One of the notable features of former child migrants’ accounts of traumatic aspects of their experience is that they are, for the most part, unsurprising given what appears in archival records. Their recollections of their lack of clarity about the reasons for their emigration, or their lack of informed consent to it, find echoes in repeated references to some voluntary organisations’ poor selection methods and insufficient preparation of children they were sending overseas. Child migrants’ lack of knowledge about their family origins in the United Kingdom, and the effects on their lives of false claims that they were orphans, is reflected in the frequent concerns expressed about failures to send child migrants’ case histories with them. Other traumatic aspects of child migrants’ experiences related to their time in residential institutions, of which many have since complained as being rigid, impersonal and over-dependent on their labour. Yet all of these elements of residential institutions had been critiqued in some detail by the Curtis report and were the subject of numerous policy discussions about the suitability of large, socially and geographically isolated institutions as places for accommodating child migrants. The extent of exploitation and physical and sexual abuse of child migrants at the Western Australian institutions run by the Christian Brothers would doubtless have come as a shock to the British policy-makers who oversaw this work, even though standards at these institutions had at various times been a source of concern. But given what was known about the importance of regular inspections of residential homes, the failure of the UK Government to implement any such monitoring and the growing evidence of the unreliability of oversight by Australian officials, it is unsurprising that such cultures of abuse were able to persist in those institutions for so many years.

The harms to which child migrants were exposed, and the failures of systems to protect their welfare, were thus far from unpredictable given expected standards of child-care and child protection in the early post-war period. Furthermore, although child migration programmes to Australia had, by 1939, come to be seen as one of the most effective parts of assisted migration policy by officials in the Dominions Office, British policy-makers’ enthusiasm for this work grew substantially cooler in the post-war period. The harms to which many post-war child migrants to Australia were exposed therefore took place in the context of programmes which British policy-makers saw as having limited national strategic value.

We therefore return to the question with which this book began of why post-war child migration from the United Kingdom to Australia resumed and continued against the grain of child-care standards reflected in the Curtis report and the 1948 Children Act. How was it that the policy aim of improving standards of children’s out-of-home care in this period failed to be implemented effectively in these programmes?

Policy Failure and Policy-Makers’ Perceptions of the Limits of Their Powers

The answer to this question lies partly in conflicting policy timetables and priorities. Although policy discussions between the Home Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office were limited during the initial resumption of child migration to Australia from 1947 onwards, from 1950 they evolved into protracted attempts to negotiate between the competing demands of assisted migration policy and the drive to improve standards of care for children. Given the United Kingdom’s political, economic and military interests in good relations with Australia, and the Commonwealth Government’s ambitious immigration policy, child migration became a means for managing wider political and economic tensions surrounding the Anglo-Australian assisted migration programme. This found its most instrumental expression in discussions around the 1950 Syers committee report which suggested that maintaining the UK Government’s comparatively small financial commitment to child migration could sweeten the pill of substantial cuts to the larger budget for other forms of assisted migration to Australia. Whilst this was never understood as an explicit sacrificing of children’s welfare for the national interest, British policy-makers’ discussions of post-war child migration remained shrouded in a sense that safeguarding child migrants’ welfare had to be pursued in ways that took account of the sensitivities of Australian policy-makers, voluntary organisations and wider public opinion. The policy of gradualist reform of child migration which was to become the basis of a, sometimes fragile, consensus between the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office from 1954 was forged in the spirit of managing these competing interests.

Whilst the influence of such ‘high politics’ on post-war child migration to Australia is already recognised in both academic and public discussions of this history,Footnote 1 there is value in developing a more fine-grained analysis of the ways in which civil servants and government ministers in Britain made sense of these compromises. It would be relatively easy to understand the resumption and continuation of post-war child migration to Australia if those policy-makers had coldly regarded risks to child migrants’ welfare as a necessary evil in managing diplomatic relations with Australia. This was not the case, however. From when the first critical accounts of Australian receiving institutions began to be received back in London in the late 1930s, civil servants and ministers typically reacted with concern to accounts of poor selection, care, training and after-care. Their responses were clearly not usually effective in producing better safeguards for child migrants and there were evidently occasions when they failed to treat reassurances about improving standards in Australia with sufficient scrutiny. But their response was never one of pure indifference.

Nor was it the case that British policy-makers lacked sufficient information about shortcomings in child migration work. The failure of the UK Government to establish annual, independent inspection visits to receiving institutions in Australia certainly meant that it was over-dependent on systems of reporting from Australian officials which were compromised by their wider policy interest in maintaining and increasing child migration as well as informal reports, such as the one produced by John Moss, which were not as critical as direct inspections by the Home Office were likely to have been. Despite this, though, British officials had sufficient knowledge of problems in the working methods of some sending organisations in the United Kingdom and at some receiving institutions in Australia to have taken more decisive action in response to this—and had numerous opportunities when they could have done so.

Rather than being the result of ignorance or indifference, the attitudes and decisions made by British policy-makers in relation to post-war child migration are better understood in terms of the ways in which they perceived their power to be limited. Whilst the development of the post-war welfare state created anxieties amongst some supporters of voluntarism that the British state would become more centralised, impersonally bureaucratic and over-controlling, in government, civil servants and ministers experienced their power as being far more constrained than this.

In the context of child migration, some of these constraints related to limitations of resource. Whilst discussions between the UK High Commission in Canberra and the Dominions Office in 1945 were, for example, clearly sympathetic to the idea of regular monitoring visits to all receiving institutions in Australia, lack of staff resources at the High Commission meant that this was never made a priority. Similarly staff in the Home Office Children’s Department also periodically rejected administrative measures that would have allowed greater oversight over child migration and other forms of out-of-home care on the grounds that they would add too great an administrative burden on its staff.

Another perceived constraint on power—sometimes as much assumed by civil servants as consciously reflected on—was precedent. In 1945, there had been considerable discussion within the Dominions Office about the problems that had emerged in relation to Australian receiving institutions during the war, future standards that might be expected and even the possibility of children no longer being sent to the Fairbridge Farm School at Pinjarra. However, when the Australian Commonwealth and State governments set out their plans for the resumption of assisted child migration in August 1946, the unquestioned assumption within the Dominions Office was that the pre-war precedent of the UK Government also giving financial support to this work would be followed. Such perceived constraints were made particularly explicit in the 1956 Shannon committee report which stated that ‘if we were untrammelled by precedent’ then the Government would not choose to support child migration programmes of this kind. The report noted, however, that precedents for this work had, by then, become such an assumed part of the relationship between the UK and Australian Governments and influential churches and voluntary organisations that it could not be ended unless there was a sufficient public outcry against this policy.

Far from simply being the expression of intellectual laziness or passivity, such deference to the principle of precedence had positive value in the decision-making worlds of civil servants.Footnote 2 Precedent had the value of establishing policy frameworks in which civil servants could operate, and helped to set limits on what needed to become a matter for fresh decision-making. Precedent made possible stable collaborations with other institutions on which the day-to-day running of the machinery of government depended. Precedent also served as a means by which government officials could present themselves as taking an even-handed approach to external bodies who wished to make claims on government resources (even if, in reality, some preferential treatment was privately shown). Clearly precedent could be over-turned by economic necessity (as in the push towards decreasing the UK Government’s financial contribution to the Australian assisted migration programme) or a sudden crisis which demanded an urgent response (such as the discussion of possible cessation of funding for Dr Barnardo’s Homes when the sexual scandal at Picton became known).Footnote 3 However civil servants’ investment in the principle of precedent meant that any radical alteration to a policy was only contemplated when it was judged that the reasons for change were sufficiently compelling to outweigh any anticipated adverse reactions.

Underpinning this caution was a wider sense amongst both British civil servants and ministers that the exercise of power in government was constrained by the interests and sensitivities of powerful organisational stakeholders.Footnote 4 This did not mean, in the context of the mixed economy of the post-war welfare state, that policy-makers simply ceded power to voluntary societies. There are many instances in the history of post-war child migration in which demands by voluntary organisations—and even the Australian Commonwealth Government—were politely declined or received only very minimal assistance. From refusals of the post-war restoration of the government grant-in-aid to the Church of England Advisory Council of Empire Settlement or for increased funding requested by the Fairbridge Society, to the lack of any active support for demands that local authorities to be encouraged to give over more children for emigration, civil servants and ministers in the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office never allowed their policy decisions simply to be dictated by the requests of external bodies. Those demands would always be courteously heard and receive at least the impression of serious attention, but were never acceded to if they did not fit with policy-makers’ existing views or priorities. Whilst there seemed to be far greater co-working between the Dominions Office and Fairbridge Society during the inter-war years, this had later cooled as the Dominions Office sought to distance itself from the demands of Fairbridge’s London committee for greater control over the operation of Fairbridge farm schools in Australia. By the post-war period, some ministers such as Douglas Dodds-Parker still actively supported child migration organisations. However, in general, civil servants and ministers displayed a greater sense of institutional distance from the voluntary organisations with whom they worked, seeing them more as organisations whose working practices and sensitivities had to be managed rather than as close collaborators in a shared policy project. The warmth of ministerial tributes in Parliamentary debates to the work of voluntary societies involved in child migration increasingly contrasted with the more reserved, and increasingly critical, tone of private notes and memoranda in government files.

However, whilst British policy-makers generally maintained a sense of institutional distance from voluntary organisations involved in post-war child migration, and were quite willing to refuse requests from them, they were also averse to creating tensions in those relationships through ‘fruitless controversy’. Within both the Home Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office, decisions about post-war child migration were consistently characterised by the wish to avoid overt conflict with other stakeholders with interests in this work—whether the Australian Commonwealth Government, voluntary organisations or local authorities. From the decision to give approval to St John Bosco Boys’ Town or the Padbury Boys Training Farm as receiving institutions despite the Home Office’s initial concerns, the approval of the Over-Seas League as a sending organisation under pressure from the Commonwealth Government, and the agreement to allow the Fairbridge Society to send children to Australia during the summer of 1956 when an unofficial suspension of child migration was meant to be in place, civil servants consistently showed an unwillingness to press their concerns to the point where it might provoke conflict. Although the case of St John Bosco Boys’ Town seemed to be one in which the Home Office did, at first, seem willing to face down lobbying from supporters of the Catholic Church, it eventually conceded in the face of broad reassurances about the institution and a faint hope that Catholic officials had understood what standards of child-care were expected of them.Footnote 5 Government ministers, on occasion, seemed more willing to contemplate bolder measures, but for civil servants, a common thread in their work was to avoid their department becoming embroiled in conflict with external bodies which they saw as having no benefit in furthering their policy aims. Within the Home Office Children’s Department, this sense of the limits of their power in the face of concerted opposition also extended to its experience of pressing for policy and operational changes in some local authorities in England and Wales.Footnote 6

A different and more complex picture of policy negotiations between government officials and voluntary organisations therefore emerges from the idea of the latter having to ‘converge’ with government policy if it were to continue to receive public resources,Footnote 7 or of policy-makers instrumentally using voluntary organisations as the informal means of meeting the Commonwealth Government’s demand for child migrants.Footnote 8 The post-war history of child migration was one of policy-makers’ increasing doubts about the working methods of voluntary organisations and the wish for them to undergo gradual reform, alongside a wariness of forms of control which might prove too controversial and have insufficient practical benefit. Where there was pressure for convergence with standards expected by the state, this pressure was, for the most part, only slowly and cautiously exerted. In the case of the Home Office Children’s Department, this arguably reflected a wider culture of timidity in enforcing standards in children’s out-of-home care. One later academic review was to go on to criticise its staff for being ‘unnecessarily restrained in their attitude to [other] authorities whose departments are inefficient or who are acting against the spirit of child care legislation or the general consensus of professional opinion on what is good child care practice’.Footnote 9

In discussions within government, this aversion to conflict also sometimes translated into civil servants’ unwillingness to trespass into the powers and responsibilities of other government departments with whom they were liaising.Footnote 10 This was exemplified in the Children’s Department’s reluctance to contemplate complete refusal of requests for approvals of receiving institutions forwarded to it by the Commonwealth Relations Office in the early 1950s because the Home Office had no formal regulatory powers in this context. With the Home Office’s role in this approval process only an advisory one, its civil servants showed considerable caution over the extent of influence they sought to exert over decision-making within the Commonwealth Relations Office, at the same time as some civil servants within the Commonwealth Relations Office found the delays caused by consultation with the Home Office tiresome.Footnote 11 Similar deference to departmental lines of responsibility was also reflected in Edward Gwynn’s decision in 1956 that the Children’s Department should not challenge the Commonwealth Relations Office on how best to manage political relations with the Commonwealth Government over the increasingly obvious disagreements about appropriate standards of care for child migrants. Aversion to straying into other department’s policy remits also had its advantages. The Home Office’s desire, in December 1956, to avoid ‘being embarrassed’ by further consultation from the Commonwealth Relations Office on the emigration of children to unsatisfactory Australian institutions reflected an attempt by its civil servants to insulate themselves from difficult and uncomfortable policy decisions by placing responsibility for them firmly in another government department.

The belief that conflictual organisational relationships could make the process of government impossible doubtless made civil servants keen to avoid any overt confrontation with influential voluntary societies. However, there were even more obvious limits to their powers when it came to governmental and voluntary bodies in Australia. A recurring challenge for British policy-makers in the post-war period was that beyond the selection and preparation of child migrants in the United Kingdom, the most significant impact of emigration on children’s lives was likely to arise from the standards of care and training they received once overseas. Yet it was precisely over these overseas matters that the UK Government had no legal power. The only meaningful sanction which the UK Government could apply was to threaten to end its financial contribution to these child migration programmes, but as discussions from the Syers Committee onwards showed, such a measure both risked a hostile response from the Commonwealth Government and would remove the only contact with these schemes through which British policy-makers could exert any influence over them.Footnote 12 To attempt to employ any strong influence over the working practices of organisations in Australia also smacked of the old colonialism which officials in the Dominions Office and Commonwealth Relations Office saw as no longer tenable or desirable.

The lack of ability to exert any controls over children once overseas played a significant role in the Children’s Department’s decision to abandon regulations for child migration by voluntary organisations. The preferred alternative option was to try to exert moral persuasion on Australian government officials through inter-governmental channels, or on Australian voluntary societies via the sending organisations in Britain who provided them with children. However, when the events of 1956 showed that trust in Australian systems to maintain appropriate standards of care had been misplaced and that the Commonwealth Department of Immigration had a very different understanding of suitable standards of care for child migrants to the Curtis Committee, a central policy bind that had run through the entire post-war programme became all too stark. The Commonwealth Government clearly wanted child migrants and had made significant financial investments to create space for them in residential institutions across Australia. Furthermore, any cessation of child migration would, it was feared in London, be perceived in Canberra as a sign not only of British indifference towards assisted migration, but towards its strategic commitment to Australia more generally. Yet, British officials came to realise, the Commonwealth Government had neither the inclination nor the systems to ensure that standards of care advocated by the Curtis report would be implemented in the institutions to which British child migrants were being sent. In the absence of any legal or other control over those Australian institutions, the UK Government was reliant on the willingness of the Commonwealth Government to insist on particular standards of care and had no means of addressing this when such willingness was absent.

When the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office agreed to introduce closer monitoring of the working methods of voluntary societies sending children from the United Kingdom in 1957, this could only effectively address problems occurring in the United Kingdom and not in Australia. The bind of feeling compelled to continue official support for child migration, whilst feeling disquiet about the inability to ensure adequate standards in Australia, was one that was never resolved by British policy-makers. When they became aware of the prosecutions for sexual offences against boys from the Picton farm school in 1958, British officials once again hoped that the Commonwealth Department of Immigration might institute some wider investigation of whether similar sexual offences had occurred at other institutions receiving British child migrants. Yet again, though, they found Commonwealth officials to be unobliging. By the end of the 1950s, the privately expressed hope of civil servants in the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office was that this bind could ultimately be resolved through child migration programmes dying a quiet death through declining numbers of available children. Those children who had already sailed to Australia were beyond the powers of their intervention and became the forgotten subjects of a policy problem that they had found too difficult to resolve.

Policy Delay, Complex Systems and Misplaced Assumptions

Whilst policy-makers’ various perceptions about the limits of their powers doubtless constrained their decisions about child migration, other causes of policy failure can be found in the over-complicated policy and administrative systems through which it operated.

The slow progress in developing policies for safeguarding child migrants in the post-war period is, in one sense, not surprising given that assisted child migration was a very small part of both the wider assisted migration brief of the Commonwealth Relations Office and the responsibilities for children’s out-of-home care for the Home Office Children’s Department. This process was made yet more protracted through processes of discussion which involved two government departments and two government advisory bodies in London, the UK High Commission in Canberra, the Australian Commonwealth Government, and professional bodies, local authorities and voluntary societies in Britain. The fact that these processes took place in the context of the wider re-organisation of children’s out-of-home care in the emerging post-war welfare state, and of wider, contentious, reviews of assisted migration policy, was also a source of further delay. The first post-war child migration parties to Australia had sailed in 1947 when the Home Office Children’s Department was still in the very early stages of adjusting to its new role as the lead government department for children’s out-of-home care and devising a wider range of new policies in the wake of the Curtis report. With the Home Office’s Advisory Council only meeting to discuss regulations for the child migration work of voluntary societies in 1949, and its discussions then delayed by other business and trans-national consultation over proposals, it was only in 1952 that the Advisory Council had a clear set of regulations to discuss. Subsequent consultation on the regulations created further delays, exacerbated by Home Office officials’ apparent fatigue with this process. By the time the Children’s Department eventually reached the decision not to introduce these regulations in 1954, the Home Office and Commonwealth Relations Office were already beginning to work towards a consensus on the value of a gradualist approach to reform in place of regulation. With attempts to implement this gradualist policy through the Oversea Migration Board hindered by the enthusiasm of some of the Board’s members for child migration, a further resolution on how to pursue this approach was only found through the Shannon committee report in the early autumn of 1956. By 1957, the informal agreement that voluntary organisations sending children from the United Kingdom should allow Home Office officials to monitor their working practices as a condition for receiving Government funding finally meant that some mechanism for oversight of their work had eventually been achieved.

Whilst, in terms of the administrative and political processes involved, it is possible to see why this policy process could take so long, for child migrants such periods of time constituted their entire childhoods. The slow progress of policy development in this context meant that child migrants’ lives were lived through a system maintained by the momentum of precedent and policy-makers’ aversion to overt conflict, with concerns about their standards of care generally assuaged with the hope that things would improve in the future. It was never the case, then, that standards for child migration were ignored by British policy-makers after 1947, or that the aspirations of the Curtis report for high standards of care for child migrants were forgotten or rejected. Failures to protect the welfare of British child migrants occurred, instead, because the ways in which British policy-makers’ perceptions of the limits of their powers hindered their ability to undertake more effective and decisive action.

More robust policy positions could certainly have been taken. Approval of residential institutions or sending organisations, about which Home Office officials had concerns, could have been withheld. As John Ross later suggested, more exacting criteria for these approvals could also have been agreed to prevent children being sent to large, impersonal and isolated institutions. Despite their limitations, the introduction of regulations for the work of voluntary societies sending child migrants from the United Kingdom would almost certainly have discouraged some of the organisations with the worst practices from continuing their work. Policy tensions with the Australian Commonwealth Government may well have been difficult to resolve, but British policy-makers still had much greater scope for pressing for better safeguards in this work than were actually, in practice, pursued.

Other causes of policy failure can also be seen embedded in the dynamics and limitations of organisational systems. The Australian Commonwealth Government’s enthusiasm for post-war child migration was, well into the late 1950s, premised on an unrealistic assessment of the number of British child migrants that might be available. Initially, this involved a gross over-estimate of the numbers of ‘war orphans’ in Britain who might benefit from new homes overseas once peace was restored. Then, when that mistake was realised, Commonwealth ministers and immigration officials continued to over-estimate what proportion of the 125,000 children identified by the Curtis report as being ‘deprived of a normal family home’ could be available for assisted migration. An important consequence of these mistakes was the Australian policy decision to provide grants to voluntary organisations to enable the opening of new residential institutions—or the expansion of existing ones—to accommodate this anticipated supply of children. Once this investment had been made, and children were not forthcoming in the numbers that had been expected, the policy imperative to press British officials for more children was strengthened. This pressure led, in turn, to the approval of the Over-Seas League as a sending organisation by the UK Government—despite concerns about its resources and working practices—as well as the active recruitment of British children to fill institutional vacancies, as happened, for example, with girls sent by the Sisters of Nazareth to the Nazareth House at East Camberwell in Melbourne. Irrespective of the flawed understandings on which a policy was based, this process showed that, once established, a programme could generate its own demands for the resources it needed (in this case, children) in order to sustain itself, regardless of whether the consequences of these demands were ultimately beneficial or not.

Child migrants were also poorly served by the complex and fragmented system of administration and oversight through which the programmes operated.Footnote 13 The risks of poorly co-ordinated systems for children’s out-of-home care were well-known at the birth of the post-war welfare state and had been a central concern of the Curtis and Clyde reports. In this context, the child migration programmes were an exceptional case in that they were a form of children’s out-of-home care where administrative and policy decisions fell outside the primary control of the Home Office. The more coherent administrative system encouraged by Curtis and implemented through the 1948 Children Act was, of course, no guarantee of effective delivery of child-care services. By the early 1960s, Home Office inspectors were still complaining of cases in which local authority child-care officers in England and Wales were failing to adhere to boarding out regulations, placing children in foster homes which had not previously been visited and failing to undertake sufficiently regular checks on their welfare.Footnote 14 However, the complex governmental systems for the administration of child migration—operating between different departments in both the United Kingdom and Australia—created even worse conditions for competing interests, failures in the sharing of information and anxiety about others’ reactions to policy decisions. These systemic problems were further exacerbated by the failure of the Home Office to introduce the controls over voluntary organisations’ work which it did have available to it under the 1948 Act.

Tensions within this complex administrative system were also shaped by policy-makers’ perceptions of which organisations within the system were closer to, or further from, their own views or trusted networks. Walter Garnett, whose work at the UK High Commission in Canberra was so important for these programmes, had for example clearly come to identify far more strongly with parts of the Commonwealth and State Governments in Australia than with the Home Office, whose interventions he saw as often ill-informed, overly rigid and insensitive. Home Office civil servants, equally, at times expressed frustration with High Commission officials whom they saw as trying to be ‘more Australian than the Australians’. Such bonds of trust and mistrust shaped the working of this policy system. When overlaid over the vast geographical spaces of Australia, it was unsurprising that this fragmented system failed to meet the need for the effective monitoring of British child migrants and hindered attempts to improve the standards of care and training they received.

Alongside these organisational factors, policy-makers’ assessment of how child migration was working in practice was significantly influenced by their prior beliefs as to whether the fundamental policy underlying this work was a good one or not.Footnote 15 When reviewing the catalogue of shortcomings in Australian receiving institutions of which the Dominions Office had become aware during the Second World War, Sir John Stephenson had noted that whilst more careful monitoring and government controls were needed, the ‘original idea’ of the child migration schemes was ‘a sound one’. Having received the information that it had about poor management, accommodation, standards of care, training and after-care, it would have been equally possible for policy-makers in the Dominions Office at that point to conclude that the project of sending British children thousands of miles away to remote, often poorly run, institutions, entailed too great a risk to their welfare for it to be sensible to continue. Policy-makers’ belief in what constituted ‘good’ policy was not, therefore, based simply on the evidence available to them—as Whiskard’s image of the rational civil servant carefully weighing up their limited options suggests—but on whether the policy provided a meaningful narrative for political action. The idea of the isolated child, with limited prospects in the United Kingdom, being offered an opportunity for a better life as a citizen of the Commonwealth, whilst consolidating the broader cultural, economic and political bonds between Britain and her former Dominions, had enduring appeal. Even in 1956, after the Ross report and its confidential addenda, had shown the various ways in which the current system was failing, the Shannon committee report went on to argue that although policy-makers would probably not choose to establish such programmes from scratch today, most child migrants appeared to benefit from this work. When a policy was seen as fundamentally sound, numerous examples of its shortcomings could be interpreted as exceptions or temporary failures that could be improved with gradual reform, rather than as evidence that the policy was, at root, unsafe. Assumptions about the basic ‘soundness’ of a policy idea—despite evidence of its failings—could therefore persist for many years and require either a significant shift in knowledge (as occurred when John Ross finally saw conditions in Australian receiving institutions for himself) or the fresh perspective of a new generation of policy-makers for such perceptions to change. In this regard, Walter Garnett’s shift from his often defensive attitude to criticisms of child migration systems to his apparent acceptance of the need for far greater controls in the report of the 1956 Fact-Finding Mission is an interesting case example of the process of change in a policy-maker’s thinking.

History, Policy Failure and Redress

On 1st March 2018, the United Kingdom Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse published its report for its Child Migration Programmes investigation. Whilst identifying failures in a number of the voluntary organisations involved sending child migrants overseas, the Inquiry commented that:

[I]t is the overwhelming conclusion of the Inquiry that the institution primarily to blame for the continued existence of the child migration programmes after the Second World War was Her Majesty’s Government (HMG)… The policy itself was indefensible and HMG could have decided to bring it to an end, or mitigated some of its effects in practice by taking action at certain key points, but it did not do so… We concluded that the main reason for HMG’s failure to act was the politics of the day, which were consistently prioritized over the welfare of children… We have made a small number of recommendations, focusing on the need for HMG to institute immediately a financial redress scheme for surviving child migrants.Footnote 16

The Inquiry’s criticism of the UK Government was based on a number of issues addressed in this book, namely the failure to introduce s.33 regulations or requirements for Secretary of State to consent for the emigration of children by voluntary societies, the failure to ensure child migration programmes ran according to the standards advocated by the Curtis report, and the tendency for policy-makers to act in ways calculated to avoid conflict with the other organisational stakeholders. As has been argued in this conclusion, however, these failures are better understood not as the result of purely instrumental decisions to prioritise political interests over the welfare of children, but of policy-makers’ perception that their powers were limited and that a policy of gradualist reform was the best option available to them. The Inquiry was, however, quite correct in arguing that the UK Government did in reality have far greater powers to act to protect child migrants’ welfare than it was willing to deploy, and that the lack of more effective action on its part left child migrants vulnerable to harm which, for many, had life-long effects.

The UK Government subsequently agreed to accept the Inquiry’s recommendation and establish a redress scheme to former child migrants that provided a flat payment of £20,000 to all eligible applicants. The UK child migration schemes have therefore become part of the international phenomenon of historic child welfare provisions that have become the focus of public critique, investigation and redress, and part of the even wider phenomenon of contemporary debates about how historic injustice might best be understood and addressed.

One element of these debates is the role that historical research can, and should, play in these processes.Footnote 17 Historical research into policy and organisational failures and abuses of rights can generate a more nuanced framework for thinking about different kinds of historic wrongs inflicted on vulnerable citizens. Alongside studies of state-sponsored violence or other policies that knowingly contravened legal or moral standards of the day, a case example such as the UK child migration programmes demonstrates that traumatic consequences can result not just from the intentionally violent exercise of state power, but from poor policy decisions and failing organisational systems.Footnote 18 By developing fine-grained historical accounts of how the workings of the machinery of government could cause profound suffering, it becomes possible to have a clearer understanding of forms of organisational responsibility for past wrong which go beyond broad notions of the nation as a moral community responsible for harms inflicted through its history.Footnote 19 Such historical analysis can also provide more careful accounts of past trauma which challenge more popularised versions that over-simplify the organisational processes and cultures involved.Footnote 20

In this sense, historical research can provide a strong basis for wider public discussions of past organisational wrongs and inform more careful debates about the nature of apologies and redress. Historical research is not, however, simply a precursor to the ‘real’ process of considering restitution and redress, but an integral part of it. One principle that has come to be associated with transitional justice is that proper restitution for historic wrongs can be shown, in part, by guarantees of non-recurrence of such abuses in the future. In many instances, however, historic wrongs take forms that are unlikely to be replicated directly in contemporary society. The notion that the UK child migration programmes should be studied so that such policies are never implemented again is, for example, rendered redundant in the face of wider policy and social changes that have already made any such recurrence unthinkable. The principle of non-recurrence can have much wider significance than this, however. Some factors underlying the dynamics of policy failure in a case such as the UK child migration programmes are clearly specific to this particular history (such as the politics of early post-war Anglo-Australian assisted migration). Cultures of policy-making also change over time, with the current emphasis on learning from past crises and social trauma (reflected in the IICSA process and subsequent redress scheme), being very different to the early post-war context in which policy-makers were more willing to take the view that there was little benefit in raking over previous failures if there were reasonable grounds for hoping that things would improve in the future.Footnote 21 Other factors evident in this case can, however, have wider relevance for other policy failures in the care of children and vulnerable adults such as over-complex administrative systems, conflicting policy agendas operating to different timetables, poor lines of communication, delays in policy decision-making, commitment to the soundness of a policy idea in the face of contradictory evidence and over-cautious avoidance of adverse reaction to policy decisions.Footnote 22 The history of post-war child migration to Australia therefore raises questions not only about whether similar factors might have been at play in failures in other health and social welfare systems of that period, but how such structural and cultural flaws in government can continue to harm the lives of vulnerable citizens today.