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hand In vengeance, shall be lifted for the wrong, Done to their weakness, by the heartless strong? 1 Delivering his annual oration at the National Children’s Homes Edgworth training farm in 1886, Santa Claus set out the central tenets of the child rescue movement. Scarcely twenty years since its foundation, the movement’s leaders were able
When General Charles Gordon lived at Gravesend in the 1860s, he turned himself into a child rescuer. This book contributes to understandings of both contemporary child welfare practices and the complex dynamics of empire. It analyses the construction and transmission of nineteenth-century British child rescue ideology. The book aims to explain the mentality which allowed the child removal policy to flourish. The disseminated publications by four influential English child rescue organisations: Dr. Barnardo's (DBH), the National Children's Homes (NCH), the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society (WSS) and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), are discussed. The gospel of child rescue was a discursive creation, the impact of which would be felt for generations to come. The body of the child was placed within a familiar environment, rendered threatening by the new social, religious and moral meanings ascribed to it. Ontario's 1888 Children's Protection Act required local authorities to assume maintenance costs of wards and facilitated the use of foster care. Changing trends in publishing have created an opportunity for the survivors of out-of-home care to tell their stories. The book shows how the vulnerable body of the child at risk came to be reconstituted as central to the survival of nation, race and empire. The shocking testimony that official enquiries into the treatment of children in out-of-home 'care' held in Britain, Ireland, Australia and Canada imply that there was no guarantee that the rescued child would be protected from further harm.
The power of child rescue narrative to shape understandings of child neglect lay as much in its creation of location as in its construction of character. The body of the child was placed within a familiar environment, rendered threatening by the new social, religious and moral meanings ascribed to it. Hence rescue became an imperative not only for the individual but also for the community – and indeed
’. Well, to finish my story quickly, I and a lot o’ lads more, On a bright September mornin’ sailed for Canada shore. And here I am alive, sir – alive and a doin’ well; And wherever I goes, this story I’ll never forget to tell. 1 Emigration provided the means through which child rescuers were able to transform their work
of this poem, written for members of the Barnardo Old Boys’ Society, provides a rare insight into the ambivalence common amongst care leavers, capturing both a pride in their achievements and a resentment of the stigma which often accompanied an institutional childhood. The celebratory child rescue literature provided little space for doubts as to the value and impact of the work, yet the outcome of
constructed meaning and identity. 3 Given that the child rescue movement understood itself as central to the social or civilising mission at home it is not surprising to find that it drew heavily upon the ‘images of empire’ that Hall argues filled the imagination of nineteenth-century Englishmen. 4 Race provided a readily understood vocabulary. The twofold duty of the English
child rescue organisations, founded in the second half of the nineteenth century: Dr Barnardo’s ( DBH ), the National Children’s Homes ( NCH ), the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society ( WSS ) and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children ( NSPCC ). Rather than entering into the long-running debate as to whether they were primarily humanitarian agencies or agents of social control, or
orphan, the homeless, [and] the outcast’ were taken to a place where ‘the past was forgiven and forgotten’. 5 ‘Not massed in barracks but grouped in small houses’, where ‘their intercourse was made like that of a family’, they were ‘set to work’ surrounded by the ‘joyous and natural life of home and religion’. 6 The institutional regimes established by child rescuers in
Gladys’s selfish complaint points to one of the key strategies of child rescue. The neglected child, however romanticised, had also to be made real if they were going to attract financial support. Like Gladys’s mother, writers had to provide the ‘ghastly details’ in order to create the strong visual images that would haunt the reader. Central to such visual images was a focus on the body which functioned
. Debate about Chinese domestic mastery and the place of the Chinese in the colonial venture came to the fore during the ‘child rescue’ campaigns that circulated across the colonial world in the 1920s and 1930s. In both Singapore and Darwin, calls for child rescue promoted governmental intervention into Chinese homes. In Darwin, the Commonwealth administration pursued this ‘civilising mission’ with