Biopolitics and Child Welfare: Negotiating the Responsibility of Care for Children under “Improper Guardianship” in Britain at the Turn of the Twentieth-Century

This presentation examines how the state and society responded to children “under improper guardianship”—such as vagrant, abused, destitute, and delinquent youth—during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a pivotal era when the modern British state began systematically developing child welfare policies. Focusing on the case of the Manchester Certified Industrial Schools around the turn of the century, this study elucidates the administrative and moral logic underpinning these institutional interventions. Ultimately, it demonstrates that early child welfare operated with an inherently dual character: serving, on the one hand, to support and protect children’s living existence, while on the other, functioning to fundamentally hinder and constrain their lives.