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Worse than Orphaned
| Orphans, along with widows, were traditionally seen as amongst the most deserving ‘objects of charity’, a focus of redemptive intervention designed to equip them to avoid dependency in adulthood. In order to argue for active intervention into the lives of a children it considered to be at risk, the child rescue movement, which emanated from Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, sought to extend the sympathy evoked by orphans to a wider range of children. By developing a new category, the ‘worse than orphaned’, the movement was able to develop an argument for the erasure of parental rights. Drawing on the promotional literature generated by the child rescue movement in Britain, Australia and Canada, this paper will examine the discursive process by which the status of ‘worse than orphaned’ was articulated, prior to the development of statutory child protection services in these nations.
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