[Forms of custody of children placed in Switzerland: ambiguous policies, resistance, and conflicting objectives (1850-1950).].

Abstract

In the past, many European countries were faced with the problem of providing care for boarded-out children. And very often the policies implemented up to the middle of the twentieth century were essentially similar and thus similarly inadequate. The problem with boarding out is that it was a measure in response to widely varying situations, not only in respect of the illegitimate as well as the legitimate children concerned, but also with regard to the reasons which led to boarding out. Orphans after the First World War with no relatives who could take them in formed a minority, and in several Swiss cantons the legitimate children outnumbered the illegitimate ones by far. Up to the First World War, the age group concerned was mostly that of children from birth to 14 years. There was considerable ambivalence in the motives leading to the boarding out of children, because they were the result of two conflicting concepts. On the one hand, the parents or the mother of an illegitimate child had to out-place her child/children because the mother had to go out to work, as was often the case with the spread of industrialisation and the frequently inadequate income of the working class. On the other hand, the local Assistance Board was often ready to split up poorer families and to take away their children with the argument that the family environment was considered morally harmful for their upbringing according to the contemporary view. Both parents and the local Assistance Board often chose the cheapest solution for different reasons. In numerous cases the children were placed with farming families quite unable to offer a proper upbringing and children were taken in only because they represented a supplementary source of income and an addition to the workforce. For the local authorities, be they rural or urban, in some cantons even during the interwar period, the auctioning of the children to families living in other parts of Switzerland was a frequent stratagem in order to pay the lowest possible boarding fees, and the level of these fees decreased enormously the older the child was since his/her work capacity increased over time. In most cantons, one of the main problems with boarding out was the totally inadequate supervision of the families to which the children were entrusted, either because of the geographical distance between the local authority and the children, or because of the inadequacy of the supervisory staff, often benevolent females with no clear rules existing for judging the adequacy of the entrusted families, or due to the general lack of interest for the destiny of the children.