Expert Comment: profound organisational failures in the child migration schemes

Commenting on today’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse report on the abuse of British child migrants, the University’s Professor Gordon Lynch said it ‘marks an important step in terms of our understanding of how profound the organisational failures were in the operation of these child migration schemes.

‘Child migration programmes were clearly not simply problematic from today’s perspective, but in a number of respects, the UK Government and many voluntary organisations failed to ensure standards of that time. The recommendation of a national compensation scheme established by the UK Government for all surviving British child migrants is likely to be welcomed by many former child migrants.

‘However, it could be seen as a source of shame that this may be offered so late in their lives when all of the analysis which informed this investigation could have been undertaken twenty years ago if an appropriate inquiry had been commissioned following the highly critical report by the Health Select Committee in 1998.

‘The process of investigation raised a number of issues, particularly relating to how children were recruited to these schemes, which demand further attention. Rather than ending our national attention to this story, this report should open up a new public conversation about how we address the legacy of this major policy failure.’

The report builds extensively on expert witness evidence provided by Professor Lynch and Professor Stephen Constantine of the University of Lancaster. This expert witness evidence established that:

• The UK Government had been aware of the need for independent inspections for institutions receiving child migrants overseas since 1944, in the wake of the case of sexual abuse of girls at a farm school in Victoria, Australia. The Government failed to set this up, however, and relied instead on reports from Australian authorities which it knew could not always be trusted. The first substantial UK Government review of residential institutions for child migrants in Australia only took place in 1956.
• The UK Government was aware of standards of child-care that had been set out in the 1946 Curtis Report, and the Report’s explicit recommendation that children should only be migrated if these standards were observed overseas. The UK Government failed, however, to ensure that these standards were maintained and failed to introduce legislation to control the child migration programmes of voluntary organisations until their work had ended.
• The UK Government failed to ensure that appropriate standards were maintained, in part, because of not wanting to alienate overseas governments (particularly in Australia) with whom it had strategically important relationships and because it was concerned about alienating influential supporters of some of the voluntary organisations who sent children overseas.
• Voluntary organisations involved in sending children overseas varied in the extent to which they maintained a duty of care to them, with some organisations (such as the Sisters of Nazareth) clearly seeming to send children according to ‘quotas’ set in Australia and with no follow-up monitoring that would have been expected at the time. The UK Government also allowed organisations such as the Royal Overseas League to undertake child migration work despite clearly lacking the resources or expertise to undertake this appropriately.

Gordon Lynch, Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology in the School of European Culture and Languages at Kent, was an advisor to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), and co-authored a report into child sexual abuse in child migration schemes for the Inquiry.