This thoroughly researched comparative study shows how the child migration schemes operated in the past by prestigious charitable organisations in the United States and the United Kingdom, once widely admired, are now seen to have caused considerable damage to many of the deprived and disadvantaged children they were dedicated to rescue and redeem. To explain the long-lasting commitment to ... Read moresuch programmes, Professor Lynch focuses especially on the moral culture, particularly derived from Christian ethics, which motivated those managing these operations. It also inspired their marketing as moral projects to attract financial support. But the book also shows how the moral certainty of those responsible made them resistant to criticism and unwilling to consider the harm they could be inflicting on the vulnerable. The book raises profound and disquieting issues about humanitarian piety with which childcare and any other organisations bent on `doing good' today ought to engage.
Stephen Constantine, Emeritus Professor of History, Lancaster University, UK
Gordon Lynch has written a sensitive and searching book that will force its readers to think about how constitutive are our ideas about right societies. Rather than sit in simple judgment of those who forced the migration of hundreds of thousands of children under diverse circumstances, Lynch asks with great interpretive acuity: What now do we do with equal humanitarian fervor and and missionary blindness? Through an expose of the suffering wrought through child migration, this book presses us to think about how suffering is inherent to our bureaucracies, our social theories, and our plots for civilization.
Kathryn Lofton, Professor of Religious Studies, Yale University, USA
In keeping with Lynch's reading, contemporary organizations would do well to examine not only their moral aims, but also attend to their unintended consequences.
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