RSVP to By Wednesday 10th September 2008 to grazia.depalma@unisa.edu.au
MH1-06, UniSA Magill Campus, St Bernards Road, Magill
Child Rescue Ideology: A Transnational History
The Australian Centre for Child Protection invites you to this lunchtime seminar by Professor Shurlee Swain and Professor Margot Hillel based on their ARC study
The founders of the British child rescue movement, Thomas Barnardo, Thomas Bowman Stephenson, Edward de Montjoie Rudolf and Benjamin Waugh, have been widely praised for the contribution they made in establishing citizenship rights for children, freeing them from their prior legal status as paternal property. The propaganda they generated functioned to reconstitute the everyday phenomenon of the street child as an object of pity, a victim of vice and neglect, simultaneously a threat to and the embodiment of the future of nation, race and Empire. While creating an environment in which parliaments were prepared to legislate to establish children's rights to food, clothing, education and medical care, this reconstruction came also to have a negative effect, leaving children unprotected in environments which often became abusive, impacts which were at their worst when policies based on child rescue ideals led to wide scale removal of Indigenous children in both Australia and Canada. Through an analysis of the child rescue literature circulating in Britain, Canada and Australia in the period 1850 to 1915, including the extensive body of work written particularly for children, this paper seeks to provide an explanation for both the attraction and failure of now much-condemned child removal policies and to contribute to ongoing debates about the nature of children's citizenship and the rights of those harmed by past practices.
Professor Shurlee Swain is a leading Australian historian at the Australian Catholic University who has researched widely in the history of childhood, welfare history and comparative indigenous history.
Professor Margot Hillel is Head of the School of Arts and Sciences at the Australian Catholic University, and she has worked extensively on constructions of childhood in children's literature, particularly Australian literature for children.
