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Fast Money & Foreign Objects
29 October 2014 Last updated at 05:37 ET
Switzerland's shame: The children used as cheap farm labour
By Kavita PuriSwitzerland
Continue reading the main story
Thousands of people in Switzerland who were forced into child labour are demanding compensation for their stolen childhoods. Since the 1850s hundreds of thousands of Swiss children were taken from their parents and sent to farms to work - a practice that continued well into the 20th Century.
David Gogniat heard a loud knock on the door. There were two policemen.
"I heard them shouting and realised something was wrong. I looked out and saw that my mother had pushed the policemen down the stairs," he says.
"She then came back in and slammed the door. The next day three policemen came. One held my mother and the other took me with them."
At the age of eight, he was in effect kidnapped and taken away to a farm. To this day he has no idea why.
For the first years of his life, he and his older brother and sisters lived alone with their mother. They were poor, but his childhood was happy until one day in 1946, when he came home from school to find his siblings had disappeared.
A year later it was his turn.
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He was taken to an old farmhouse and became the farmhand. He would wake before 06:00 and worked before and after school. His day finished after 22:00. This physically imposing man in his 70s looks vulnerable as he remembers the frequent violence from the foster father. "I would almost describe him as a tyrant... I was afraid of him. He had quite a temper and would hit me for the smallest thing," Gogniat says.
Continue reading the main story
Find out more
Watch Kavita Puri's report Switzerland: Stolen Childhoods on Our World at 11:30 GMT on Saturday 1 November and at 2230 GMT on Sunday 2 November on BBC World News. Assignment is on BBC World Service radio from Thursday.
On one occasion, when he was older, he remembers he snapped, grabbed his foster father, pushed him against the wall and was about to hit him. The man threatened him: "If you hit me, I'll have you sent to an institution." David backed off.
His siblings were living with families in the nearby village, though he rarely saw them. He missed his mother desperately. They wrote and there were occasional visits. One day his mother made an audacious attempt to get her children back. She came up with an Italian couple in a Fiat Topolino and said she was taking his siblings for a walk. David wasn't there but it was the talk of the village when he came back that night. The police brought the children back three days later.
"The fact that my mother arranged to kidnap her own children and take them back home to Bern with her just goes to show how much she was struggling against the authorities," Gogniat says. On his mother's death he made a shocking discovery. He found papers which showed she had been paying money to the foster families for the upkeep of her four children, who had been forcibly taken away from her and were working as indentured labourers.
Gogniat, his brother and two sisters were "contract children" or verdingkinder as they are known in Switzerland. The practice of using children as cheap labour on farms and in homes began in the 1850s and it continued into the second half of the 20th Century. Historian Loretta Seglias says children were taken away for "economic reasons most of the time… up until World War Two Switzerland was not a wealthy country, and a lot of the people were poor". Agriculture was not mechanised and so farms needed child labour.
David Gogniat with his younger sister before they were taken away from their mother
If a child became orphaned, a parent was unmarried, there was fear of neglect, or you had the misfortune to be poor, the communities would intervene. Authorities tried to find the cheapest way to look after these children, so they took them out of their families and placed them in foster families.
"They wanted to take these children out of the poor family and put them somewhere else where they could learn how to work, as through work they could support themselves as adults," says Seglias.
Dealing with the poor in this way she says was social engineering. If a parent dared to object, they could face measures themselves. "They could be put in prison or an institution where you would be made to work, so you could always put pressure on the parents."
Mostly it was farms that children were sent to, but not always. Sarah (not her real name) had been in institutions from birth, but in 1972, at the age of nine, she was sent to a home in a village, where she was expected to clean the house. She did that before and after school, and at night cleaned offices in nearby villages for her foster mother. She was beaten regularly by the mother, she says, and from the age of 11 was sexually abused by the sons at night.
This is the first time she has spoken about her story and her hands shake as she remembers. "The worst thing is that one sister, their daughter, once caught one of those boys... while I was asleep and she told the woman... [who said] that it didn't matter, I was just a slag anyway," Sarah says. A teacher and the school doctor wrote to the authorities, to express concern about her, but nothing was done.
There was no official decision to end the use of contract children. Seglias says it just naturally started to die out in the 1960s and 70s. As farming became mechanised, the need for child labour vanished. But Switzerland was changing too. Women got the vote in 1971 and attitudes towards poverty and single mothers moved on.
I found an exceptionally late case in a remote part of Switzerland. In 1979, Christian's mother was struggling. Recently divorced from a violent husband she needed support.
Christian with his mother
The state intervened and took her seven and eight-year-old sons to a farm many hours away by car. Christian remembers getting out of the car and watching his mother and the woman from social services driving off.
"My brother and I stood in front of the house feeling very lost and didn't know what to do… it was a strange moment, a moment you never forget," he says.
On the first day they were given overalls and perfectly fitting rubber boots, "because before the placement the woman from social services had even asked what size shoes we wore… When I think back I do believe there was an awareness that my brother and I would be made to work there."
Christian says there was work before and after school, at weekends and all year round. He remembers one incident, at a silo where cut grass was kept to make into silage. "In winter it was pretty frozen and I had to hack quite hard with the pitchfork and I was put under pressure and then this accident happened and the fork went through my toe."
He says work accidents were never reported to his mother or social services. And if the boys didn't work hard enough there were repercussions. Food was withheld as a form of punishment.
Continue reading the main story
Jump media player
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Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue.
"My brother and I just went hungry at the time. When I think back there were five years during which we constantly went hungry. That's why my brother and I used to steal food," Christian says. He remembers they stole chocolate from the village shop - though he now thinks the owners knew the boys were hungry and let them take the goodies. A former teacher of Christian's at the local school says with hindsight he looked malnourished.
But Christian remembers there were also more serious consequences if he didn't work hard enough, including violence. "We were pretty much being driven to work," he says. "There were many beatings, slaps in the face, pulling of hair, tugging of ears - there was also one incident involving something like a mock castration."
Christian has no doubt why he and his brother were placed with the farmer. "I believe it was about cheap labour... we were profitable," he says. "They expanded the farm... it was five years of hard work."
Historians estimate there were hundreds of thousands such children. For one year alone in the 1930s, records show 30,000 children were placed in foster families across Switzerland.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
They were being abused and no-one believed them”
Loretta SegliasHistorian
"It's hard to know precisely how many contract children there were as records were kept locally, and sometimes not at all," says Loretta Seglias. "Some children were also placed by private organisations, or their own families."
The extent to which these children were treated as commodities is demonstrated by the fact that there are cases even in the early 20th Century where they were herded into a village square and sold at public auction.
Seglias shows me some photographs. One child looks barely two - surely she couldn't be a contract child? "She could, she would be brushing floors bringing in the milk. Sometimes they came as babies on to the farms, and the bigger they grew the more work they would do," Seglias says.
In her studies, and speaking to former contract children she finds recurring themes. The lack of information comes up again and again.
"Children didn't know what was happening to them, why they were taken away, why they couldn't go home, see their parents, why they were being abused and no-one believed them," she says.
"The other thing is the lack of love. Being in a family where you are not part of the family, you are just there for working." And it left a devastating mark for the rest of the children's lives. Some have huge psychological problems, difficulties with getting involved with others and their own families. For others it was too much to bear. Some committed suicide after such a childhood.
Social workers did make visits. David Gogniat says his family had no telephone, so when a social worker called a house in the village to announce that she was coming, a white sheet was hung out of a window as a warning to the foster family. On the day of this annual visit David didn't have to work, and was allowed to have lunch with the family at the table. "That was the only time I was treated as a member of the family… She sat at the table with us and when she asked a question I was too scared to say anything, because I knew if I did the foster family would beat me."
David with his foster family and another unidentified boy
Sarah too remembers that visits were announced and that social workers were always welcomed with cake, biscuits and coffee. "I used to sit at the table too. It was always lovely, ironically speaking, but at least I knew I was being left in peace, that nothing was going to happen." She never spoke alone to a social worker during her stay with the family.
Christian doesn't remember seeing a social worker alone either. In his documents, social workers wrote that he was "happy". In one of the letters, a visit is announced, saying it doesn't matter if the children are at school. Christian shows me letters written by his mother, detailing her concern that they were being beaten, were malnourished, and doing agricultural labour. His mother organised a medical assessment, on one of his rare visits home, and the doctor's conclusion was that he was psychologically and physically exhausted. This triggered his removal from the farm in 1985, when he was 14. His older brother, left at the same time. They were then sent to a state-run institution.
Archive photos of verdingkinder courtesy of Paul Senn (1901-1953), Bern Switzerland; Bernese Foundation of Photography, Film and Video, Kunstmuseum Bern, deposit Gottfried Keller Foundation. © Gottfried Keller Foundation, Bern.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29765623
article is a bit longer in the link
Anyone else think this could turn things around in America?
Switzerland's shame: The children used as cheap farm labour
By Kavita PuriSwitzerland
Continue reading the main story
Thousands of people in Switzerland who were forced into child labour are demanding compensation for their stolen childhoods. Since the 1850s hundreds of thousands of Swiss children were taken from their parents and sent to farms to work - a practice that continued well into the 20th Century.
David Gogniat heard a loud knock on the door. There were two policemen.
"I heard them shouting and realised something was wrong. I looked out and saw that my mother had pushed the policemen down the stairs," he says.
"She then came back in and slammed the door. The next day three policemen came. One held my mother and the other took me with them."
At the age of eight, he was in effect kidnapped and taken away to a farm. To this day he has no idea why.
For the first years of his life, he and his older brother and sisters lived alone with their mother. They were poor, but his childhood was happy until one day in 1946, when he came home from school to find his siblings had disappeared.
A year later it was his turn.
Continue reading the main story
Jump media player
Media player help
Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue.
He was taken to an old farmhouse and became the farmhand. He would wake before 06:00 and worked before and after school. His day finished after 22:00. This physically imposing man in his 70s looks vulnerable as he remembers the frequent violence from the foster father. "I would almost describe him as a tyrant... I was afraid of him. He had quite a temper and would hit me for the smallest thing," Gogniat says.
Continue reading the main story
Find out more
Watch Kavita Puri's report Switzerland: Stolen Childhoods on Our World at 11:30 GMT on Saturday 1 November and at 2230 GMT on Sunday 2 November on BBC World News. Assignment is on BBC World Service radio from Thursday.
On one occasion, when he was older, he remembers he snapped, grabbed his foster father, pushed him against the wall and was about to hit him. The man threatened him: "If you hit me, I'll have you sent to an institution." David backed off.
His siblings were living with families in the nearby village, though he rarely saw them. He missed his mother desperately. They wrote and there were occasional visits. One day his mother made an audacious attempt to get her children back. She came up with an Italian couple in a Fiat Topolino and said she was taking his siblings for a walk. David wasn't there but it was the talk of the village when he came back that night. The police brought the children back three days later.
"The fact that my mother arranged to kidnap her own children and take them back home to Bern with her just goes to show how much she was struggling against the authorities," Gogniat says. On his mother's death he made a shocking discovery. He found papers which showed she had been paying money to the foster families for the upkeep of her four children, who had been forcibly taken away from her and were working as indentured labourers.
Gogniat, his brother and two sisters were "contract children" or verdingkinder as they are known in Switzerland. The practice of using children as cheap labour on farms and in homes began in the 1850s and it continued into the second half of the 20th Century. Historian Loretta Seglias says children were taken away for "economic reasons most of the time… up until World War Two Switzerland was not a wealthy country, and a lot of the people were poor". Agriculture was not mechanised and so farms needed child labour.
If a child became orphaned, a parent was unmarried, there was fear of neglect, or you had the misfortune to be poor, the communities would intervene. Authorities tried to find the cheapest way to look after these children, so they took them out of their families and placed them in foster families.
"They wanted to take these children out of the poor family and put them somewhere else where they could learn how to work, as through work they could support themselves as adults," says Seglias.
Dealing with the poor in this way she says was social engineering. If a parent dared to object, they could face measures themselves. "They could be put in prison or an institution where you would be made to work, so you could always put pressure on the parents."
Mostly it was farms that children were sent to, but not always. Sarah (not her real name) had been in institutions from birth, but in 1972, at the age of nine, she was sent to a home in a village, where she was expected to clean the house. She did that before and after school, and at night cleaned offices in nearby villages for her foster mother. She was beaten regularly by the mother, she says, and from the age of 11 was sexually abused by the sons at night.
This is the first time she has spoken about her story and her hands shake as she remembers. "The worst thing is that one sister, their daughter, once caught one of those boys... while I was asleep and she told the woman... [who said] that it didn't matter, I was just a slag anyway," Sarah says. A teacher and the school doctor wrote to the authorities, to express concern about her, but nothing was done.
There was no official decision to end the use of contract children. Seglias says it just naturally started to die out in the 1960s and 70s. As farming became mechanised, the need for child labour vanished. But Switzerland was changing too. Women got the vote in 1971 and attitudes towards poverty and single mothers moved on.
I found an exceptionally late case in a remote part of Switzerland. In 1979, Christian's mother was struggling. Recently divorced from a violent husband she needed support.
The state intervened and took her seven and eight-year-old sons to a farm many hours away by car. Christian remembers getting out of the car and watching his mother and the woman from social services driving off.
"My brother and I stood in front of the house feeling very lost and didn't know what to do… it was a strange moment, a moment you never forget," he says.
On the first day they were given overalls and perfectly fitting rubber boots, "because before the placement the woman from social services had even asked what size shoes we wore… When I think back I do believe there was an awareness that my brother and I would be made to work there."
Christian says there was work before and after school, at weekends and all year round. He remembers one incident, at a silo where cut grass was kept to make into silage. "In winter it was pretty frozen and I had to hack quite hard with the pitchfork and I was put under pressure and then this accident happened and the fork went through my toe."
He says work accidents were never reported to his mother or social services. And if the boys didn't work hard enough there were repercussions. Food was withheld as a form of punishment.
Continue reading the main story
Jump media player
Media player help
Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue.
"My brother and I just went hungry at the time. When I think back there were five years during which we constantly went hungry. That's why my brother and I used to steal food," Christian says. He remembers they stole chocolate from the village shop - though he now thinks the owners knew the boys were hungry and let them take the goodies. A former teacher of Christian's at the local school says with hindsight he looked malnourished.
But Christian remembers there were also more serious consequences if he didn't work hard enough, including violence. "We were pretty much being driven to work," he says. "There were many beatings, slaps in the face, pulling of hair, tugging of ears - there was also one incident involving something like a mock castration."
Christian has no doubt why he and his brother were placed with the farmer. "I believe it was about cheap labour... we were profitable," he says. "They expanded the farm... it was five years of hard work."
Historians estimate there were hundreds of thousands such children. For one year alone in the 1930s, records show 30,000 children were placed in foster families across Switzerland.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
They were being abused and no-one believed them”
Loretta SegliasHistorian
"It's hard to know precisely how many contract children there were as records were kept locally, and sometimes not at all," says Loretta Seglias. "Some children were also placed by private organisations, or their own families."
The extent to which these children were treated as commodities is demonstrated by the fact that there are cases even in the early 20th Century where they were herded into a village square and sold at public auction.
Seglias shows me some photographs. One child looks barely two - surely she couldn't be a contract child? "She could, she would be brushing floors bringing in the milk. Sometimes they came as babies on to the farms, and the bigger they grew the more work they would do," Seglias says.
In her studies, and speaking to former contract children she finds recurring themes. The lack of information comes up again and again.
"Children didn't know what was happening to them, why they were taken away, why they couldn't go home, see their parents, why they were being abused and no-one believed them," she says.
"The other thing is the lack of love. Being in a family where you are not part of the family, you are just there for working." And it left a devastating mark for the rest of the children's lives. Some have huge psychological problems, difficulties with getting involved with others and their own families. For others it was too much to bear. Some committed suicide after such a childhood.
Social workers did make visits. David Gogniat says his family had no telephone, so when a social worker called a house in the village to announce that she was coming, a white sheet was hung out of a window as a warning to the foster family. On the day of this annual visit David didn't have to work, and was allowed to have lunch with the family at the table. "That was the only time I was treated as a member of the family… She sat at the table with us and when she asked a question I was too scared to say anything, because I knew if I did the foster family would beat me."
Sarah too remembers that visits were announced and that social workers were always welcomed with cake, biscuits and coffee. "I used to sit at the table too. It was always lovely, ironically speaking, but at least I knew I was being left in peace, that nothing was going to happen." She never spoke alone to a social worker during her stay with the family.
Christian doesn't remember seeing a social worker alone either. In his documents, social workers wrote that he was "happy". In one of the letters, a visit is announced, saying it doesn't matter if the children are at school. Christian shows me letters written by his mother, detailing her concern that they were being beaten, were malnourished, and doing agricultural labour. His mother organised a medical assessment, on one of his rare visits home, and the doctor's conclusion was that he was psychologically and physically exhausted. This triggered his removal from the farm in 1985, when he was 14. His older brother, left at the same time. They were then sent to a state-run institution.
Archive photos of verdingkinder courtesy of Paul Senn (1901-1953), Bern Switzerland; Bernese Foundation of Photography, Film and Video, Kunstmuseum Bern, deposit Gottfried Keller Foundation. © Gottfried Keller Foundation, Bern.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29765623
article is a bit longer in the link
Anyone else think this could turn things around in America?
I wonder if there is a *1st world* country that wasn't built off of slavery and/or child labor.
