The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain: Professor Peter Anderson on his new book

I wrote the book in response to two child-removal scandals in Spain. The first concerned the removal of children from what some historians cast as 30,000 political opponents of the Franco regime during and shortly after the Civil War 1936–1939. A second scandal concerns the up to what some have estimated as 300,000 babies taken from vulnerable parents from the 1950s and sold into adoption.

In both cases, we are faced by a lack of evidence and an emphasis on new ideological practices linked to the ‘fascist’ Franco regime.

I wanted to find a way of bringing documentary evidence to the debate and to see how far existing interpretations help us understand the removal practices revealed by the documentary record.

I identified the Spanish Juvenile Court system as the key institution carrying out child-removals during the early Franco regime and it surprised me that historians had not studied this court’s child-removal function.

When I gained access to the files for the courts for Madrid, one of my first conclusions was that many of the child-removal practices were long established and were shaped by enduring, and largely Catholic-influenced child-removal practices rather than new Francoist procedures. This context connects Spain to other child-removal practices in countries such as the United States of America, Canada, and Australia — not just ‘fascist’ regimes.

By focusing on removal practices before, during and after the Civil War, it also became possible to blur the overly sharp boundaries between removals from the urban poor and political removals. 

While the historiography of the Spanish case has long focused on figures such as military psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera, I studied a range of Spanish activists who particularly from the nineteenth century forged child-removal practices.

Important examples include Ramón Albó, a Social Catholic who became the chief judge in the Barcelona juvenile court. He proved an avid reader of British, US, Belgian, and other experts on child ‘protection’ and helped pioneer the work of the court in Barcelona. He also became the head judge again in Barcelona in the early Franco regime.

During the Civil War, his political ideas hardened, and he became a declared enemy of secular and left-wing parents whom he believed had corrupted their children by depriving them of the protection of Catholic morality. 

We need to think not just in terms of fascism and new ideological practices, but in long-term practices that find an echo in both ‘liberal’ and ‘fascist’ regimes (although they took on different characteristics in different countries). This helps us to recognise the experience of poor parents whose history has often been overlooked by the focus on ‘political’ victims, but it also helps us to recognise the agency of both those who practised child removal and those who felt its effects in their own families.

In many cases, families proved able to resist efforts to break bonds. In other cases, relatives used the courts to gain custody of children from despised relatives. In other words, we need to understand the actions of both the state and society to better appreciate child-removal practices.