The Vicious Circle of Deprivation

What it is

Part I of the report argues that deprivation harms the child, which is a welfare claim and moves committees slowly. The vicious circle turns it into an epidemiological claim, and epidemiological claims move governments.

The escalation across the document is the clearest example in this library of a hypothesis hardening into a slogan inside a single text. Early on it is cautious: those who spent five years or more in institutions and turned out socially incapable were incapable as parents, and one may suspect the same of some others. Thirty pages later it is stated as a finding, that the investigator is confronted with a self-perpetuating social circle. Seventy pages after that it is demoted again, and this is the honest moment, listed first among certain basic hypotheses which need testing, with the concession that even once proven true there remain many other factors. Three pages later it opens the conclusion as a contagion, with deprived children described as a source of social infection as real and serious as carriers of diphtheria and typhoid. A hypothesis marked as untested is a public health analogy thirteen pages later, and both sentences are in the same document.

In effect

The evidence is thin, and Bowlby says so. The direct support is one table drawn from an analysis of a few hundred pairs of parents whose children entered a children's charity's homes in the late 1930s. Among the mothers about whom anything at all was known, more than half had themselves been illegitimate, institution-raised or had what the investigators called an abnormal childhood, and among the fathers about a third.

The number Bowlby treats as most telling is the missing data. No information at all was available for well over half the mothers and for three quarters of the fathers, and the investigators wrote that they had the impression this type of parent had led an unsettled life which made a full case history impossible. Bowlby reads that absence as confirming evidence. It is not. It is absence.

The supporting material is two American marriage studies from the 1930s, Lewis Terman's questionnaires of several hundred couples and Ernest Burgess and Leonard Cottrell's of several hundred more, which found marital happiness associated with the parents' marital happiness and with a happy childhood. Bowlby is candid that both are questionnaire studies dependent on the couples' own reports and that neither involved a psychiatrist, and he presents their agreement as the point.

Both halves of the verdict are owed. For it, the intergenerational transmission of caregiving patterns is a real research programme that did not die with the 1951 report, and something in the neighbourhood of this claim has survived in a far weaker and better specified form. Against it, the version in this report is a strong causal claim resting on one agency's incomplete records and two self-report questionnaires. It ignores the shared material conditions that make both generations poor, and it converts a correlation between two generations of a disadvantaged population into a transmissible defect. The disease metaphor in the conclusion is not decorative: it carries the whole weight of the policy case and it is doing work the data cannot do.

What it does not say

It does not describe any individual family, and nothing in it is a prediction about a person. It is a population-level hypothesis from 1951, and it is recorded here as history.

It does not say that the intergenerational research that followed is unsound. That literature is separate, weaker in its claims and better specified, and it is not sourced here.

It does not license the political use the claim has had. A claim that some families reproduce social failure has been put to uses Bowlby did not intend, and the report itself goes close to that edge where it reports a proposal to place whole problem families under supervision and restraint and concludes that this may be the right solution. That is recorded as history rather than as argument.

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