Oliver Twist-Child Abuse Essay Example

stipulated that the poor could only receive government assistance if they moved into government workhouses. Residents of those workhouses were essentially inmates whose rights were severely curtailed by a host of onerous regulations. Labor was required, families were almost always separated, and rations of food and clothing were meager.

The workhouses operated on the principle that poverty was the consequence of laziness and that the dreadful conditions in the workhouse would inspire the poor to better their own circumstances. Yet the economic dislocation of the Industrial Revolution made it impossible for many to do so, and the workhouses did not provide any means for social or economic betterment. Furthermore, as Dickens points out, the officials who ran the workhouses blatantly violated the values they preached to the poor.

Dickens describes with great sarcasm the greed, laziness, and arrogance of charitable workers like Mr. Bumble and Mrs. Mann. In general, charitable institutions only reproduced the awful conditions in which the poor would live anyway. As Dickens puts it, the poor choose between “being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it. ” Dr Brennan says that the recognized consequences of abuse, including absconding, passivity, depression, poor self image and vulnerability to corruption by anyone showing them what appears to be love, are very well illustrated by the text.

Dickens also managed to identify all the now accepted parental risk factors for abuse: substance abuse, including alcohol, domestic violence, mental health problems and animal abuse. And he also describes the domestic abuse perpetrated against both sexes in the novel. Nancy is abused by Bill Sykes her

pimp and Mr. Bumble is abused by Mrs. Coney, the superintendent of the female workhouse, two months after their marriage.