NSPCC

The 'National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children' ('NSPCC') is a UK charity working in child protection and the prevention of cruelty to children.

Contents

Description

History

Values

Campaigning and controversy

Satanic ritual abuse scandal

Fathers 4 justice protest

See also

External links

Description

The NSPCC runs Community-based teams and projects throughout England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but not Scotland where the charity Children1st plays a similar role. It offers a free, 24-hour Child Protection Helpline and operates the ChildLine service throughout the whole of the UK. It also runs public education campaigns, parliamentary campaigns, and provides information resources on child protection and related topics for professionals, the press and the general public. It gives child protection training and advice for organisations involved in the care, protection and education of children and carries out research into the nature and effects of child abuse.
It fundraises through individual donations and by building relationships with corporate supporters. The relationship between companies and the NSPCC is becoming very important, as like most UK charities, it turns increasingly to corporate charity donations for support. Examples of companies currently supporting the NSPCC include:
Early Learning Centre, KJ Beckett, Madame Tussauds, and Microsoft.
Celebrities supporters include Kylie Minogue, Jonny Wilkinson, Amir Khan, Catherine Zeta-Jones and others.

History

The first child cruelty case in Britain was brought by the RSPCA; the court charge list described the affected child as "a small animal", because at the time there were no laws in Britain to protect children from mistreatment. This case was successful.
The NSPCC was founded in 1884 as the London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (London SPCC) by Benjamin Waugh.
After five years of campaigning by the London SPCC, Parliament passed the first ever UK law to protect children from abuse and neglect in 1889.
The London SPCC was renamed the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1889, because by then it had branches across Great Britain and Ireland.
The NSPCC was granted its Royal Charter in 1895, when Queen Victoria became its first Royal Patron. It did not change its title to "Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children" or similar, as the name NSPCC was already well established, and to avoid confusion with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), which had already existed for more than fifty years.
Today, the NSPCC works in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Channel Islands. Children 1st - formerly the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children - is the NSPCC's equivalent in Scotland.
The NSPCC's organisation in the Republic of Ireland was taken up by the newly-founded Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC) in March 1954.
In February 2006, the charity ChildLine joined together with the NSPCC.
The NSPCC's administrative headquarters are in Shoreditch, London. It provides employment to 2500 people [1], and has a budget for 2006-2007 of £138 million. Of this £138 million, the NSPCC plans to spend £60 million (43%) on services for children and young people. It also aims in 2006/2007 explicitly to "ensure every NSPCC service is able to demonstrate clearly how the service is contributing to keeping children safe" [2].
Since 2002, the Chairman of the NSPCC has been Sir Christopher Kelly KCB, formerly a senior Civil Servant. The Chief Executive is Dame Mary Marsh DBE.

Values

The NSPCC's stated core values are based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.
They are:

★ Children must be protected from all forms of violence and exploitation

★ Everyone has a responsibility to support the care and protection of children

★ We listen to children and young people, respect their views and respond to them directly

★ Children should be encouraged and enabled to fulfil their potential

★ We challenge inequalities for children and young people

★ Every child must have someone to turn to

Campaigning and controversy

The NSPCC's campaigning role has often led it into controversial areas. It has recently received complaints for "cold" mailing young mothers with a "babies' names" booklet containing instead a detailed list of the deaths of babies [3]. The charity also supports mandatory sex education for all children, and has argued against the view that marriage is necessarily the only way to create stable relationships [4]. In 2000 the NSPCC supported the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 2000 which lowered the age of consent for same sex relationships to 16, in line with that for heterosexuals [5].
In recent years, the charity has faced criticism for its stance on contact visits to children following parents' separation. The NSPCC has consistently opposed an automatic right of contact for both parents, arguing that this is not necessarily in the best interests of the child. This stance has led to criticism both in parliament [6] and by the fathers' rights group
Fathers4Justice. Indeed, in 2004 the London headquarters of NSPCC were briefly invaded and occupied by Fathers4Justice supporters. [7]
The NSPCC also faced criticism for failing (along with other organisations) to do enough to help Victoria Climbié and prevent her death, and also for misleading the inquiry into her death.[8]
The organisation has also faced criticism for its allegedly increasing obsession with publicity and advertising, for Fear mongering and supposedly fabricating or exaggerating facts and figures in its research, although these claims are generally subjective. In an article on ''Spiked'', Frank Furedi professor of sociology at the University of Kent, branded it a 'lobby group devoted to publicising its peculiar brand of anti-parent propaganda and promoting itself'. [9]
Whilst generally subjective other organisations such as the ECB take the NSPCC's worst case analysis as their baseline furthering further unreasoned and often unreasonable restrictions on law abiding citizens, often the disbeneifts outweighing the supposed beneifts.

Satanic ritual abuse scandal

During the late 80's and early 90's, a moral panic emerged over alleged ritual satantic abuse. The NSPCC provided publications known as 'Satanic indicators' to social services around the country causing many social workers to panic and make false accusations. The most prominent of these cases was in Rochdale in 1990 when a total of 12 children were taken from their homes and parents after social services believed then to be involved in satanic or occult ritual abuse. The allegations were later found out to be false. The case was the subject of a BBC documentary which featured recordings of the interviews made by NSPCC social workers, revealing that flawed techniques and leading questions were used to gain evidence of abuse from the children. Critics claim that the social services were wrongly convinced, by organisations such as the NSPCC, that abuse was occurring and so rife that they made allegations before any evidence was considered. [10]

Fathers 4 justice protest

In November 2004, the campaign group Fathers 4 justice targeted the London offices of the NSPCC. The protesters claimed that the NSPCC 'ignores the plight of 100 children a day who lose contact with their fathers' and that they promote a 'portrayal of men as violent abusers' [11]

See also

★ ChildLine

★ Internet Watch Foundation

★ The Children's Society

External links

★ NSPCC Homepage

★ Charity commission registration

★ Internet Watch Foundation