POVERTY AND OOHC

Do you know a child who was taken into residential or foster care solely because their family didn’t have enough money to look after them? Me neither. 

However, it was of course very common in the 19th Century. Indeed, taking children out of poverty was the very reason that some of our oldest not-for-profit child welfare organisations were established. In both the US and the UK, there were also strong beliefs around the virtues of removing children from ‘the squalor’ of the new industrial cities and placing them in more ‘idyllic’ and healthy rural locations. In the US the ‘Orphan’ Train Movement, operating between 1854 and 1929, relocated about 250,000 children from largely poor and destitute families living in crowded eastern cities (including some who were abused), to the rural MidWest and elsewhere.

From the 1920s through to the 1970s, giving poor children ‘a better life’ was the rationale for the Child Migrant programmes and 130,000 children being shipped from the UK to New Zealand, Australia, and Canada; their futures were at best uncertain, and at worst led to a childhood of servitude and physical and sexual abuse.

And while we maybe think of the Republic of Ireland and the Magdalene Laundries in relation to mothers, usually young and unmarried, who ‘gave’ their children up for adoption, all Anglo-American countries have long and recent histories of placing children for adoption on the grounds that their mothers were economically (and ‘morally’), unable to care for them.

It is now widely recognised that across most Anglo-American countries over the last 50 years ago, the gap between the rich and the poor has steadily grown. Today, while not all children who need to come into care have experienced a life of poverty, undoubtedly many or most will have. Ironically, at the same time that we are learning more about the neuroscience of poverty and trauma along with brain plasticity, the number of children coming into OOHC in most of our jurisdictions continues to rise. Meanwhile, some of our kin and non-kin foster carers are living close to, or even below, the poverty line, while many or most young people will face poverty when they transition from OOHC back to their families and/or to live by themselves. COVID-19 is not exactly helping.

Anglo-American countries tend to see themselves as international leaders in relation to OOHC and child welfare; you only need to glance at the programme for next month’s online global EUSARF (European Scientific Association on Residential & Family Care for Children and Adolescents) conference to see how over-represented we are amongst the presenters. And taking a narrow, targeted, child protection perspective, we possibly are. However, in relation to poverty, more equality, family support and the interface between targeted and more universal services, there is much that we as countries could and should learn from others.