Leo Bersani

Remembering Child Migration: Faith, Nation-Building and the Wounds of Charity explores in more detail than any previous study the moral and religious framing of child migration initiatives, informed by growing research in the anthropology of ethics - how values and ethics come to be enacted in specific social contexts. The book also speaks to issues beyond child migration: understanding the role that moral assumptions and claims play in our lives remains an issue of on-going interest, in particular the ways in which our ethical claims are complex, even contradictory, and can leave us blind to the harmful effects of our social actions. From 1853 to 1967 an estimated 250,000 children were re-located away from their families or home communities through a range of child migration schemes run by Christian charities and denominations. Children were taken from New York and moved to other parts of the USA, and children from the UK were moved to Canada, Australia, Rhodesia and New Zealand. These schemes were intended not simply as practical welfare responses to the care of poor or displaced children, but as a moral project in which their migration was understood in terms of a move to a new redemptive environment that would enable them to flourish as pious and productive citizens. Whilst some children later regarded these schemes as useful interventions in their lives, many came to regard them as sources of unnecessary suffering and trauma.