A History of Scottish Child Protection Law

Abstract

This book explores the development of Scottish child protection law from its earliest days in the poor law, tracing the changing assumptions that underlay child protection processes, and the radical shift of emphasis from private (charitable) endeavour to public (local authority) duty. This book looks at the developing legal processes for removing children from abusive or neglectful environments, explores how child offenders and child victims came to be dealt with in the same processes, and examines the reasons why Scots law has managed to continue to cleave its own procedural path in the contemporary world. It explores both processes and outcomes, explaining how the juvenile court evolved into the children’s hearing, and it examines the substantive continuities between the various orders that could be made over children. The regulation of boarding out and fostering of children is compared with the regulation of institutional care, and the evolution of aftercare provisions is explained. The book also offers an analysis of the (dubious) legal basis for the Imperial practice of sending troubled children to the colonies, as part of a deliberate policy of spreading British “stock” across the world. The final chapter traces the origins and statutory control of the practice of adoption of children, from its days as an informal arrangement through its early manifestation as a minor action changing status to its present position as the most radical order that a court of law can make.