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Britain To Fund Child Migrant Reunions, No Apology. Britain will spend one million pounds (US$1.68 million) to reunite surviving former British child migrants with their families, but will not apologise for sending thousands of children abroad to lives of abuse. British Health Secretary Frank Dobson said in a statement, issued by the British High Commission in Australia on Tuesday, that the child migration policy under which 160,000 children were sent to Australia, New Zealand and Canada, was “misguided”. But the government said any further compensation would be inappropriate and offered its “sincere regrets.” The Child Migrants Trust, which helps former British child migrants in Australia reunite with their families, welcomed the news, but added the reunions would have to be accelerated. “Unless we can get on with this very quickly, sadly many child migrants will be returning to the graves of their parents,” said director Margaret Humphreys in Perth. Some 160,000 British children, some as young as five, were sent to “white Commonwealth countries” including Australia, Canada and New Zealand under migration schemes between the 1850s and the 1960s. The schemes were seen as a way of populating these countries and of getting people away from Britain's poor economy. The policy also aimed at providing “good white stock” for former colonies. The main criterion for choosing children appears to have been poverty. The flow of children was particularly heavy after World War Two, when Britain was in economic recession. Many children were given new names and never told of their origins in Britain. Many were orphans and many others were told that they were orphans. Some were forcibly separated from their parents. The number of surviving migrants was not immediately available but between 7,000 and 10,000 were estimated to have been sent to Australia between 1947 and 1967. The one million pound support fund would seek to reunite the former migrants with their families over the next three years. “The fund will be for former child migrants without the means to make their own arrangements to visit and will support first time reunions with close family,” Dobson said. “It is envisaged that the fund will help not only with the cost of travelling and subsistence, but also the provision of support such as counselling...,” he said. A British parliamentary report in July found many of the children suffered severe emotional and physical abuse. In Australia, many went to religious organisations and schools, from where they were often put up for adoption. John Hennessey, who was 10 when he was sent to Australia in 1947, told the inquiry that he was once stripped naked and flogged almost to death by a Christian priest for stealing grapes from a vineyard in Western Australia. The inquiry said “blame must be distributed” to all governments and migration agencies involved. It called on Britain to issue an apology to the “surviving human casualties” and to financially and physically assist family reunions. But Britain has rejected the call for an apology. “The United Kingdom government considers...that these policies were misguided,” Dobson said. “To those and their families who see themselves as still deeply scarred by their early experiences it offers sincere regrets.” Humphreys said many former child migrants saw an apology as essential in the healing process. “An apology is very important from a therapeutic point of view, it is the start of recovery...it's recognition of what these terrible schemes did to our children,” she told reporters. (C) Reuters Limited 1998 [ARTICLES] |