Intersections of gender and ethnicity-based differences in children’s placement in state care in Hungary, 1949-1956

The process of removing children from their home environment and placing them with foster parents or in residential homes is a segment of the welfare system and of welfare work that is especially prone to projections about victimized families and children suffering in child protection institutions, that represent the all-mighty arms of the state. This image furthermore fits conveniently a characterization of the period between 1949 and 1956 as the years of “Stalinist terror.” On the other hand, a representation of the state and child protection institutions as rescuing innocent children and families victimized by the war is just as far from addressing the complexity of interactions between children, parents and child protection representatives that partake in these process. Before a child entered state care in the 1950s numerous actors at different levels of the institutional hierarchy in the field of the child protection expressed not once contradictory and conflicting opinions on “the best interest of the child.” The history of child protection in early state socialist Hungary testifies to the significance of examining the state in its complexity. In my analysis I pay specific attention to how gender- and Roma-specific preconceptions among child protection case workers affected placement in state care in this time period in Hungary. Child protection practice manifests two consequences of the country’s new welfare system introduced with the onset of state socialism. First, new regulations were based on the assumption that as a result of fast modernization and catch-up industrialization, the preconditions for participation in productive work were secured to all. Unemployment has turned into an individual’s own fault and employment grew to be a moral obligation. The case files of children placed in state care reveal increased expectation towards both men and women as wage workers, as a result of which fathers as well as mothers’ lack of employment could lead child protection case workers to suspect their work-shyness. At the same time, the significance of participation in productive work easily generated prejudices against Romani parents. Themes, such as the inborn laziness and work avoidance of Roma that have fed eugenic discourses in Europe between the 1920s and 1940s lived on and fertilized discourse on Roma in state socialist Hungary. This exemplifies the survival of the definition and categorization of Roma on the basis of their work-shyness across systemic divides.