Contradictory mobility: child self-protection and automobiles in interwar Toronto’s Globe (Mobilité contradictoire: L’autoprotection des enfants et les automobiles dans le Globe de Toronto de l’entre-deux guerres)

Abstract

Twenty-first-century Toronto recapitulates its early twentieth-century self in one important respect: the automobilism of present-day Toronto injures and kills pedestrians in the same way – in the city’s crowded streets – and at roughly the same rate. The difference between the two eras lies in the types of injury and causes of death among children. Interwar Toronto endangered its children on increasingly crowded and automobilising streets, with virtually no municipal policy to protect them, especially those aged four and younger. The Toronto Globe determined that the next best thing to a policy option was to advance child self-protection. The newspaper’s ‘Just Kids Safety Club’ trained young pedestrians ‘to look up and down’ before crossing the street. In this, the Globe and the Torontonians who supported the paper contradicted decades of child protection discourse, which required all adults to protect all children.