to fowls ’; scourging a child till it is a ?pass of bruises, then breaking its little jaw in two; tying cords tightly round its little thumbs, then tying them, with extended arms, to the foot of a bedstead, then beating it with a thorn bush.” The following story is terrible in its tragic irony :—“ A little girl of five, who been tortured by her father and mother by being tied crnciflxwiso to the foot of an iron bedstead in the morning with her face to it, and then beaten from the neck to the heels, in her one thin garment with a buckled stap, and in the evening turned and tied again with her back to the bedstead in the same fashion, and then flogged with the same strap from 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, “I was once like that! ” Cruelty, Mr Waugh urges, is not the monopoly of “ the poor,” 1 The society (he says) has had to interfere in the families of clergymen and millitary 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 whitmore ' to be called ‘habitation? do the habits - „ 01 cruelty than rln „. ■- .—awns of the rich | and never the dnmkiu'd sVirpass, 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 fervor 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’s experience has rendered impossible to it.”

- A curious incidental point raised is that of the incx'ease of gambling among very young children, carried on by means of what is called “ lucky sweetstufl' — packets of sweetmeats, some of which contained small coins. A manufacturing confectioner has given the following testimony on this subiect: — “ I have givou up the c lucky trade ’ because a short time since T visited a confectioner’s shop in the North of England, when a little girl entered and bought a halfpenny lucky turnover. Instead of eating the sweet

after finding there was no coin in she threw it away and bought another . with same result ; and within two minutes this child had purchased 12 turnovers, and each time throwing the sweets away. I remarked it was a strange sight to witness, but my customer informed me it was a common thing for young children to spend their money in this way.” This miniature lottery business is illegal, but it is said to be carried on very largely all the same.