WE TEND to imagine neglected children as they’ve been depicted in literature or film.

There’s the cheeky ‘Orphan Annie’ model that in popular entertainment, and a comical ‘Matilda’ quality which depicts a clever than average child struggling beneath the domination of grotesquely vile parents or teachers.

We adore it when these figures are shown to be ridiculous out-of-date authoritarians who eventually get their just desserts as justice is done.

This Victorian model has trickled down into modern social consciousness, and in some literature includes figures like Francie Brady in Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy, or Katriona O’Sullivan’s child self in her autobiography, Poor.

The lesser child has featured strongly over the past two centuries or so, and includes fairy tales such The Little Match Girl, Hansel and Gretel, as well as Dickens’s Oliver Twist.

In the last few decades, Jeanette Winterton’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit and more recently Anna Burns’s Milkman, or Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These depict young people completely ignored and neglected within a family group or by society itself.

But it doesn’t always have to be slapping and beating, starvation and physical abuse. Less dramatic forms of neglect do exist but we tend not to hear about those.

The low-grade quiet performer for example, the ones who outwardly appear competent and cooperative, but whose behaviour may be masking a different story.

So what makes a child feel ‘lesser’ and who, usually, is responsible for such feelings?

If anything, silence is the key, the kind of load-bearing silence in which nobody ever notices, or intervenes when they witness something not quite right within a child’s life.

In my novel ‘Sweep the........

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