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This resource sheet provides a brief history of developments in child protection services in Australia and internationally.
Social and political interest in the protection of children from abuse or neglect at the hands of caregivers is a relatively recent phenomenon. Since the early colonial days in Australia, there have been some forms of protection for children. Abused and abandoned children were either boarded out to approved families or placed in orphanages run by voluntary organisations. However, provisions of care throughout most of the 19th century were established solely for the needs of abandoned or "illegitimate" children whose parents were seen as socially inadequate. The concept of providing protection of children from their parents or caregivers did not exist. Governments took the position that children were the property of parents who had the right to treat their child any way they saw fit. Western society showed little interest in, and had no specific policies for, protecting children from their parents or caregivers.
Although child maltreatment has been occurring since before there were laws to protect children from abuse and neglect, western society in the 19th century was characterised by particularly brutal attitudes towards children, a fact immortalised by authors of the time such as Charles Dickens (1812–1870). The first manifestations of child protection services with a legal mandate to intervene to protect children from abuse and neglect emerged in the late 19th century, initially in the form of charitable and philanthropic endeavours.
