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，导致估计有90，000名儿童被重新安置到加拿大和澳大利亚，较小的计划也将儿童移民到罗得西亚和新西兰。虽然建立在英国使用儿童移民的更长历史的基础上，但这些计划因其前所未有的运作规模和将儿童从英国被认为是道德风险来源的家庭和社会环境中移除的共同雄心而引人注目。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，而是作为一个道德项目，他们的迁移被理解为一个新的救赎环境，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-撒克逊种族股票。虽然一些孩子后来认为这些计划是对他们生活的有益干预，另一些人则将其视为不必要痛苦的根源。在大多数情况下，移民到加拿大的儿童被安置在偏远的农村家庭，在那里他们作为家庭佣工被契约安置，而不是作为家庭正式成员被收养。这意味着他们的工作时间更长，接受正规教育的机会也比他们留在英国的法律的更有限。在后来澳大利亚的计划中，儿童主要被安置在寄宿机构，其中一些机构后来成为系统性虐待和忽视指控的焦点。虽然早期移民加拿大的计划通常允许儿童移民和出生家庭之间进行某种程度的持续接触，但在后来的移民澳大利亚计划中，父母同意和了解其子女移民的程度要低得多。在许多情况下，亲生父母没有被告知他们的子女是由他们将子女留在那里照顾的机构送到澳大利亚的，或者被不准确地告知他们的子女将被澳大利亚的家庭收养，而实际上他们是被送到寄宿机构的。澳大利亚的儿童移民报告说，他们被不准确地告知他们的父母已经去世，或者因为他们的名字或生日被接收机构更改而难以与亲生父母重新建立联系。通过儿童移民信托等组织的工作，数百名前移民有可能与联合王国的家庭成员团聚，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已经死亡。与这些计划有关的痛苦，特别是在澳大利亚的情况下，导致澳大利亚和联合王国的总理以及澳大利亚的一些其他组织，包括英国圣公会和天主教会、爱尔兰基督教兄弟会、救世军和巴纳多的公开道歉。该项目将支持在联合王国的V&A童年博物馆举办关于这些儿童移民计划的第一个大型展览，预计将吸引约250 000名参观者，媒体对展览的报道将吸引更多的观众。公众宣传主任亦会与直接参与举办这些计划的机构合作，探讨他们希望在展览期间出版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支持形式。还将与屡获殊荣的教育提供商TrueTube合作制作关于这些儿童移民计划的在线电影和课程计划，供第三和第四阶段的中学生使用。

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.