Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire by Emily Baughan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire by Emily Baughan Aisling Shalvey Saving the Children: Humanitarianism, Internationalism, and Empire. By Emily Baughan. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. xii + 300 pp. Cloth $85.00, paper $24.99, e-book $24.95. This book was a joy to read, each of the six chapters evoking a different era in the history of humanitarian work with children. It begins with the foundations of the Save the Children humanitarian aid organization in 1919 in Britain, when aid work was a status symbol of the social elite. Baughan does not remain focused on the European situation, though; she emphasizes the link between the expansion of humanitarian aid for children, neocolonialism, and imperialism involved in the Save the Children campaigns. The author artfully combines previously under-used archival sources with a well-informed and carefully articulated criticism of these sources, seeing beyond the dominant narrative and highlighting the injustices committed under the guardianship of the Save the Children organization. This book begins with the origins of British humanitarian efforts in upper-class circles, moving on to the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1924. In the third chapter, Baughan explains the expansion of Save the Children to the British Empire in Africa and Asia, then goes on to describe the organization's role in protecting children during the war, along with the transition to a postwar humanitarian environment without the support of the League of Nations, and then finally, the move to humanitarianism in a decolonized world. [End Page 164] Baughan critically explains the 1924 Declaration of the Rights of the Child and how it was constructed in an idealistic manner, noting that in practice it expected nation-states to protect these rights for its citizens, while those who did not ethnically or racially "fit" were left without protection (72–75). She also notes that Save the Children did not renounce its policy of family separation from prior to 1945 but in fact leaned into it, despite the psychoanalytic theory that underpinned most postwar aid, emphasizing that it was family structure and emotional attachment that improved child welfare. The terminology used by Save the Children did begin to shift, though. While they did not change their methods, they began to highlight juvenile delinquency and the removal of children from negative influences. Baughan intelligently notes that "the funds success in the postwar years did not lie in its innovation or adoption of new child rearing methods, but its ability to repackage and rebrand its existing work and prejudices in line with the concerns of the era" in relation to making juvenile delinquent reformatories sound like British public school, so that fundraisers could make this repackaged system of family separation sound appealing to their upper-class council members (149). Beginning with a description of the eugenicist and classist apolitical ideas of the Save the Children organization, this book goes on to explain the central role of this organization in using exploitative images of naked, starving children in marketing and the view of children not as individuals but as a product for later economic growth. One example of the organization ignoring glaring inequalities, while simultaneously claiming to be at the center of child welfare, was the 1942 visit of Gregory Thelin (president of the International Union of Save the Children) to Berlin to investigate German child welfare during World War II. He noted that their well-being generally seemed excellent, and while he had not come across any Jewish children, and he did not see this absence as a problem (133). Baughan then notes that while the Save the Children organization was predicated on an apolitical mission statement, thus refusing to criticize fascist governments of the time, not all organizations held such beliefs—for example, the Peace Pledge Union (134). The book addresses the involvement of humanitarian aid by Save the Children in the postwar era as a bid to retain colonial influence in the rapidly decolonizing continent of Africa. This resulted in imprisonment of children, as well as colonial violence, being used as opportunities to create loyal British subjects by an organization that claimed to protect the welfare of the child. She explains...