9 Home Children
During the 19th and 20th centuries, around 150,000 British “Home Children” were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and Rhodesia. The scheme arguably dated back as far as the 17th century, but what’s surprising is how long it lasted—between 1947 and 1967 as many as 10,000 children were shipped from the United Kingdom to Australia.
Those behind the scheme had clear ideological intentions—they wanted to ensure that the colonies in question would have white majorities. The British children chosen to be shipped across the world were often referred to as “good white stock.”
Competing religious groups, including the Catholic Christian Brothers, sought to use the scheme to increase their followers in the colonies. Between the late ’30s and early ’60s, the Catholic Church shipped at least 1,000 British and 310 Maltese children to Catholic schools in Australia, where many were forced to do construction work or other hard labor.
In addition to forced labor, subsequent inquiries have found that many of the migrant children in the Church’s care were brutally beaten, raped, and starved—some children were made to “scramble for food thrown on the floor” to survive. Many of the children were stripped of their birth name. Decades later, in 2001, the Catholic Church in Australia confirmed the crimes committed and issued an apology.
8 Spain’s Stolen Children
Starting in the 1930s, the fascist regime of Francisco Franco sought to purify Spain by stealing the babies of “undesirable” parents and having them raised in more politically acceptable surroundings. The scheme originally targeted the children of leftists, who the Spanish government saw as having “a form of mental illness that was polluting the Hispanic race,” but eventually came to target unmarried mothers and otherwise “unfit” parents. As many as 300,000 babies were eventually stolen from their parents.
The baby-stealing scheme was carried out with the close cooperation of the Catholic Church in Spain. After Franco rose to power calling himself the defender of Catholic Spain, the Church controlled most of Spain’s social services—from schools to hospitals to children’s homes. This allowed thousands of children to be stolen or otherwise removed from their parents by Catholic doctors, priests, and nuns.
In many cases, nurses in Catholic hospitals would take a newborn baby from its mother to be examined. The nurse would then return with a dead baby kept on ice for the purpose of persuading the mother that her baby had suddenly died. After the babies were stolen from their mothers, they were often sold in illegal profit-making adoptions.
After Franco died in 1975, the Church retained its grasp on Spanish social services and largely continued the scheme. The child kidnappings didn’t fully come to an end until 1987, when the Spanish government began tightening adoption regulations. It has been estimated that around 15 percent of adoptions in Spain between 1960 and 1989 were part of the kidnapping scheme.
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