Tending the gardens of citizenship, child protection in Toronto, 1880s-1920s

grantor: University of TorontoSparked by several high profile child deaths, Ontario's Child Welfare Reform at the turn of the twenty-first century has resulted in a restructuring of the child protection system. This dissertation uses historical analyses to develop a critical understanding of the Reform. The analyses are influenced by the Foucaultian governmentality approach. Specifically, it explores the transformation of conceptions of human identities, citizenship, and technologies of power, from the threshold of the "social" era to our present "post-social" era. The dissertation examines child protection ideas and practices during the period from the late 1880s to 1920s. It argues that preventing crime and immorality and building a useful and Christian citizenry were the main objectives of child protection. Gardening metaphors were used widely to construct a humanist identity for children as "future citizens" and to promote technologies of parental power which were primarily governmental in Foucault's sense. Cruelty and neglect deviated from the gardening mode of parental power. Child protection workers governed parents' cruelty or bad morals so that parents could in turn govern children properly. The study identifies a range of child protection technologies, also represented by gardening metaphors. Child protection connected the conduct of individuals with issues of societal importance. While the focus of child protection was on individuals' conduct, the "social" mode of thinking allowed a consideration of resource issues in other related areas. The analyses of the early history of child protection are used to understand the recent Reform. Instead of being considered as "future citizens," today children are constituted as the ideal citizens. The child-citizen discourse accentuates children's rights to personal safety and portrays parents as (potential) criminals. In contrast to the earlier period, the primary objective of current child protection is "keeping kids safe." This understanding severely limits the kinds of collective actions to be considered. New technologies of risk management and criminal punishment subsume child protection to criminality. These changes reflect the "privatization of citizenship." The dissertation challenges the tendency of reducing complex structural issues to a matter of children's personal safety.Ph.D