Sexual Exploitation Of Children In The Victorian Era

Diane Phengdy
English 4
07 August 2017
The Reality
Charles Dickens was not only an author that used writing to speak about Victorian issues, he was also an advocate for children’s rights. The reality is, the Victorian era was not an ideal time frame for children. It was a time where they were not treated righteously as humans, but as property.
Children in the Victorian era were abused in multiple ways. One of those ways was being sexually exploited and it wasn’t such a miniscule problem. Apparently in London 1848, nearly 2,700 girls aged 11 through 16 were hospitalized due to sexual diseases, mainly due to prostitution. Child prostitution and the sexual exploitation of children was so prominent that a police officer in London had reported

Children were also abused in the sense of labor. That’s right, child labor was prominent in Victorian England where children started working around 4 or 5 years old. They worked hard, exhausting jobs and long, dreaded hours while their safety wasn’t even considered. No one considered the job safety of children in the workplace. This is quite abhorrent due to the fact that their jobs were never easy, it was always cheap and difficult labor. The lack of safety supervision resulted into multiple injuries and deaths. Death in dangerous workplaces was not uncommonly found amongst children, it happened quite often due to all the opportunities for injury and how physically vulnerable children are. They could easily crawl into small, dangerous places and injure themselves with machinery. Common jobs for children included mining, factory work, servants, cleaning, farming, and unfortunately, prostitution. A regular day on the job was 14 to 18 hours a day, leaving little time for rest and sleep. This must’ve taken a toll on the children's’ bodies, as they are still developing and unable to complete exhausting and dreadful tasks for long periods of time. It seems that the health and wellbeing of children was never considered amongst these jobs or in the idea of children working at all. Afterall, they were not viewed as children, but as