| Presenter | Claudia Soares Newcastle University |
| Paper Title | Accessing the voice of children in care through history |
| Abstract | The sources that survive about welfare recipient children and their families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are usually fragmentary and highly even. Archival sources have dominantly produced and preserved the perspective of those in power, rather than the viewpoints of welfare recipients, who have tended to be objectified, violated, erased and silenced within the historical record. However, across institutional and official archives produced about children who were recipients of different forms of welfare and care from 1800-present across the Anglophone British Empire, the child’s voice sometimes emerges in different forms, and at different times, both indirectly and directly. This paper grapples with the important interpretative and methodological challenges of looking for evidence of young people’s voices and experiences, and the impossibility of directly and simply reading voice and experience of children from historical sources. It takes several sources (both child and adult-produced documents) about children’s care as sites of inquiry and case studies to consider how voice, experience, feeling, and meaning-making were expressed by different historical actors. In doing so, the paper engages with themes of silence, absence and power, competence, knowledge, resistance and the right to be heard. |
| Biography | Dr Claudia Soares is a Modern British and Imperial Historian at Newcastle University. In 2024, she became a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and is now working on a seven-year project entitled Caring Communities: Rethinking Children’s Social Care, 1800-present. Her recent publications include her first book, A Home from Home? Children and Social Care in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, 1870-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2023), and has recent articles published in Journal of Family History, Journal of Victorian Culture, and History Workshop Journal. She is currently writing a second book on the history of children’s care in Britain, Australia and Canada between 1800-1930. |
| Presenter | Laura Nys Ghent University |
| Paper Title | The happy, miserable and repentant self of Gustave J. Belgian juvenile offenders and narratives of escape, 1890-1950 |
| Abstract | Archives of reform schools for juvenile offenders contain a myriad of autobiographical documents written by young people. This paper focuses on reform schools for boys in Belgium between 1890 and 1950. Drawing on case files of boys who escaped from the institute, this paper discusses the dynamics between police interrogations and the boys’ own narratives of escape. Therein, this paper discusses notions of authorship, institutional censorship, emotions and selfhood, and their changes throughout the first half of the 20th century. |
| Biography | Postdoctoral scholar at Ghent University |
| Presenter | Sally Dowling Open University/University of Bristol |
| Paper Title | 'Fallen', 'been bad' and 'gone astray': Language for describing young women in institutional care in the late-nineteenth century |
| Abstract | This presentation uses the Temporary Home for Young Girls who Have Gone Astray, Bristol as a case-study, with a focus on the years 1864-1909. It will examine how language used to describe the young women in the care of the Home might have affected their access to, and experience of, support. The nineteenth century was a time of polarized views in relation to behaviour, particularly women’s. This is demonstrated in the terms used to describe them – wayward, fallen, gone astray, delinquent, bad; these words, and others, acting as euphemisms for transgressive behaviour, often sexual (even if they were unwilling participants). Young women, from sometimes desperate home circumstances, were 'reformed' through contact with a range of institutions, including Penitentiaries, Reform and Industrial Schools. This was in the context, nationally and locally, of a range of issues including nineteenth-century attitudes to women in general (specifically sexuality); the care of unmarried mothers; deviance and reform in Victorian society; institutional care and associated organisations; as well as related legislation. This presentation, through a close examination of primary source material (the records of the Temporary Home, held by the Bristol Archives) will highlight how language was used in the decision making process of the Temporary Home Committee - to admit a young woman to the Home, to send her to another institution or to return her to her family. Many Committee members were women from well-known local business families – the use of language will be considered as one of the ‘varying mechanisms used to control, label and denigrate’ young women as well as a feature of the work undertaken by female philanthropists of this period. |
| Biography | Dr Sally Dowling is an interdisciplinary academic (Women’s Studies, Public Health, Sexual Health, Social Sciences, Medical Education). She works in Bristol Medical School at the University of Bristol teaching on undergraduate and postgraduate Medical Education programmes as well as acting as co-Programme Director for the MSc Reproduction and Development. Her previous research has been in the field of infant feeding and early motherhood and she has published many papers in this area as well as co-editing a book. She is currently studying for an MA in History (Open University). Her presentation is based on the work being undertaken for her Dissertation. |