Kate and Emma

Monica Dickens's novel, first published 1965, opens in a Juvenile court in London. One of the young offenders is a sixteen-year-old girl, Kate, who is described as being in need of care and protection. In the court is a girl only slightly older, Emma, daughter of the magistrate. From her experience of going around with a social worker on his calls she knows that adolescents and, more important, small children are daily subjected to neglect and brutality and that "care and protection" cannot...