In the summer of 2016, the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry (SCAI) commissioned me to draw up a report on the legislative provisions regulating the various environments in which children were accommodated when they were, for whatever reason, not living with their own families. The overarching aim of that Inquiry was, through an examination of the experiences of children who had suffered while in the care of persons or bodies other than their parents, to seek to learn lessons from the past in order to make children safer for the future. It also sought to provide acknowledgement of the suffering of victims and to allow them “closure”. Given the ages of the oldest of the presently surviving victims of child abuse, it was assumed that my Report would start with the Children and Young Persons (Scotland) Act, 1932. However, I soon realised that the 1932 Act, primarily an amending statute, could not be properly understood without exploring the earlier legislation which it amended. So that took me to the Children Act, 1908, which had substantially expanded the role of the state in the care of children. Yet like the 1932 Act, the 1908 Act did not start with a clean slate. It too built upon earlier foundations and to gain a full understanding of the 1908 Act I found it necessary to examine yet earlier legislation. And so the process, as is the nature of historical study, went on.

My Report to the SCAI was published on their website in November 2017, and it records the details of the various regulatory regimes applying over the past 150 years or so to various institutions, including industrial schools (later known as approved schools) and children's homes, Borstal institutions and foster care. The present book seeks to build upon that Report through an exploration of the political choices that were made at various points in the development of child protection law in Scotland, and a contextualisation of these choices within world-wide trends. It is no part of my task here to replicate the work of the SCAI by documenting the utterly heart-breaking extent to which individual children suffered because the rules and regulations being examined were subverted, ignored and breached with impunity.