Social assistance in Franco’s fascist Spain (1939–75): a history of social control, family segregation and stolen babies

Abstract

The founding of the first Spanish school of social work in 1932, in Barcelona, is a well-known and celebrated milestone in the development of the social work profession in Spain. The school was financially supported by Raül Roviralta and was linked to a Belgian Catholic school of social work. The activity of this first school of social work was short lived, as it came to a halt with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. But very little is known or discussed about some dark ramifications of the school´s work and the pro-fascist political trajectory followed by its patron, Roviralta, during and after the war. This is just one small reflection of a significant area of political blindness affecting most historical accounts of the evolution of social work in Spain: a lack of explicit acknowledgement of its history of complicity and collaboration with the social control, oppression and indoctrination methods of the far-right dictatorship which was established at the end of the civil war in 1939 and lasted until 1975. Extreme implications of this complicity include instances of involvement in human rights abuses such as forced removal and stealing of babies from political prisoners and other families deemed unworthy or incapable to raise their children, according to the Spanish religious and cultural values which the dictatorship vowed to protect and enforce. Little is known, either, about histories of social workers´ individual and collective resistance to such abuses.