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This book examines the ideas and practices underpinning state removal of children. Early twentieth century Spanish juvenile courts were involved in taking children from poor families, families displaced by war, and from political opponents. This study captures the voice and agency of the marginalized children and parents affected by mass removals.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: Dangerous Parents
- 2: Removing Children
- 3: The Rise of Juvenile Courts and the Consolidation of Child Removal
- 4: The Spanish Courts and the Poor, 1926-1936
- 5: The Poor and the Fight for Custody, 1926-1936
- 6: The Battle for Madrid and the Splintering of Families, 1936-1939
- 7: Hardening Francoist Attitudes Towards Political Opponents
- 8: Franco's Victory: Repression, Deprivation, and Child Removal in Everyday Life
- 9: Repatriation, Family Feuds, and Child Removal
- 10: The Role of Family Visitors in Supervising, Removing, and Returning Children
About the author
Peter Anderson is Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century European History in the School of History at the University of Leeds. His books include Friend or Foe? Occupation, Collaboration and Selective Violence in the Spanish Civil War (2016) and The Francoist Military Trials: terror and complicity, 1939-1945 (2010).
Summary
The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain analyses the ideas and practices that underpinned the age of mass child removal. This era emerged from growing criticisms across the world of 'dangerous' parents and the developing belief in the nineteenth century that the state could provide superior guardianship to 'unfit' parents. In the late nineteenth century, the juvenile-court movement led the way in forging a new and more efficient system of child removal that severely curtailed the previously highly protected sovereignty of guardians deemed dangerous. This transnational movement rapidly established courts across the world and used them to train the personnel and create the systems that frequently lay behind mass child removal. Spaniards formed a significant part of this transnational movement and the country's juvenile courts became involved in the three main areas of removal that characterize the age: the taking of children from poor families, from families displaced by war, and from political opponents.
The study of Spanish case files reveals much about how the removal process worked in practice across time and across democratic regimes and dictatorships. These cases also afford an insight into the rich array of child-removal practices that lay between the poles of coercion and victimhood. Accordingly, the study offers a history of some of most marginalized parents and children and recaptures their voice, agency, and experience. Peter Anderson also analyses the removal of tens of thousands of children from General Franco's political opponents, sometimes referred to as the lost children of Francoism, through the history and practice of the juvenile courts.
