The deportation of thousands of British children to Australia, Canada and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) created the most catastrophic child abuse legacy in living memory, the national inquiry into child sexual abuse has been told.
Investigator Margaret Humphreys told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) that the physical and sexual abuse, conditions of slavery, removal of identities, and lies suggesting the youngsters’ parents were dead amounted to a catalogue of crimes. “These are human rights violations,” she said, adding that institutions colluded and covered up the abuse.
Humphreys, who set up the Child Migrants Trust in 1987, said the removal of each child’s identity aided the abuse. “The perpetrators knew there was no one for the children to turn to… no one was going to visit them at weekends, no one was going to send them Christmas cards, and no one was going to celebrate their birthdays.”
She described the “greatest betrayal” of telling children their parents were dead when they were not. One mother told how she visited her son weekly in a Liverpool children’s home, but arrived one Saturday to find he had been sent to Australia just 1.5 hours earlier. She ran to Lime Street station as the train departed, screaming, “get the children off, stop the train”. Her boy put his face to the window and shouted, “I’ll never forget you mum.”
The inquiry is investigating the sexual abuse of children removed from British institutions between 1947 and the 1970s and taken to Australia and Canada by charities including Barnardos, the Fairbridge Society, and the Sisters of Nazareth. Once abroad, they were kept in farm schools where they suffered brutality, sexual abuse, and slave labour.
