Remembering Britain's Child Migrants: Supporting Public Reflection through a National Exhibition, Media and Organizational Engagement

在1869年至1967年期间，英国慈善机构和宗教组织在国家支持下实施了一系列儿童移民计划，导致大约90000名儿童重新安置到加拿大和澳大利亚，较小的计划也将儿童迁移到罗得西亚和新西兰。虽然这些计划建立在英国使用儿童移民的更长历史的基础上，但值得注意的是，它们的运作规模史无前例，而且它们都有共同的抱负，即在英国将儿童从被视为道德风险来源的家庭和社会环境中驱逐出去。这些计划的目的不仅仅是为了照顾贫穷或流离失所的儿童，而是一项道德计划，在这项计划中，他们的迁移被理解为向一个新的救赎环境的转变，使他们能够作为虔诚和有生产力的公民蓬勃发展，同时加强这些殖民地的盎格鲁-撒克逊种族种群。虽然一些儿童后来认为这些计划是对他们生活的有益干预，但另一些儿童开始认为它们是不必要的痛苦的来源。在大多数情况下，加拿大的儿童移民被安置在偏远的农村家庭，在那里他们作为家庭佣人提供契约安置，而不是被收养为正式家庭成员。这意味着他们的工作时间更长，接受正规教育的机会也更有限，如果他们留在英国，这是合法的。在后来前往澳大利亚的计划中，儿童主要被安置在寄宿机构，其中一些后来成为系统性虐待和忽视指控的焦点。虽然早期的加拿大移民计划通常允许儿童移民和出生家庭之间进行一定程度的接触，但在后一次移民计划中，父母同意的程度和对其子女移民的了解程度要低得多。在许多情况下，亲生父母没有被告知他们的孩子是由他们把孩子留在那里照顾的机构送到澳大利亚的，或者被错误地告知他们的孩子将被澳大利亚的家庭收养，而实际上他们被送到了寄宿机构。前往澳大利亚的儿童移民报告称，有人错误地告诉他们，他们的父母已经去世，或者因为接收机构更改了他们的名字或生日，他们很难与亲生父母重新建立联系。通过儿童移民信托基金等组织的努力，数百名前移民有可能与英国的家庭成员团聚，尽管在许多情况下，移民发现他们的亲生父母在他们能够与他们重新联系之前就去世了。与这些计划有关的痛苦，特别是在澳大利亚的背景下，已导致澳大利亚和英国总理以及澳大利亚的其他一些组织，包括英国国教和天主教会、爱尔兰基督教兄弟会、救世军和Barnardo‘s，公开为这些计划道歉。该项目将支持在英国V&A儿童博物馆举办的第一个关于这些儿童移民计划的大型展览的发展，预计将吸引约25万名参观者，媒体对展览的报道远远超过这一数字。国际展览局还将与直接参与这些计划的组织合作，探讨它们可能希望与展览一起进行的公开声明或其他活动。该项目产生的媒体产出还将探讨前儿童移民目前的经历，包括可能需要的持续形式的支助。还将与屡获殊荣的教育提供商TrueTube一起制作关于这些儿童移徙计划的在线电影和教学计划，供中学生在关键阶段3和4使用。

Between 1869 to 1967, a range of child migration schemes were run by UK charities and religious organizations with State support that led to the re-location of an estimated 90,000 children to Canada and Australia, with smaller schemes also migrating children to Rhodesia and New Zealand. Whilst building on a longer history of the use of child migration in the UK, these schemes were notable both for their unprecedented scale of operation and their shared ambition to remove children from family and social environments in the UK deemed to be a source of moral risk. These schemes were intended not simply as practical welfare responses to the care of poor or displaced children, but as a moral project in which their migration was understood in terms of a move to a new redemptive environment that would enable them to flourish as pious and productive citizens, whilst strengthening the Anglo-Saxon racial stock of those colonies.Whilst some children later regarded these schemes as useful interventions in their lives, others came to regard them as sources of unnecessary suffering. Child migrants to Canada were, in most cases, placed in remote rural homes where they served indentured placements as domestic workers rather than being adopted as full family members. This entailed both longer working hours and more limited access to formal schooling for them than would have been legal had they remained in Britain. In later schemes to Australia, children were mainly placed in residential institutions, some of which subsequently became the focus of allegations of systemic abuse and neglect. Whilst earlier migration schemes to Canada usually allowed some degree of on-going contact between child migrants and birth families, levels of parental consent and knowledge of the migration of their children in the later schemes to Australia were much lower. In many cases, birth parents were not told that their children were sent to Australia by institutions in which they had left them to be cared for, or were inaccurately told that their children would be adopted by families in Australia when they were in fact being sent to residential institutions. Child migrants to Australia have reported being told, inaccurately, that their parents were dead, or struggled to re-establish contact with their birth parents because their names or birthdays had been changed by receiving institutions. Through the work of organizations such as the Child Migrants Trust it has been possible for several hundred former migrants to be re-united with family members in the UK, although in many cases migrants have discovered that their birth parents had died before they were able to renew contact with them. The suffering associated with these schemes, particularly in the Australian context, has led to public apologies for them being made by the Prime Ministers of both Australia and the United Kingdom, as well as a number of other organizations in Australia including the Anglican and Catholic Churches, the Irish Christian Brothers, the Salvation Army and Barnardo's. This project will support the development of the first major exhibition on these child migration schemes to be held in the UK, at the V&A Museum of Childhood, which is expected to attract around 250,000 visitors, with media coverage of the exhibition reaching a much larger audience than this. The PI will also work with organizations directly involved in running these schemes to explore public statements or other activities they may wish to undertake in conjunction with the exhibition. Media outputs arising from this project will also explore the current experiences of former child migrants, including on-going forms of support that may be needed. An on-line film and lesson plan on these child migration schemes will also be produced in conjunction with the award-winning educational provider TrueTube for use with secondary school students at Key Stages 3 and 4.