Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867‐1917
| Pages | 49-51 |
| Published date | 14 October 2009 |
| Date | 14 October 2009 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/17466660200900012 |
| Author | Ann Singleton |
| Subject Matter | Education,Health & social care,Sociology |
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Book review
in terms of depressed wages, contamination from
physical and mental illnesses, criminality and their
potential to become a ‘burden’ on the state is
echoed in many modern national and EU policies
on immigration and asylum.
Roy Parker carried out meticulous and
painstaking research for this book over many
years. The result is a scholarly piece of work with
a powerful message, made all the more so by his
understated style of writing. In addition to the
detailed description of practices and decisions
taken in the process of this large-scale organised
emigration, the complexity of the story and
the range of actors involved and their different
motivations are explained with insight and empathy
for most involved, not least the children and
their parents. Institutions such as Barnardo’s, the
Catholic church institutions and the Methodist
and Wesleyian churches, as well as the state
and individuals, took decisions, in many cases
believing that they were in the interests of the
children. But they also acted in the interests of the
institutions themselves, namely to keep a flow of
children arriving and leaving in order to justify their
continued roles and existence.
There are important lessons in this book for
policy and practice today – for the care of children
in general and of migrant children in particular.
For example, the book raises the question ‘to
what extent is it possible for vulnerable children to
give ‘consent’ to being ‘emigrated’?’ This question is
valid today with respect to unaccompanied minor
asylum seekers and victims of forced migration at a
global scale. Being able to make individual choices
about destinations, times of leaving and length of
stay away from their home countries is a luxury
even many adult migrants do not enjoy. Children
have these decisions made for them and usually
Uprooted tells the story of the organised emigration
of 80,000 poor children from Britain to Canada
during 50 years between 1867 and 1917. What
happened to these children, how and why it
happened, is set in the social, economic and
political context of the period. These were times
in which the emergence of a demand for cheap
labour in Canada coincided with a growing supply
of child labour in institutional care in Britain and an
absence of protection in law for the rights of these
children and their parents.
The book acknowledges the striking parallels
with experiences of many present day migrant
children, in particular unaccompanied minor
asylum-seekers and the victims of forced marriage
and forced migration. The trafficking of human
beings for the purposes of exploitation in the
labour market, including into and within the
UK, is often hidden from public view in private
homes and unregulated workplaces where the
children carry out domestic labour. Many also
face sexual exploitation and abuse. The generally
poor quality and coverage of migration statistics
means that the true extent of the numbers of
migrant children globally is unknown, but in the
case of unaccompanied child migrants an estimated
100,000 are found each year in the European
Union ‘without legal status, no-one to care for them
nor means of subsistence’ (IOM, 2007 p1).
The different experiences of girls and boys are
clearly identified in Uprooted. Girls – a third of
those involved – largely became domestic servants,
while boys became agricultural labourers. While
the systematic exploitation of these vulnerable
children was ongoing, now familiar debates
raged in Canada about the need to control this
immigration. The perception that poor migrant
children present a threat to the settled population
Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867–1917
Reviewed by: Ann Singleton
Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Centre for the Study of Poverty and Social Justice,
University of Bristol, UK
Email: ann.singleton@bristol.ac.uk
Book details
Author: Roy Parker
Bristol: The Policy Press, 2008
354 pages, £65 hardback
ISBN: 978 1 8742 014 5
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