as labor INTO THE 1960S.
Speaking of horrific.
Child migrants, 1618-1967
These are the children sent from Britain and Ireland to colonies and former colonies with the express intention of helping to culturally swamp the native peoples by increasing the white population.
The practice began in 1618 with a shipment of children to Virginia, and did not stop until 1967. The shameful history of the practice was almost forgotten until recently, when Margaret Humphreys and the Child Migrants' Trust began investigating and trying to reunite surviving children with their parents.
The 1930s to 50s were the period of greatest activity, when the primary destinations were Australia, Canada, Zimbabwe and New Zealand. The children were usually aged between five and 12 years. Mainly they were taken from children's homes and orphanages. Children were told that their parents were dead or had abandoned them (often a deliberate lie, as most in fact still had parents); the parents were seldom consulted: their children simply disappeared. The children were shipped overseas and usually housed in large children's homes instead of being fostered or adopted. This compares unfavorably with the treatment of the children on the US Orphan Trains.
Investigations over recent years have revealed large-scale physical, emotional and sexual abuse in the destination institutions, with children being used as virtual slaves before being shoved out the doors when they were considered old enough to fend for themselves.
http://famous.adoption.com/famous/child-migrants.htmlAlso the US orphan trains: a pretty face is sometimes put on the practice but it wasn't pretty.
Eighty years ago, Elliot Bobo was taken from his alcoholic father's home, given a small cardboard suitcase, and put on board an "orphan train" bound for Arkansas. Bobo never saw his father again. He was one of tens of thousands of neglected and orphaned children who over a 75-year period were uprooted from the city and sent by train to farming communities to start new lives with new families. Elliot Bobo's remarkable story is part ofThe Orphan Trains.
Photo of orphans The story of this ambitious and finally controversial effort to rescue poor and homeless children begins in the 1850s, when thousands of children roamed the streets of New York in search of money, food and shelter--prey to disease and crime. Many sold matches, rags, or newspapers to survive. For protection against street violence, they banded together and formed gangs. Police, faced with a growing problem, were known to arrest vagrant children--some as young as five--locking them up with adult criminals.
In 1853, a young minister, Charles Loring Brace, became obsessed by the plight of these children, who because of their wanderings, were known as "street Arabs." A member of a prominent Connecticut family, Brace had come to New York to complete his seminary training. Horrified by the conditions he saw on the street, Brace was persuaded there was only one way to help these "children of unhappy fortune."
"The great duty," he wrote, "is to get utterly out of their surroundings and to send them away to kind Christian homes in the country."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan/The actual agenda of these "good works" was to provide cheap labor for imperial expansion.