Roy Parker – författare

Adoption has undergone a transformation in the last decade or so, and has brought with it new and pressing issues such as the adoption of older children from care; contact with birth families after adoption; trans-racial placement; single-person adoption; and the need for a post-adoption support service. Over recent years, the Department of Health has commissioned a range of studies on adoption. They have since set up a working party - largely comprising practitioners - to review the results of these studies and draw out the implications for practice and policy.

This collection of 12 new and revised essays on child care and children’s services, written by leading child welfare historian Roy Parker, draws on his lifetime of research in this area. By exploring various topics these essays explain significant political, economic, legal and ideological aspects of this history from the mid-1850s. This unique and lasting review of child care services allows readers to understand how the services for some of society’s most vulnerable children have become what they are, how well they have met and now meet the needs of those children.The collection provides a high-quality, historical reference resource that will inform and capture the interest of social work and social policy students as well as social and legal historians, political scientists and those involved in administration and government, struggling with the issues of the day.

Some 80,000 British children - many of them under the age of ten - were shipped from Britain to Canada by Poor Law authorities and voluntary bodies during the 50 years following Confederation in 1867. How did this come about? What were the motives and methods of the people involved in both countries? Why did it come to an end? What effects did it have on the children involved and what eventually became of them? These are the questions Roy Parker explores in a meticulously researched work that brings together economic, political, social, medical, legal, administrative and religious aspects of the story in Britain and Canada. He concludes with a moving review of evidence from more recent survivors of child migration, discussing the lifelong effects of their experiences with the help of modern psychological insights.His book - humane and highly professional - will capture and hold the interest of many: the academic, the practitioner and the general reader; and they will include the relatives and descendants, both in Britain and Canada, of the children around whom this study revolves.CUSTOMERS IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA: Copies of this title are available from UBC Press, www.ubcpress.ca