The Clark Family

I watched a documentary last night about a family of up to 17 kids who were split up and scattered across Scotland from the 1940s to the 1960s. It was truly awful what happened to these children. Five or six died at or shortly after birth - nobody seems to be sure how many. A few were adopted and did okay. Others went into care and didn't do okay. A couple suffered so badly that they remain damaged right into their 60s and 70s. What was more amazing than the brothers who got involved in drugs and alcohol and sleeping rough was that the rest didn't but became fine, upstanding citizens who went looking for the rest of their brothers and sisters.

The 'crime' committed by these children - the reason for them being taken from their parents - was that their parents weren't up to the job of raising them, at a time when there wasn't much help on offer. There were a whole lot of reasons for that, I'm sure - lack of education, their own poverty-stricken backgrounds - but mainly the problem was poverty.

All the way through the documentary, I kept thinking about the mother of these children. What the hell kind of life did she have? She had 17+ pregnancies. That means most of her adult life she was pregnant. At one point, she was jailed for 'neglect' of her children. And that raises another question: these children had a father. Where the hell was he? There wasn't even a photo of him. Did he get the jail too? If not, why not?

And still in the end this mother kept hold of one child, Andrew. Could she have been that bad a mother if she was still allowed to keep her youngest child?

It's impossible to estimate how many damaged people we have in our community as a result of the awful treatment they encountered when they were young. The one thing we know is that the damage gets passed on generation by generation. We should ask what kind of upbringing this mother had herself - not to mention her husband. And could there have been some kind of intervention that would have saved the parents and their children?

I had a friend - she took her own life 5 years ago - who was part of a large family in 1960s Glasgow. Her mother died when she was 6 years old. Her 3 brothers stayed with their father. Her two older sisters went into Nazareth House in Glasgow. Their experience was bad but at least they had each other. Another sister went to relatives. My friend was on her own. Her stories of how she was treated were  awful: beaten by a nun for wetting the bed and for crying for her mother.

Somehow, we have to break the cycle that leads to so many children suffering. Children have to be rescued because they are our future - and they deserve better.