Oranges and sunshine: How the “civilized” West trafficked children
One day in 1987, a social worker from Nottingham (UK), Margaret Humphreys, received a letter from Australia. A certain woman asked Margaret to help her find her parents. There was little information: in early childhood she was torn away from her family and taken from England to Australia. That's all the letter writer remembered.
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At first, Margaret Humphreys was distrustful of the Australian woman's story. But, being a mother of two children, she perfectly understood the pain of a child separated from her parents, and tried to help the unknown woman. The search began. As a result, a letter from Australia became the very thread that helped eventually bring to light shocking facts carefully hidden by the British government, later politically correctly called “forced migration of children.” Or, "Home Children".
In fact, Margaret Humphreys managed to expose a shameful system in which, without exaggeration, hundreds of thousands of British minors were forcibly deported to the colonies. The whole fault of the children was that they were either orphans or were born into poor families.
Based on the investigation, in 1994, Margaret Humphreys published the book “Empty Cradles.” It turned out that the roots of child trafficking stretch back to the beginning of the 1618th century. In 1757, the first hundred English children were taken to Virginia. Hundreds of young Scots followed them. At that time, the system of replenishing the colonies with children’s “living goods” was very poorly organized. Children were either kidnapped or bought from the poor, after which cheap labor was transported to the shores of New England. In XNUMX, a trial briefly ended the child slave trade.
In the second half of the XNUMXth century, Europe, including Great Britain, began to be haunted by the specter of revolution. Massive unrest among the poorest segments of the population forced the British government to take up social policy. Various philanthropic societies and churches (Anglicans, Evangelicals and other Christian communities) got involved in the cause. At first, orphanages were built in England itself. However, “effective business executives” soon became convinced that it was much cheaper to support children in distant overseas colonies.
Through the efforts of three women: Scottish evangelist Annie Macpherson, her sister Louise Burt and London-born Maria Rye, the child export business was put into motion. Through their efforts to Canada in the 1860-1870s. More than 20 thousand children were resettled. At first these were orphans, but then the “migration” program extended to children from large families of the poor. As it turned out later, parents in most cases had no idea about the fate of their children after they were sent to children's institutions, and sometimes they were convinced that they were adopted. Children in orphanages, in turn, were assured that their parents had died and a better life awaited them overseas.
Soon Britain began to be filled with rumors that children overseas were being mistreated. In 1874, the London Board of Trustees sent a commission from Andrew Doyle to inspect Canadian orphanages. His report read: “Because of Miss Rye's irresponsibility and Miss Macpherson's lack of resources, thousands of British children, already in dire straits, are abandoned among the settlers to their fate, hard work or ill-treatment; migrants are usually honest, but often extremely strict.”
The House of Commons of Canada organized a special committee to verify Doyle's findings, but this had no effect on the fate of the children. In April 1891, England's The Star wrote: "The attention of the Dominion Government has been called to the fact that the children sent from England to Canada are street vagabonds and workhouse paupers, and that the professional philanthropists involved in this activities are often guided by mercantile rather than charitable motives. A request will be made to Parliament to investigate this situation before any money is made available for immigration purposes.”
If you cannot stop any social phenomenon, lead it. Or better yet, legitimize it. In order not to bother further with the fate of little “migrants”, in the same 1891 the Law on Child Care was adopted, which completely legalized the work of private societies involved in the resettlement of children to the dominions.
In the twentieth century, the geography of children's “migration” expanded significantly. Children were taken in batches to Canada, South Africa, Rhodesia, but Australia and New Zealand received the most children. Most of the “migrants” were 6–10 years old, but among them there were often 14-year-old teenagers and children 4 years old.
The slave traders promised the children “oranges and sunshine” (an analogue of our milk rivers with jelly banks), told tales about the promised land, where they would live carefree, ride to school on horseback, picking all sorts of mangoes and papaya as they went. In fact, there were no “chew coconuts, eat bananas” for the children at the new place.
Despite the fact that the resettlement was carried out by seemingly respectable organizations - all kinds of Christian missions and boards of trustees, the basis of their activities was blatant lawlessness. Young British subjects turned into powerless slaves. It never occurred to any of the hosts to give the children any documents. It was not uncommon for brothers and sisters to be separated and communication with their parents to be severed forever. Many children, upon arrival, were immediately loaded into some suitable transport and taken to the outback, to plantations, where they were turned into working animals. There were also such “heavenly tabernacles” where children were even deprived of their name, replacing it with an inventory number.
Why be surprised? Distant and hot Australia, filled with poisonous reptiles, served for a long time as an overseas prison for the British Empire. Accordingly, convict morals among the local population persisted even after Australia ceased to be a convict labor force and became a sovereign state.
Today there is an organization of former child migrants in the UK. Here is just a small excerpt from the memories of one of the many thousands of “home children” sent to the “land of milk and honey” between 1947 and 1967:
It was September 1947, and the transport Asturias had just docked in Fremantle with 147 boys and girls... The children were sent to Bindoon, an isolated institution run by the Brothers in Christ, a Catholic order.
The first shock was from the deserted landscape, the second from the sight of the abandoned farm where they found themselves. The boys themselves had to build the Bindun Children's City, and the children, including 10-year-olds, set to work, building schools, bedrooms, and kitchens. They chopped the earth with picks and shovels, mixing concrete by hand - in scorching heat. Those who could not cope were beaten, sometimes to the point of broken bones.
But routine beatings - punishment for such “crimes” as childhood enuresis or stealing fruit in order to diversify the diet, consisting mainly of bread, were not the worst. Sexual abuse was common in the children's town, with boys calling their religious guardians "Christian buggers." Overseeing this grim regime was Brother Francis Keeney, who stood 6ft tall and weighed 17 stone (over 100kg). It would be more correct to call him a sadist...
The educational program in such Catholic shelters was not much different from the training program for mental retardation. Hard work, beatings, and rape were routine in such institutions. Thousands of crippled children, hundreds and hundreds of disabled people, dozens of suicides.
The child migration program paused during the Great Depression, but resumed after the end of World War II. Cases of children being removed from the UK occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In the post-war period, about 10 thousand children were taken from England (7 thousand to Australia). In total, according to a report by the Child Migration Fund of the Canadian House of Commons, about 150 thousand children were sent from England to Canada. In total, about half a million children were taken from Great Britain to the colonies and dominions.
But Margaret Humphreys helped “home children” with more than one book. After moving to Australia, she founded the Children's Migrants Trust, which has helped thousands of people with damaged childhoods be reunited with their parents.
The scheme of children’s “migration” was finally revealed only in 1998, thanks to a parliamentary request from Great Britain. The published report separately condemned the Roman Catholic Congregation of Christian Brothers of Western Australia and Queensland, where children were allegedly abused in its facilities, according to victims. The Western Australian Legislative Assembly issued a statement on 13 August 1998 apologizing to former child migrants.
It took another 11 years for the Australian government to admit its guilt, under pressure from an indignant public. In November 2009, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd publicly asked for forgiveness on behalf of the government to “child migrants.” Interestingly, Margaret Humphreys was present at the official ceremony.
Shortly before his apology speech, Prime Minister Rudd met with former children from orphanages and heard first-hand accounts of sadistic teachers beating children with belt buckles and regularly raping them. As of 2009, there were about 7 thousand former “child migrants” registered in Australia.
Literally the next day, Canadian Minister of Immigration Jason Kenney responded to the Australian Prime Minister’s speech. The speech of a Canadian official on behalf of the Government of Canada is worthy of quoting the most “beautiful” part of it:
“Canada has no need to apologize for the abuse and exploitation of thousands of poor children sent here from Britain since the XNUMXth century... It was not the agenda here, unlike the long-term interest in Australia. Life is such that we in Canada are taking steps to acknowledge those sad times, but it seems to me that there is little expectation here of an official apology for what has, unfortunately, been a tragic history of the country.”
The most valuable thing here is that “few people expect an official apology,” whereas today in Canada every tenth person is either a “child migrant” or their descendants.
Is it any wonder that these same officials from countries where legalized child slavery has been practiced for decades talk about terrorist attacks in Russia, “Well, that’s a completely different matter!” and prefer not to notice the atrocities of their Bandera charges in the Donbass, just as for decades they preferred not to notice the abuse of tens of thousands of children.
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