Search results
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 struggle to reconcile the narratives of darkness and light that surround child rescue has bedevilled many of the recent enquiries into the legacy of out-of-home care. Despite what child rescuers may have believed, children did not ask to be rescued. The decision to sever the parent–child bond was made by others claiming to be acting in their interests, and yet, while the substitute homes in which
–23. Raftery, M., and O’Sullivan, E. (1999) Suffer the Little Children: The Inside Story of Ireland’s Industrial Schools , Dublin: New Island Books. Robins, J. (1980) The Lost Children: A Study of Charity Children in Ireland, 1700–1900 , Dublin: Institute of Public Administration. Sargent, P. (2013) Wild Arabs and Savages: A History of Juvenile Justice in Ireland , Manchester: Manchester University Press. Skold, J. (2013) ‘Historical abuse – a contemporary issue: compiling inquiries into abuse and neglect of children in out-of-home care worldwide
harboured such harm? Why did the institutions established to improve the lives of their child residents create environments in which so many of them would be abused? 4 It is not only Indigenous peoples who have contested the circumstances under which they came to be removed from their families. In Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom adults who spent time in their childhood in out-of-home care have also
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.
Responding to the resurgence of verbatim theatre that emerged in Britain, Australia, the United States and other parts of the world in the early 1990s, this book offers one of the first sustained, critical engagements with contemporary verbatim, documentary and testimonial dramaturgies. Offering a new reading of the history of the documentary and verbatim theatre form, the book relocates verbatim and testimonial theatre away from discourses of the real and representations of reality and instead argues that these dramaturgical approaches are better understood as engagements with forms of truth-telling and witnessing. Examining a range of verbatim and testimonial plays from different parts of the world, the book develops new ways of understanding the performance of testimony and considers how dramaturgical theatre can bear witness to real events and individual and communal injustice through the re-enactment of personal testimony. Through its interrogation of different dramaturgical engagements with acts of witnessing, the book identifies certain forms of testimonial theatre that move beyond psychoanalytical accounts of trauma and reimagine testimony and witnessing as part of a decolonised project that looks beyond event-based trauma, addressing instead the experience of suffering wrought by racism and other forms of social injustice.
admitted to such institutions, 13 the Ryan Report concluded that, between 1936 and 1999, many children were physically, psychologically, and sexually abused by both religious and lay staff while in out-of-home care. 14 In 2002, the Residential Institutions Redress Board (RIRB) was established to compensate and assist those who had suffered in residential children's homes and, crucially, other institutions ‘in respect of which a public
For more on Lady Marjorie Allen's campaign see G. Lynch, ‘Pathways to the 1946 Curtis Report and the post-war reconstruction of children's out-of-home care’, Contemporary British History , 34:1, 2020, pp. 22–43. 34 BDA, AP/H/12, Meeting of Religious engaged in Rescue Work, Westminster, Minutes of Meeting, 2 January 1945. 35
recommended the roll-out of Home Care Packages (HCPs), support packages of care tailored to meet the needs of an individual, comprising the services of nurses, home help and various therapies, including physiotherapy and occupational therapy services. The HCP scheme was established to facilitate timely discharge from acute hospitals and offer enhanced support along with existing home help and communitybased care services. It was a significant departure for long-term care policy in Ireland, as the government acknowledged for the first time that it had responsibility to
Migration Policies in Sweden 2015–2016’, Refugee Review, 3, pp. 2–14. Schmidt, G. (2013). ‘“Let’s get Together”: Perspectives on Multiculturalism and Local Implications in Denmark’, in Kivisto, P. and Wahlbeck, Ö. (eds.) Debating 28 Refugees and the violence of welfare bureaucracies Multiculturalism in the Nordic Welfare States. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 197–218. Sköld, J. (2013). ‘Historical Abuse – A Contemporary Issue: Compiling Inquiries into Abuse and Neglect of Children in Out-of-Home Care Worldwide’, Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime