Inquiry urges payouts for victims of postwar UK child migration scheme

Inquiry urges payouts for victims of postwar UK child migration scheme

Government called on to offer redress to people sent as children to countries such as Australia and Canada

Owen Bowcott Legal affairs correspondent

@owenbowcott

Thu 1 Mar 2018 16.05 GMT First published on Thu 1 Mar 2018 12.03 GMT

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Four children arriving at the Fairbridge farm school, Molong, Australia.

Four children arriving at the Fairbridge farm school, Molong, Australia. Photograph: Handout

About 2,000 survivors of a postwar child migration scheme should be paid compensation by the government for suffering that included medical neglect, physical mistreatment and sexual exploitation, the first report by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) recommends.

The 160-page study says the UK government should offer redress to victims of a “fundamentally flawed policy”. The sum paid should be “an equal award to every applicant”, although no precise figure is stipulated.

Most former child migrants have died, the report notes. “This means that in many cases [the government] has missed its opportunity to offer redress to those who were affected by its failure. However, around 2,000 child migrants are alive today and [the inquiry] considers it essential that all surviving former child migrants are offered such redress.”

The IICSA urges the government to establish a compensation scheme without delay and says it “expects that payments should start being made within 12 months”. The inquiry says that it considers past, successive governments to have been “primarily responsible”.

There were immediate apologies on Thursday from the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission and the Royal Overseas League, one of the charities criticised in the report. The ROL had never previously apologised.

The child migration programme ran for about 25 years after the second world war. Children as young as five were sent from their families, care homes or foster homes in the UK without their parents to institutions or families overseas.

They were dispatched mainly to Commonwealth states such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. About 4,000 were shipped out to Australia alone.

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Many of them endured regimes that the report says involved physical and emotional abuse, neglect and in some cases sexual abuse. Some later described periods of constant hunger and inadequate education.

One former child migrant described his experiences as “more torture than abuse”, recounting how he was locked in a place known as “the dungeon” without water or food for days. In some places there were “persistent beatings of boys and girls”, the report says.

“In a particularly awful incident,” the IICSA report adds, “we heard of the killing of a pet horse loved by the children which a group of 15 children were forced to watch as a form of collective punishment for an alleged wrongdoing.”

There were no means of reporting abuse and children lived in fear of reprisal if they did so, according to the investigation. One child was told not to tell anyone he had been raped; another was told to “pray for his abuser”.

One of the most devastating aspects of the scheme, IICSA says, was that children were lied to about their family background – even about whether their parents were dead or alive.

Some of the organisations involved, such as the Fairbridge Society and Barnado’s, both sent out children from the UK and received them at their operations overseas.

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This is the first full report by IICSA, which was established in 2014 by the then home secretary, Theresa May. The child migration scheme was one of the first strands of the inquiry, which is looking at abuse committed within many other UK institutions.

In 2010, the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, publicly apologised to former child migrants for their experiences. Consequently the report does not call on the government to make a further apology.

It does note, however, that some institutions have still not apologised for their role in the programmes. “We recommend that they make such apologies,” the IICSA urges.

One of the organisations that had not apologised nor provided any support or reparations, the report notes, was the Royal Overseas League, which promoted social and cultural links throughout the empire and subsequently the Commonwealth. It had argued that because it had not faced allegations of sexual abuse directly, there was no need to respond to such allegations.

The IICSA report, however, states that the league “did not take sufficient care to protect its child migrants from the risk of sexual abuse”.

After the report’s publication the ROL issued an apology. In a statement on its website it said: “The Royal Over-Seas League (ROSL) deeply regrets and apologises for its support of government initiatives from the 1920’s onwards relating to child migration and condemns unreservedly the abuse and ill treatment of children.”

Meanwhile Bishop Marcus Stock, vice-chair of the National Catholic Safeguarding Commission, who gave evidence before the inquiry, apologised to all of those who were involved in the British government’s migration programmes as children.

The IICSA’s chair, Prof Alexis Jay, said that the policy had continued despite evidence over many years that children were suffering and blamed “successive British governments”.

She added: “We hope that this report offers acknowledgment to those who experienced abuse resulting from the child migration programmes.”

A Department for Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “The child migration policy was misguided and deeply flawed. Successive governments have accepted that the policy of child migration was wrong. The 2010 national apology has been reaffirmed in each subsequent year. Over £9m has been made available to former child migrants to help them be reunited with their families.

“We will carefully consider the findings of the inquiry’s report and respond in due course.”

Oliver Cosgrove, a core participant in the inquiry, said: “Whilst I welcome apologies and compensation which is way overdue, I deserve more; those who suffered sexual abuse deserve more.

“It is not enough to acknowledge and apologise for what happened in the past – we need to learn from the obvious failures to ensure that no child suffers as I did. Because sexual abuse is still taking place in our society. This report does nothing to ensure that it stops. It has missed a golden opportunity to do so.”