Reformers feared released orphans would relapse into prostitution and crime

Evidence

“But no, this is not what will happen. They would use their freedom to return to their native places. There they would be without any help in strange surroundings. The young women would service the Chinese and Europeans, the boys would end up in jail.” In short, they would fall back into the destitute conditions from which they had come. … Instead he proposed that the children be raised on Java, agreeing with Van Delden that they should be “isolated but certainly not cut off from European surroundings. The choice of place is very important if the goal is an improved race and if we want to include as many children as possible.” — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 785

Categorization

• SHARE: The prediction that girls would ‘service the Chinese and Europeans’ and boys would end up in jail vividly captures anxieties around miscegenation and moral decay in the Indies — worth sending to someone studying colonial racial anxieties.
• XREF: Echoes the ‘improved race’ rhetoric connecting orphan policy to eugenic concerns in other colonial contexts like South Africa and Australia’s stolen generations.
• SEED: An essay angle: how ‘the goal is an improved race’ made colonial child welfare inherently a biopolitical project, foreshadowing twentieth-century eugenics.