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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.
’s Protection Act, which required local authorities to assume maintenance costs of wards and facilitated the use of foster care. This was followed five years later by an Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to and Better Protection of Children which vested responsibility for active intervention and placement in local Children’s Aid Societies, supervised by an Office for Neglected and Dependent Children, of which
From captivity to kinship 51 USA, even though Native Americans accounted for only about 2 per cent of the total population. Nationally, Indian children were twenty times more likely to be placed in foster care than non-Indian children. As many as 35 per cent of all Indian children were placed in foster care or adopted.10 Native protest against adoption as a form of cultural genocide led to the passing of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978, an act which restores tribal jurisdiction over Indian child welfare, and which promotes Native custody and adoption
This book recounts the little-known history of the mixed-race children born to black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. Of the three million American soldiers stationed in Britain from 1942 to 1945, about 8 per cent (240,000) were African-American; the latter’s relationships with British women resulted in the birth of an estimated 2,000 babies. The African-American press named these children ‘brown babies’; the British called them ‘half-castes’. Black GIs, in this segregated army, were forbidden to marry their white girlfriends. Up to half of the mothers of these babies, faced with the stigma of illegitimacy and a mixed-race child, gave their children up for adoption. The outcome for these children tended to be long-term residency in children’s homes, sometimes followed by fostering and occasionally adoption, but adoption societies frequently would not take on ‘coloured’ children, who were thought to be ‘too hard to place’. There has been minimal study of these children and the difficulties they faced, such as racism in a (then) very white Britain, lack of family or a clear identity. Accessibly written and illustrated with numerous photographs, this book presents the stories of over forty of these children. While some of the accounts of early childhood are heart-breaking, there are also many uplifting narratives of finding American fathers and gaining a sense of self and of heritage.
life on a university campus by taking part in a week’s residential at QMUL. As it has developed, TVF has become a much wider collaboration that includes adult colleagues from a range of disciplinary areas, notably from the field of ethical management and creative evaluation, as well as with participatory officers from local authority children’s services. 3 Since the project began in 2015, we have gathered a broader range of testimonies, notably from foster carers and social workers who share the professional contexts and conditions of their work in the care service
Given the significant similarities and differences between the welfare states of Northern Europe and their reactions to the perceived 'refugee crisis' of 2015, the book focuses primarily on the three main cases of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Placed in a wider Northern European context – and illustrated by those chapters that also discuss refugee experiences in Norway and the UK – the Danish, Swedish and German cases are the largest case studies of this edited volume. Thus, the book contributes to debates on the governance of non-citizens and the meaning of displacement, mobility and seeking asylum by providing interdisciplinary analyses of a largely overlooked region of the world, with two specific aims. First, we scrutinize the construction of the 2015 crisis as a response to the large influx of refugees, paying particular attention to the disciplinary discourses and bureaucratic structures that are associated with it. Second, we investigate refugees’ encounters with these bureaucratic structures and consider how these encounters shape hopes for building a new life after displacement. This allows us to show that the mobility of specific segments of the world’s population continues to be seen as a threat and a risk that has to be governed and controlled. Focusing on the Northern European context, our volume interrogates emerging policies and discourses as well as the lived experiences of bureaucratization from the perspective of individuals who find themselves the very objects of bureaucracies.
Nationalism has reasserted itself today as the political force of our times, remaking European politics wherever one looks. Britain is no exception, and in the midst of Brexit, it has even become a vanguard of nationalism's confident return to the mainstream. Brexit, in the course of generating a historically unique standard of sociopolitical uncertainty and constitutional intrigue, tore apart the two-party compact that had defined the parameters of political contestation for much of twentieth-century Britain. This book offers a wide-ranging picture of the different theoretical accounts relevant to addressing nationalism. It briefly repudiates the increasingly common attempts to read contemporary politics through the lens of populism. The book explores the assertion of 'muscular liberalism' and civic nationalism. It examines more traditional, conservative appeals to racialised notions of blood, territory, purity and tradition as a means of reclaiming the nation. The book also examines how neoliberalism, through its recourse to discourses of meritocracy, entrepreneurial self and individual will, alongside its exaltation of a 'points-system' approach to the ills of immigration, engineers its own unique rendition of the nationalist crisis. There are a number of important themes through which the process of liberal nationalism can be documented - what Arun Kundnani captured, simply and concisely, as the entrenchment of 'values racism'. These include the 'faux-feminist' demonisation of Muslims.
have been other projects with different topics, but a significant amount of my time has been spent working in relation to care-experienced communities. Impact has been key, with multimodal outputs including magazines, music videos, animated films, dedicated websites and artwork; training events and workshops have been held across the UK and Ireland with foster carers, teachers, young people, social workers and related practitioners (Mannay et al. 2019 ; Kara et al. 2021 ). There have also been further research projects with different funding bodies and partners
engage with ongoing debates about the downfall or survival of the family in the USA, addressing issues like single parenting, foster care, adoption, and ‘the child’s best interest’ that were circulating in the 1980s and into the early twenty-first century, but were differently inflected in different decades. The 1980s, the years of the Reagan administration, saw a republican slant to family values that included the President’s clear stand against abortion, and intensified attacks on welfare in order to ‘cut back on domestic government services and taxes, to let market
schemes was the closure of large institutions or orphanages and the creation of modern child protection services, such as networks of foster carers, family type homes, and mother and 03_ChildrensRights_055-091.indd 66 10/10/2013 10:35 Child protection in Romania and European Union accession67 child centres. The rationale behind project funding was to forge the implementation of the best practice, thus the Commission only funded the best projects at the county level in terms of attaining the objectives of Children First.30 The EU project funding was coupled with the