Dirty Secrets of the Church regarding Children - Home Children

This is a hard renching story on what the Church did to thousand of children. It is a true story ... many of these children who are now adults, are still suffering and many will never recover from the emotional truma.

I met this man who had been part of this scheme.  He and his sister were removed from their parents home, on the pretext that their parents could not take care of them.  They were put in a children's home and later told that their parents had died.  This is not the only incident of children been removed from their parents home. Not only that, they told the parents that their children had died. He and sisters were sent to Australia.  I can't imagination the life they had there.  They were used as slave labour, given only three set of clothes.  He does not talk much about it. Many of these children were raped and abused.  He was told that his parents were dead. These children birth certificates where all destroyed, they had no idea who they were. Later when they tried to find about their lost families, it proved a very difficult task.  A social worker dedicated her life in reuniting these people. For many of them it was to late, for many they lacked finances to be reunited to their families.  My heart broke a million times.  He had lodged a court case against the government of Australia and many of these people joined forces with him.  I lost track of him and did not hear the outcome of the law suit.  I know that the dates when this stopped is incorrect and were still going for a long time after!!


In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated the case of a woman who claimed that, at the age of four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. Margaret Humphreys soon discovered that as many as 150,000 children had in fact been deported from children's homes in Britian and shipped off to a "new life" in distant parts of the Empire

Margaret Humphreys reveals how she gradually unravelled this shocking secret, how she became drawn into the lives of some of these innocent and unwilling exiles, and how it became her mission to reunite them with their families





Home Children
Home Children was the child migration scheme founded by Annie MacPherson in 1869, under which more than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa.

During the 19th and 20th centuries, around 150,000 British "Home Children" were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Rhodesia. The scheme arguably dated back as far as the 17th century, but what’s surprising is how long it lasted—between 1947 and 1967 as many as 10,000 children were shipped from the United Kingdom to Australia.

Those behind the scheme had clear ideological intentions—they wanted to ensure that the colonies in question would have white majorities. The British children chosen to be shipped across the world were often referred to as “good white stock.”

Competing religious groups, including the Catholic Christian Brothers, sought to use the scheme to increase their followers in the colonies. Between the late ’30s and early ’60s, the Catholic Church shipped at least 1,000 British and 310 Maltese children to Catholic schools in Australia, where many were forced to do construction work or other hard labour. 

In addition to forced labour, subsequent enquiries have found that many of the migrant children in the Church’s care were brutally beaten, raped, and starved—some children were made to “scramble for food thrown on the floor” to survive. Many of the children were stripped of their birth name. Decades later, in 2001, the Catholic Church in Australia confirmed the crimes committed and issued an apology.

Australia apologised for its involvement in the scheme; in February 2010 UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a formal apology to the families of children who suffered. On 16 November 2009, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney stated that Canada would not apologise to child migrants.

Oranges and Sunshine -  the movie

The Lost Children of Britain
Katherine Karr 

Katherine Karr is an American national who holds a BA in Sociology from Rutgers University. 

She also holds a Masters in International Relations and a sequential Masters in International 

Non-Governmental Organizations from Webster University. She has spent most of her 

academic career researching children’s rights and has worked for the Arthritis Foundation as 

juvenile arthritis intern. The migration of children from Britain to Australia piqued her interest 

when she began searching for a thesis topic. 

‘Would you like to go to this wonderful place called Australia where the sun shines all day every
day and you pick oranges off the trees, live in a little white cottage by the sea and ride a horse to school? Well, you know you're an orphan, your parents are dead, you've got no family you might as well go.’

This statement habitually preceded the long journey made by British child migrants, some of
them orphans, sent from Great Britain to its former colonies and dominions.

In this paper, I focus on the migration of children from Britain to Australia, one of the largest recipients of such schemes. Contextualising these schemes within their legal and historical framework, this article subsequently addresses the blurred question of ‘consent’, an issue which I suggest blurs the lines between ‘forced’ and ‘voluntary’ with regards to the migration of these children. Finally, I address the international and domestic legal standards breached by the schemes to show how one of the greatest world powers violated human rights law with these (forced) migration schemes. 

Britain’s “Unwanted Children”
The History of Child Migration
In 1891, the passing of the Custody of Children Act, also known as ‘Barnado’s Act’, legalised the migration of British children by private organisations, marking the official endorsement of such migration schemes.

Child migration is conventionally defined as a ‘social policy which involved the transfer of abandoned youth from the orphanages, homes, workhouses and reformatories of the United Kingdom to overseas British colonies’, and ‘once overseas, the children were placed with colonial employers – usually in rural areas… [While] the care and removal of the children was under the law as it then stood’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2001). 

It is important to note, however, that not all child migrants were ‘abandoned’ or ‘orphaned’. In the earlier years in particular, most of these children were destitute or homeless, while others came from families who were unable to provide for them (Humphreys 1994). They were, therefore, purportedly being sent overseas with the prospect of a ‘better life’. 

Varying in size and interests, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Rhodesia (now
Zimbabwe) were the main destination points for British child migrants. Although exact figures
are difficult to ascertain, it is believed that from 1648 to 1967 over 100,000 children were sent to British Dominions, through various migration schemes usually led by charitable and religious organisations.

The schemes were ostensibly designed to alleviate the financial burden of supporting children in care, while contributing to the growth of the population and providing the necessary labour force in the burgeoning colonies.

Stanley Fairbridge, for instance, notably set up the Fairbridge Schools of farming, ‘t[aking] as his personal crusade the twin goals of populating the empire and solving the problems of Britain’s mounting army of poor and neglected children’ (Gill 2007: n.p.). While the migration schemes were controversial in and of themselves, and their history remains contested, the most controversial aspect was the racial dimension. 

This was most explicitly reflected in the so-called ‘White Australia Policy’. The British government wanted their colonies to be populated with ‘whites, and more specifically, with British ‘whites’. According to Coldrey (1999: 148), in 1944 the Australian government refused to grant entry to 750 Polish child refugees being temporarily granted refuge in Iran. Moreover, the term ‘good British stock’ was often used during this era to reflect not only the racial (or phenotypical) requirements, but also mental criteria, such as IQ (Humphreys 1994). These were especially pronounced in the 1940s under Australia’s policy of ‘populate or perish’, when a Japanese invasion was seen as an imminent threat in the eyes of the country (Coldrey 1999: 24-27). 

John Hennessy, who arrived in Australia in 1947 when he was just eleven years old, recounts being met at the dock at the end of his journey by the Archbishop of Perth. He told the children: ‘We welcome you to Australia.  For some, the journey and transition to Australia and other Commonwealth countries was a positive experience, opening doors to new opportunities. This was most common in Rhodesia (Humphreys 1994). For others, the experience was more arduous. A number of reports and child testimonies attest to the difficult conditions faced by child migrants in these schools and homes. 

In Australia, a little publicised investigation commissioned by the UK Home Office in 1956
found ‘unfavourable conditions and poorly trained staff’ in the 26 institutions investigated, of
which almost a fifth were blacklisted. Among the most commonly cited hardships faced by child
migrants included depersonalisation and loss of sense of self, hard physical labour, as well as
physical, and at times sexual, abuse (Select Committee on Health 2003). 

Migration or Deportation?: Addressing the Question of Consent. The complex question of consent is an important one when exploring Britain’s child migration schemes, as it is this issue which places these programmes squarely within the realm of forced migration. For many of the children who ‘emigrated’ to Britain’s dominions, their ‘transportation’ is more aptly depicted as ‘deportation’ (Brown 2010). 

Indeed, the mechanisms through which children were sent away were often far from ethical. In
the 1740s, for instance, it is reported that almost 500 children were kidnapped from a town in
Scotland and sent to live in the Americas (Child Migration Timeline 2010). In other cases,
parents were lied to by local churches and orphanages. 

Due to social (and religious) stigma,children born out of wed-lock, for instance, were often sent away as child migrants, at times without the knowledge or consent of their mother. A report by Child Migrants Trust produced for the Australia Government recounts the story of a former child migrant, Jim, whose mother had been told by her local church that ‘there was a local church-going family who wanted to take her baby, and that she should be thankful somebody was prepared to “pick up her mistake”’ (Child Migrants Trust 2001, emphasis added). This was, of course, untrue and Jim, like so many others, was sent to Australia believing he was an orphan.


Furthermore, deception was a tactic often used by institutions to obtain the agreement or
‘consent’ of the children. In her book Empty Cradles, Margaret Humphreys (1994) recounts countless tales of deception, in which children were often told that parents were dead and that
they could expect a better life with their adoptive parents once they reached their destination.

The vast majority, however, were not adopted but sent to institutions such as the Fairbridge
schools while, in the case of Australia, legal guardianship of these children was granted to the
Minister for Immigration and citizenship was not granted. To this day, many former child
migrants who are still alive consider themselves ‘British to the core’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2001). 

Overall, as we can see even from this limited selection of accounts, the question of consent –
either of the parents or of the children themselves – was often flouted through lies and
deception.

In recognition of this and the hardships faced by the children in their respective
destinations, in 2009, former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave a formal and
emotionally charged apology to former child migrants for this ‘ugly chapter’ in Australia’s history
(Rudd 2009). Following Rudd’s lead, in 2010 former UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, stated
that, on ‘behalf of the nation’ he was ‘truly sorry’ for the ‘misguided’ nature of the child
migration/deportation programmes which ‘let down’ those affected and ‘robbed them’ of their
childhoods (Brown 2010).