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Introduction London, 10 September 2018 Since 2015, more than one and a half million people have traversed the Mediterranean, seeking asylum in Europe. The EU has been negotiating their screening and resettlement outside of Europe. European governments have closed some ports and borders to them. And neofascist groups from across Europe have rallied on the ground and online to prevent their entry. Thousands have died at sea. Multinational NGOs like Médecins Sans Frontières and Save the Children have carried out search-and-rescue
This book seeks to contribute to Italian social history and to deepen understanding of Catholic charity and social policy in past times. It focuses on two groups of disreputable (or at least tarnished) women and children and on the arrangements made to discipline and care for them, both by public authorities and by voluntary organisations and would-be benefactors. The first group consisted of prostitutes, concubines, single mothers, estranged wives, and girls in moral danger. The second was composed of children, many born outside wedlock, who were abandoned by their blood parents, out of shame or poverty or both. A synoptic survey, the book examines the complications involved in the tolerance and regulation of activities considered bad but impossible to suppress. Could licensed prostitution be used as a lesser evil to counter supposedly greater abuses, such as sodomy, adultery or concubinage, and to protect ‘decent’ women? Could child abandonment be tamed and used against the greater evils of infanticide or abortion, to preserve the honour of women who had borne illegitimate children and to save fragile lives? And what should be done to protect and rescue the victims of sexual exploitation and children separated from their natural mothers?
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
6 The rescue strategy HILE THE LAST chapter has outlined the exhaustive nature of the multiagency investigation into the fraud and other crimes perpetrated by Guerin and his closest associates, culminating in a fifteen-year jail sentence for the former ISC chief executive, we now have to analyse how those left with the horrendous task of effecting a recovery of Ferranti International coped with this enormous challenge. The fraud had created a huge hole in the company’s accounts, estimated at approximately £400 million, while the acquisition of bank debt
M1218 - THOMPSON TXT.qxp:GRAHAM Q7.3 10/3/08 13:10 Page 75 3 The Bretton Woods rescue The end of the Second World War left the United States as the most powerful state in the world with only the Soviet Union as a conceivable competitor. Economically, it had an extraordinary advantage even compared to the one it had enjoyed during the 1920s. Whilst all of the other significant powers were substantially poorer in 1945 than they had been in 1939, the United States was richer. It now accounted for more than half of the world’s manufacturing production, supplied
67 4 Extenuation and rescue Gregory Martin, in about 1580, had written of certain women ‘being by themselves placed’ in the ‘vile service’ of public prostitution, as if they had volunteered for an unpleasant task but deserved no thanks for doing so.1 How far did observers and commentators in the early modern centuries believe that prostitutes and other dishonoured women were entirely responsible for their own predicament, ascribing this solely to their weakness and depravity rather than to the pressure of their circumstances? Or could a woman be, if not
22 Pacifism and rescue: the case of Lionel Cowan Already in this book we have met many ‘exceptional people’: people, that is, who went far beyond the ordinary bounds of compassion to concern themselves with those with whom, for the most part, they had no close personal ties. They include the volunteers who worked for the Jewish, Quaker and Rotarian refugee committees. In a paper delivered in 1944 Rae Barash posed the question of why volunteers like herself had committed themselves to work with refugees. She answered: ‘My own reason as a Jewess: “There but for the
Berlin Wall, speaking of neo-liberalism’s ‘ideological certainty that has long passed … because reality has intervened’. That states were now coming to the rescue of ‘free’ markets was further proof of neo-liberalism’s contradictions. However, the politics of the crisis and its aftermath have served as another lesson in neo-liberalism’s pragmatism and flexibility, and how analysis must focus on ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002 ). As is now widely observed, the crisis has not been a crisis for neo-liberalism, prompting renewed debate on
that? In August he had heard much about ‘the poor, trodden-down’ company, ‘perfectly helpless’, so the House ‘must pay whatever sum that Company might demand’ and ‘come to its rescue and preserve it from the ruin it was threatened with, owing to the policy of the Government’. Now the Government was blamed for placing itself ‘altogether in P&O’s hands and they must pay
in July 2018 boarded a Turkish Airlines flight from Gothenburg to Istanbul to prevent the deportation of a man to Afghanistan. 2 Arguably, such acts of solidarity are not new. Think, for example, of Lisa Fittko, who in 1940 and 1941 escorted many refugees, among them Walter Benjamin, across the Pyrenees from France to Spain ( Fittko, 2000 ). What is new, however, is the publicity and support these acts are garnering in Europe. In this essay I focus on one particular instance in 2019, in which an act of solidarity with migrants – a search and rescue (SAR) operation