1. Forced British Children Migration
Alone on a Wide Wide Sea
Forced British Children Migration
Britain is the only country in the world with a sustained history of child migration. Only Britain has used child migration as a significant part of its childcare strategy rather than as a policy of last resort during times of war or civil unrest.
The reality of this policy was to remove children, some as young as three years old, from their homes or care homes, from their mothers and fathers or carers, from all that was familiar to them, and to ship them thousands of miles away from their home country to institutions in distant lands within the Commonwealth. Many of these children were removed without their parents' knowledge or consent. Some names and birthdays were changed deliberately so children could not be traced by their relatives. Brothers and sisters were not always kept together and in some instances were sent to different countries.

2. Between 1868 and 1970 around 150 000 British children were shipped from Britain:
- Around to Canada (around 11% of Canada’s current population is descended from British child migrants)
- The rest were sent to Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and other British colonies
By and large the children were destined to fill menial occupations and were very cheap or free labour, some were adopted by foster families.
They were told they would be going to “a land of milk and honey”, “ a land of opportunity”

3. Who were these children? Abandoned children Neglected children Orphans
Children from poor families or from single-parent families
Dr. Ron Sinclair (2011) explained these circumstances as a child migrant when he said:
“My mother died very tragically….my father ultimately couldn’t cope with four young children in the grim years of World War II’s aftermath.  There were no social services of significance in Britain….in sense we were going to a country that I would come to regard as a better country.”

4. Why?
Economic reasons: to relieve the burden on the British economy to pay for their care and help the economies of the receiving countries as they were used as free labour
Moral reasons: to protect them from moral depravation at home, from poverty and neglect and provide them with a Christian education
Colonial reasons: to increase the white population in Australia or Rhodesia

6. http://www. theguardian

7. Speaking at that time, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said:
The British Government made a public apology to child migrants and their families in 2010.
Speaking at that time, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said:
“Children as young as three were sent alone to the farthest corners of the world. The names and birthdays of some were deliberately changed so that it would be impossible for families to reunite. Some were dispatched without the consent of their mother or father. 
Indeed many parents did not know their children had been sent to foreign shores at all – they had no idea where you were, no way of bringing you home. And this cruel and unnatural practice was, not so much transportation as deportation – deportation from your mother country.”
Margaret Humphreys CBE, OAM who founded the Child Migrants Trust, endorsed the call for a full judicial inquiry to establish how children were selected in the UK and sent to Australia to face further abuse, given the clear degree of deception and cover up that has devastated so many British families. 
She said: “It is vitally important that the British Government investigates allegations of childhood abuse in UK institutions, how those children were selected then trafficked to endure further abuse in Australia.
The Government should now begin a full judicial inquiry into how thousands of our British children, many with families in the UK, were forcibly set abroad without their families to face appalling brutalities on the other side of the world.”

8. Britain’s child migrants
An exhibition telling the heart-breaking true stories of Britain's child migrants who were sent to Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries between 1869 and These children were sent overseas by migration schemes, which were run by a partnership of charities, religious organisations and governments, and claimed to offer boys and girls the opportunity of a better life in Britain's Empire overseas.
Many migrants never saw their homes or their families again.
Featuring detailed first-hand stories, photography and personal items which belonged to child migrants, as well as video and audio which recount this period of history.
The exhibition will explore the complex moral motivations to these schemes and share the work of the Child Migrants Trust, which has brought some comfort to former child migrants, by finding their families and reuniting them with surviving members.
On Their Own:
Britain’s child migrants
This exhibition is at the V&A Museum of Childhood
from 24 October 2015 until 12 June 2016.