Faith, migration, and trauma: Religious dimensions of the UK child migration programs

This chapter reviews religious involvement in UK child migration programs—particularly in the post-war period—with particular attention to how this work harmed children in their care. The UK child migration programs can also be understood as part of wider nation-building projects in Commonwealth countries that also included native assimilationist policies, including the removal of children from Indigenous communities in Australia and Canada. It is helpful to reflect on what this case study suggests about how religion and migration can intersect in ways that can harm vulnerable people. Such harm can arise not only through the ideas, assumptions, and practices of individual religious actors or organizations, but as a consequence of wider organizational and policy contexts as well. In a number of important respects, British child migrants were harmed because of an over-complex and fragmented system of governance, in which children were insufficiently protected from the competing interests of government departments and voluntary societies. The chapter then illustrates how the internal cultures of religious organizations also contribute to these harms. For those religious organizations involved in the UK child migration programs, their work was always underpinned with a sense of spiritual and moral legitimacy that proved resistant to critiques made of it at the time.