Britain’s lost children: Will there be justice?
Many sent across the Commonwealth were victims of sex abuse and treated like slaves
The walls of the office belonging to Margaret Humphreys in West Bridgford, England, are covered in old photographs.
Among them is an image of a group of British children stepping off a boat onto Australian soil, squinting into the broiling sun.
They represent just a fraction of the 4,000 children, some as young as four, who were dispatched from Britain to countries across the Commonwealth, including Canada, from 1947 to 1970.
Those running the child migration schemes were charity and church groups, supposedly helping the youngsters on to a “better life.”
This month, as Britain’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) got underway, a nondescript conference room in central London heard the appalling truth about what some really faced.
During the day, they were viciously beaten and forced to work “like slaves.”
At night, they would be plucked from their dormitory-room beds by predatory pedophiles.
Although hearings are just starting, the inquiry has already had four chairmen and cost more than $32 million since it was set up by Theresa May, then home secretary and now British prime minister, in 2014, and is the most wide-ranging of its kind ever held in Britain.
It will hear evidence from 13 different investigations into institutional child sex abuse at Westminster, in children’s homes and within churches, and about ordeals suffered by thousands of youngsters sent overseas in a program overseen by the British government.
For Margaret Humphreys, such damning testimony is nothing new.
The softly spoken social worker founded the Child Migrants Trust 30 years ago, and has fought for justice for these lost children ever since.
“They were told they were orphans, were sent to the other side of the world and some were abused in the most awful circumstances,” says Humphreys. “They were lied to from the beginning and, to this day, they continue to live with the consequences of the abuse and betrayal they suffered.”
The plight of the child migrants is historic, but ongoing. Hundreds are still hoping to be reunited with their now elderly parents.
That the British establishment was complicit makes it the ideal place to start the long and harrowing inquiry into why, in the postwar years, the country seemed so willing to turn a blind eye to child abuse. What these children experienced, Humphreys says, was “the worst betrayal of all.”
It is a story that, for Humphreys, started back in the mid-1980s when she was a social worker at the “really hard end of child protection.”
In 1987, after she wrote an article in a fostering magazine about children in care, a letter arrived from Australia. It was from a woman who had been sent there from Britain at the age of five.
“She wanted me to help find her parents,” Humphreys recalls.
“I thought she must have had the story wrong. Oh, the arrogance of the professional.”
Humphreys and her colleagues had never heard of this child migrant scheme. She travelled out to Australia and posted advertisements in newspapers asking for others to come forward — at first a trickle, then thousands.
In the early days, she would collect children from church institutions in Australia to be reunited with their families, and would wonder why the priests and monks did not seem pleased.
“Now I know,” she says. “More importantly, the child migrants know. They were told they were the sons of whores, worthless and even banned from singing British nursery rhymes.”
Slowly, a picture emerged of what the inquiry heard last week was “widespread and systematic sexual abuse.”
Vulnerable, poor and illegitimate children were forcibly separated from siblings and wrongly told their parents were dead in order to ship them overseas more easily.
Helped by her husband, Mervyn (one of the small team of a dozen or so who run the Child Migrants Trust), she has reunited thousands of families; a photograph of each meeting has been put up on the office wall.
The charity is still working to reconnect around 200 people with their families.
It is a race against time now to find elderly parents before they die.
It took Humphreys 23 years of campaigning to elicit an apology from the British government.
In 2010, Gordon Brown, the then prime minister, told the Commons he was “truly sorry” and announced a $10-million fund to reunite families.
Last week, that money finally ran out. It is not yet known if more is forthcoming.
Eight child migrants have travelled from Australia to appear before the inquiry.
One witness died in the process of preparing testimonies over the past six months. Many of their abusers have also passed away. Is it too late to seek justice? At this, Margaret Humphreys firmly shakes her head. “It’s not in the past for the victims,” she says. “They have to live with what happened every day.”