Commenting on the separation of 2,000 young migrant children from their parents and families at the United States southern border in the past 6 weeks, the University’s Professor Gordon Lynch says in other countries where this has happened it has become a matter of ‘national shame’.
‘The current policy of the Trump administration towards separating migrant children from their families has a longer history of activities by state and charitable organisations that justified the removal of children from their birth families on the grounds that those families posed a moral risk to society.
‘Historically these policies have included children’s admission to native residential boarding schools in the United States and Canada, and the separation of Aboriginal children (the ‘stolen generations’) from their families in Australia, to other forms of residential school (like the industrial school system in Ireland) and various child migration programmes.
‘The “sacred bond” that is normally understood to exist between parents and children was seen as breakable in these cases because the parents posed a social threat on the basis of their ethnicity or perceived moral failings.
‘In most countries in which these policies have operated – apart from the United States – they have since become matters of national shame, apology and in many cases, compensation.’
Gordon Lynch, Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology in the School of European Culture and Languages at Kent, was an advisor to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), and co-authored a report into child sexual abuse in child migration schemes for the Inquiry.