y the Poor
Law Amendment Act 1868, parents were rendered _summarily_ punishable who
wilfully neglected to provide adequate food, clothing, medical aid or
lodging for their children under fourteen years of age in their custody,
whereby the health of the child was or was likely to be seriously
injured. This enactment (now superseded by later legislation) made no
express exception in favour of parents who had not sufficient means to
do their duty without resort to the poor law, and was construed as
imposing criminal liability on parents whose peculiar religious tenets
caused them advisedly to refrain from calling in a doctor to a sick
child.

The chief progress in the direction of adequate protection for children
prior to 1889 lay less in positive legal enactment on the subject than
in the institution of an effective system of police, whereby it became
possible to discover and repress cruelty punishable under the ordinary
law. It is quite inaccurate to say that children had very few rights in
England, or that animals were better protected. But before the
constitution of the present police force, and in the absence of any
proper system of public prosecution, it is undeniable that numberless
cases of neglect and ill-treatment went unpunished and were treated as
nobody's business, because there was no person ready to undertake in the
public interest the protection of the children of cruel or negligent
parents. In 1889 a statute was passed with the special object of
preventing cruelty to children. This act was superseded in 1894 by a
more stringent act, which was repealed by the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children Act 1904, in its turn superseded for the most part by the
Children Act 1908, which introduced many new provisions in the law
relating to children and specifically deals with the offence of
"cruelty" to them. This offence can only be committed by a person over
sixteen in respect of a child under sixteen of whom he has "custody,"
"charge" or "care." The act presumes that a child is in the custody of
its parents, step-parents, or a person cohabiting with its parent, or of
its guardians or persons liable by law to maintain it; that it is in the
charge of a person to whom the parent has committed such charge (e.g. a
schoolmaster), and that it is in the care of a person who has actual
possession or control of it. Cruelty is defined as consisting in
assault, ill-treatment (falling short of actual assault), neglect,
abandonme