Child, nation, race and empire

Swain, Shurlee; Hillel, Margot

doi:10.7765/9781526118059

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Swain and Hillel note with reference to 'child rescue' literature more broadly, that correspondence was 'suitably edited' and functioned as 'testimonials to the importance of their work'. 7 With reference to the letter extracts printed by the LRSU, Wagner writes that they were intended to 'keep public interest in the scheme 3 alive'. 8 The challenges historians face when working with such sources have been noted by David Gerber; edited content and falsified letters compromise the reliability of promotional material.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Give my love’: community and companionship among former ragged school scholars

Mair¹

2018

Family & Community History

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By 1884, forty years after its establishment, the London Ragged School Union estimated that 400,000 children had attended its schools. This article explores how former scholars perceived and engaged with their old ragged school community. Existing scholarship on the movement draws predominantly on its promotional literature or institutional documents, yielding limited access to the testimonies of the children themselves. As such, understanding of the children's experiences and perspectives remains partial. Drawing on a collection of 227 letters from 57 former scholars of Compton Place Ragged School, this article offers new insights into the role that the school, its teachers, and its pupils could continue to play. The correspondence analysed here demonstrates the critical assistance teachers offered to those overseas by relaying messages and locating loved ones. Ragged school teachers acted as an important link to Britain, a source of stability during times of uncertainty. In the same way, correspondents connected their teachers and institutions to their peers by offering information as to their whereabouts and wellbeing. As such, the letters reveal the existence of ragged school networks in emigrant communities; friendships forged in the classroom continued and developed overseas.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Give my love’: community and companionship among former ragged school scholars

Mair¹

2018

Family & Community History

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“…Such anachronistic retention of the values and prejudices of a seemingly bygone era is all too plausible in an institutional environment that literally dates back to colonial times, and in which the carceral welfare paradigm is focused with unparalleled fidelity. That conflation of the justice and welfare systems is itself a direct legacy of 19th-century notions of welfare, charity, and social respectability (Swain & Hillel, 2010). As criminologist Kerry Carrington (1993) has cogently observed, the judicial-welfare “gaze” fell more intensely on lower-class girls than on any other group, and those who passed into institutions such as Parramatta Girls’ Home had, by definition, reached an end-point of that judicial apparatus, a socio-legal nadir that automatically connoted the most degraded and degenerate traits of an already derided “race.”…”

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confidence: 99%

Delinquent Girls as Activists: Insider Activism and Carceral Welfare

Wilson

Carlton

2022

Space and Culture

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The article examines the motivation and role of the insider activism that resulted in the preservation of a major historical site of female incarceration, the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct, in suburban Sydney. For much of the 20th century the site was a “Girls’ Home,” in which children who had committed no offense were incarcerated under child welfare regulations and literally treated like criminals. Life in the institution was characterized by routine extreme maltreatment of children, many of whom have carried the psychological legacy of their time there throughout their lives. A group of survivors, moved to preserve and reclaim the space, spent many years contending with obdurate and indifferent bureaucracies before successfully having the site Heritage-listed, and it is now a member of the international Sites of Conscience. The Precinct’s significance as a site of feminist carceral history is discussed, and its place in today’s cultural landscape examined.

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Where Do They Belong?—Adoption of Mixed-Race Children in Late 1950s and Early 1960s Britain

Jur

2022

Genealogy

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This paper analyses the adoption of mixed-race children in Great Britain from formerly colonised or dominion territories after the Second World War with a focus on the late 1950s and early 1960s. It explores the ways in which mixed-race children and their biological, as well as their adoptive families, were treated in the adoption system in order to explore the tensions that arise between adoption and questions of racial belonging. As adoption and its related processes have the ability to profoundly interfere with the most private realms of human cohabitation—the family, this positions the history of adoption right at the interface of the private and the public sphere, offering an ideal background to look at the public as well as the private perception of the (decolonising) British Empire. By taking this specific group of children into focus, it is possible to illustrate the immediate and deeper effect of the race/colour question in adoptions as if under a magnifying glass. In the context of adoption processes, deeply colonial and inherently racist patterns of thought can be found, particularly in adoption records, but also in advice literature.

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Child, nation, race and empire

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

‘Give my love’: community and companionship among former ragged school scholars

‘Give my love’: community and companionship among former ragged school scholars

Delinquent Girls as Activists: Insider Activism and Carceral Welfare

Where Do They Belong?—Adoption of Mixed-Race Children in Late 1950s and Early 1960s Britain

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