Note: This article originally ran on June 4, 1989 as part of the AJC’s award-winning “Suffer the Children” series.
A century ago, there was a society to prevent cruelty to animals. Children weren't so lucky.
In December 1873, while making rounds in a New York City tenement, nurse Etta Wheeler heard from neighbors of a child in the building who was being beaten daily by her foster parents. She talked her way into the apartment and caught a glimpse of a 9-year-old girl named Mary Ellen.
» "SUFFER THE CHILDREN" SERIES: Full series | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
PART 1 OF THE SERIES:
"From a pan set upon a low stool she stood washing dishes, struggling with a frying pan about as heavy as herself," Mrs. Wheeler wrote later. The child appeared barefoot, ill-clothed and half-starved. "Across the table lay a brutal whip of twisted leather strands, and the child's meager arms and legs bore many marks of its use. But the saddest part of her story was written on her face in its look of suppression and misery, the face of a child unloved."
During the next few months, Mrs. Wheeler reported Mary Ellen's plight to police and to charities, who did nothing. In desperation, she turned to Henry Bergh, president of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Mr. Bergh got a judge's permission to intervene on "humanitarian" grounds. "I saw a child brought in, carried in a horse blanket, at the sight of which men wept aloud," wrote Jacob Riis, a newspaper writer who was in the courtroom that day. Mary Ellen's body was bruised and her face had a large gash on the left side where her mother had cut her with scissors the day before.
Using laws that banned cruelty to animals, the judge ordered Mary Ellen taken away from her foster mother - the first recorded case of a court intervening to protect a child from abuse. Nine years after the creation of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, New York City established the nation's first child protective agency.
"That was the beginning of seeing [child abuse] as a civil issue as well as a criminal issue," says Paul Smith, director of research at the Children's Defense Fund in Washington. "You can think of what happened in child abuse as the very first victims' rights movement."
Many more reforms followed, such as the creation of juvenile courts, the passage of child labor laws and identification in 1962 of "the battered child syndrome," which led to requirements in all 50 states that doctors report abuse cases to police.
While many child abuse cases still end badly, the case of little Mary Ellen at least gave children a better chance at being rescued from miserable circumstances. Mary Ellen's story, in fact, had a happy ending.
Within a year of her rescue, Mary Ellen was sent to live with Mrs. Wheeler's family in upstate New York. Nourished and loved, she was "fast becoming a normal child," Mrs. Wheeler wrote.
"When 24 she was married to a worthy man and has proved a good homemaker and a devoted wife and mother," the nurse wrote years later. "If the memory of her earliest years is sad, there is this comfort - that the cry of her wrongs awoke the world to the need of organized relief for neglected and abused children."
