Waifs and strays

Why it is that children's homes, supposedly designed to protect the vulnerable, have instead become sites of abuse?

David Wilson

The discovery of parts of a child's body at Haut de la Garenne, a former children's home in Jersey which is now used as a youth hostel, and continuing police activity at the site as a result of allegations of the sexual and physical abuse of children dating back over several decades, is but an appalling echo of all that we heard from over 600 people who gave evidence about the abuse that they suffered in children's homes in North Wales in the 1970s.

In turn, their harrowing testimony - documented in the Waterhouse Report - echoes the testimonies of those abused at the Kincora Boys' Home in Belfast, and also those who were mistreated in the various children's homes presided over by Alan Prescott in Tower Hamlets and at homes in Essex, before his arrest and imprisonment in 2001.

And while it is only right that the police continue to search for other children who may be buried at Haut de la Garenne, should we not also pause and consider why it is that children's homes - which are supposedly designed to protect and care for those children who are amongst the more vulnerable in our society - have instead regularly become the sites of abuse, torture, and in the worst circumstances murder?

Listening to those who survived abusive childhoods in homes, one theme dominates above all others - powerlessness. Steven Messham, for example, who was sent to Bryn Estyn children's home in Wrexham when he was 13, complained that it was "only a matter of days" before he was sexually abused at this "Colditz of care", and that "I tried to complain - I made police statements in 1978 and nothing was ever done. No one was listening." In other words his voice could not be heard above those other more official voices who had access to power and influence and who as a result were able to shape and silence Steven and all the others who complained.

Of course many would like to believe that what really lies behind this powerlessness - not just in North Wales, but also at Kincora and elsewhere - was a "cover-up"; a conspiracy by Masons, paedophile rings, corrupt national or local politicians, civil servants and businessmen - either individually or working collectively - to ensure that children in care could be used and abused as suited their adult needs.

Indeed, conspiracy theories abound - especially on the internet - about all of these children's homes that I have mentioned, and while I have no way of verifying many of the claims that are made about what is alleged to have taken place and why this took so long to come to public attention, it seems to me at least plausible that "cover-up" does indeed help to explain the public silence about many aspects of the abuse that was subsequently reported.

But so what? Accepting - even partially - the idea of conspiracies and cover-up merely serves to absolve us from thinking more broadly about the powerlessness of children generally, of which the powerlessness of children in care is but the most extreme example. It allows us to present what happened at Kincora, in North Wales and Essex - and which is likely to have happened at Haut de la Garenne - as aberrations from the norm, as opposed to the routine, everyday powerlessness of children more generally.

To see this abuse as the work of paedophiles, Masons, or corrupt politicians and the like merely deflects attention away from the reality of the structured dependency and powerlessness of children in our culture more generally, a powerlessness which we have created, perpetuate and condone. Quite simply, in Britain childhood is the most intensely state-regulated period in human existence. Inspection, intrusion and incapacitation mark out the landscape of what it means to be a child.

All of this has deep roots in our culture. In the 1880s, members of the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society would, for example go out at night "waif hunting" - looking for children who had nowhere to stay - and then find them homes in what were known at the time as "industrial schools".

The Church of England was prompted to name their society which aimed to protect children as the "waifs and strays society" after the medieval term "wayves and streyves". "Wayves and streyves" can be simply translated as meaning pieces of ownerless property, and this idea that children are property - as prevalent today as it was in 1880 - is ultimately what facilitates the abuse that they suffer from, whether in homes or elsewhere, and creates the conditions in which to be young is to be less than human. Lovers of trivia may like to know that Haut de la Garenne first opened its doors for children in 1867 when it became Jersey's flagship industrial school.