Professor Gordon Lynch, Michael Ramsey Professor of Modern Theology in the Department of Religious Studies, featured in the Guardian on Monday 13 June, commenting on the Goddard inquiry which is looking into claims of child sexual abuse in the UK among young people transported to Australia and Canada between 1920 and 1970.

The Goddard inquiry was set up in 2014 to examine the abuse of children in public and private institutions and is urging those men and women transported to Australia and Canada who may have been victims of sexual and physical abuse before being removed from the country to come forward as a priority.

In the Guardian, Gordon commented: ‘It is about historic justice. These people experienced the really horrendous trauma of being removed from the UK as children without proper warning, being sent to Australia and being placed in residential establishments where they experienced physical and sexual abuse. It is an emotional burden, which is still with them today. They are visibly marked by it.’

Gordon recently curated an exhibition at the V&A Museum of Childhood about child migrants based on his research and new book entitled Remembering Child Migration (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), which looks into the ways in which the humanitarian motivations of child migration schemes in American and Britain were implicated in the suffering that children experienced through them.

One thing Gordon hopes the Goddard inquiry can do is really nail the issues about what went wrong with the post placement supervision of children. ‘Why were organisations in the UK not concerned and not checking up on what was happening to these children and what did the organisations themselves know about what was going on?’

The full article can be found on the Guardian website.