Abuse or Punishment? Violence toward Children in Quebec Families, 1850–1969 by Marie-Aimée Cliche (review)

Child rearing and abuse are subjects currently pivotal to the history of children and youth. We live in an era of inquiries into, and redress for, the historic abuse of institutionalized children – from our own Truth and Reconciliation Commission (into the ill-treatment of indigenous children in Canadian residential schools) to Northern Ireland, Australia, Sweden, and Germany, among others. Largely centred on institutions of care that developed in the nineteenth century as children and childhood became politically and culturally more visible, these inquiries shed light on the banality of violence that accompanied innovations in treating, caring for, and assimilating young people. These investigations often give voice to those who were institutionalized, revealing the brutal nature of “care” at the hands of the state and faith organizations entrusted to provide oversight and training to young people. They also historicize the acceptance of, and slowly eroding tolerance for, child punishment and map the moments when child abuse entered or disappeared from public view. As current historical research proves, then, violence against children was facilitated by their institutionalization. Marie-Aimée Cliche’s recently translated book, Abuse or Punishment: Violence toward Children in Quebec Families, 1850–1969, is similarly focused on violence against children in the last century and a half, but the site of that violence is the family and the perpetrators are not strangers but, rather, intimates.

In both formal children’s institutions and in the family, Canadian laws and customs permitted “reasonable” or moderate chastisement of misbehaving children. Cliche embarks on the monumental task of explaining how attitudes toward child rearing and practices of corporal punishment changed from the 1850s to the 1960s in Quebec. She begins with a hook about our contemporary intolerance for corporal punishment and asks critical questions about when physical punishment became “bad.” She delves into why violence against children was not only acceptable but also encouraged as good child-rearing practice. Her argument supports what is generally accepted among scholars of childhood – that, over the century, attitudes and practices changed toward the intolerance of physical punishment both inside and outside the family, and this was influenced by developments in the social sciences. Quebec, she argues, follows the trajectory of other Western states in attitudes toward corporal punishment.

The book is divided into three periods that chart the gradual change in attitude toward physical punishment in child rearing: 1850–1919, 1920–39, and 1940–69. Each section contains chapters that reveal discourses governing contemporary parental discipline, the practice of corporal punishment, the cultural presence and debate – through various media – of violence toward children, and the emergent consciousness and politicization concerning the abused child. The range of sources and detailed vignettes make this study a fascinating read and gives a clear sense of cultural change over the century. Secular and religious child-rearing advice, advice columns in newspapers, comic strips, family court files, and media coverage of abused and battered children illustrate how pervasive violence against young people was. Readers will be familiar with certain dramatic and tragic cases, like the 1920 case of Aurore, whose abuse was so severe the story has resonated through Quebec culture (chapter 3). The reader is left wanting more of a systematic analysis of this fantastic evidentiary base, and further explication of the meaning of corporal punishment and its implications for its perpetrators (mostly fathers) and its recipients (largely – but not entirely – sons) is also necessary.

Abuse or Punishment is a window onto a prevalent form of violence toward children that was perpetrated not in the myriad formal institutions of modernizing Quebec (think orphanages and industrial and reform schools) but, instead, in the family home. This study delves into the brutal side of family life, an area of research that Cliche has helped to develop. Domestic violence, as we know from Linda Gordon’s classic Heroes of Their Own Lives (Viking 1988), took...