Care of the State: Relationships, Kinship and the State in Children’s Homes in Late Socialist Hungary [1st ed.] 9783030494834, 9783030494841

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Care as a Frame for Understanding the Mutual Constitution of State and Kinship (Jennifer Rasell)....Pages 1-32
Not a Fading Problem: Child Protection from the 1950s to the 1980s (Jennifer Rasell)....Pages 33-60
Negotiating Care Between Parents and State Officials (Jennifer Rasell)....Pages 61-92
The Continuing Family Relations of Children in Care (Jennifer Rasell)....Pages 93-110
Care in the Children’s Home and Wider Circles of Belonging (Jennifer Rasell)....Pages 111-144
Conclusions: The Processes of Producing Kinship and the State in Residential Care (Jennifer Rasell)....Pages 145-155
Back Matter ....Pages 157-169

Citation preview

Care of the State Relationships, Kinship and the State in Children’s Homes in Late Socialist Hungary Jennifer Rasell

Care of the State

Jennifer Rasell

Care of the State Relationships, Kinship and the State in Children’s Homes in Late Socialist Hungary

Jennifer Rasell

ISBN 978-3-030-49483-4    ISBN 978-3-030-49484-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49484-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Alex Linch_shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

A mixture of choice and opportunity led me to this topic and I would like to thank the great number of individuals and institutions from several countries who cared for me and my research. This project would have turned out very differently without the willingness of care leavers and child protection staff to discuss their memories with me and show me around. My research participants remain anonymous, but one of my biggest debts is to them. I truly appreciate their time, openness and trust. I wrote the thesis on which this book is based within the framework of the project ‘Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late State Socialism’ based at the Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, Germany. It was a great privilege to have my ideas nurtured by this network of historians and by friends and colleagues at ZZF. In particular, I thank Jan Behrends, Ulf Brunnbauer, Jens Gieseke and Pavel Kolář for the numerous insightful comments and conference invitations. I am especially grateful to the international supervision triangle formed by my PhD supervisors: to Wolfgang Kaschuba for welcoming me to the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, to Thomas Lindenberger for embracing an interdisciplinary project and guiding my historical imagination and to Tatjana Thelen for inspiring my anthropological theorisation, for practical help in the field and for overall guidance far beyond the doctoral years. It was Eszter Tarsoly’s language teaching at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies in 2007–2009 that laid the groundwork for my research with Hungarian sources. I have Erika Jakab to thank for getting my Hungarian skills to a level that I was ready for fieldwork and she v

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meticulously transcribed my interviews. The translation help and infectious enthusiasm of Anikó Boros and Stephanie Karmann kept me motivated when analysing my data. A special thank-you also goes to Orsolya Nagy-Szabó, who since 2003 has looked out for me in Hungary and made my research stays a delight. In Hungary I was assisted by oral historian Eszter Zsófia Tóth, whose energy, ideas and contacts greatly helped my work. I would like to thank Csaba Csóti for his help in finding material in the Somogy County Archives. I am grateful to Eszter Varsa who generously shared with me her experiences of researching child protection in early socialist Hungary and her contacts. Friederike Kind-Kovács regularly took the time to advise me on my oral history experiences. My PhD research was generously funded by a scholarship from the Leibniz Association, which was extended by the ZZF, and from the DAAD to spend four months at the University of Vienna. My time at the then Departments of Methods (ethnography) in Vienna, Austria, was crucial for developing the conceptual frame of my work and I particularly thank Tatjana Thelen, Evangelos Karagiannis and Christof Lammer for integrating me into Viennese life. I found the space to turn my thesis into a book in Bielefeld, Germany. While starting to revise the text I was part of the research group ‘Kinship and Politics: Rethinking a Conceptual Split and Its Epistemic Implications in the Social Sciences’ at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University, which was an inspiring group of anthropologists and social historians who have left an imprint on my thinking. The timely submission of this manuscript was made possible by the support of the management of the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences who granted me two leaves of absence from work. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers of my manuscript for their valuable suggestions, which tremendously benefitted this final version, and the editors and production team at Palgrave Macmillan for their help. This research saw me leave the UK for Germany and frequent moves to and from Hungary and Vienna. It is my family who ensured I never lost myself, that I kept my work-life balance in check and constantly encouraged me. My deepest gratitude goes to my brother Michael who started me on this journey and was there with advice and moral support when I needed it most, who read and commented on all chapters and who pushed me to sharpen my analysis. Finally, I would like to thank Oliver Claas for understanding my heavy work schedule, for his humour and for ensuring my overall well-being.

Contents

1 Care as a Frame for Understanding the Mutual Constitution of State and Kinship  1 Care to Kin Me   4 Taking a Relational Approach to the State   8 Understanding the Context of State Care in Socialist Hungary  11 Methodology and Analysis  17 Outline of Chapters  23 References  25 2 Not a Fading Problem: Child Protection from the 1950s to the 1980s 33 Supporting Children Through Family Policies and Regulations  34 Changing Policies and Ideals of Parenting Reflected in State Care Numbers  42 The System of Residential Care  47 Care Leaver Biographies  50 The Quality Control of Parenthood  59 References  59 3 Negotiating Care Between Parents and State Officials 61 Multiple Layers, Images and Modalities of the State  63 State Images of the Family and Assessments of Parenting  69

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Contents

Tactical Collusion, Alliances and Compromises Over Raising Children  81 ‘Proper’ Parenting and the State  88 References  90 4 The Continuing Family Relations of Children in Care 93 Ongoing Parent Relations Within State Care  94 Sibling Power or a Discarded Relation? 103 Expectations from a Birth Certificate 107 References 109 5 Care in the Children’s Home and Wider Circles of Belonging111 Belonging Within the School 113 Narrating Out the Children’s Home 117 Village Life and Belonging to a Place 124 From Child in Care to ‘Gypsy’ Adult: The Ascription of Ethnic Belonging 131 Just a Friend: Not Recognising Care Relationships Beyond Kin 136 Undervaluing Personal Relations 139 References 141 6 Conclusions: The Processes of Producing Kinship and the State in Residential Care145 Care Practices and Kinship 146 Images of the Family in State Practices 148 Devaluing Specific Relations 150 The Blurred Boundaries Between State and Family 152 Final Reflections on the Value of Studying Relationships 153 References 154 Appendix A: Main Characters157 Appendix B: Overview of Recorded Interviews163 Glossary165 Index167

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

Organisational structure of the children’s home network, 1987 Zsolt timeline Katalin timeline Károly timeline Zsolt encountering his favourite teacher after decades Zsolt in the derelict children’s home looking out the window Zsolt exchanging news with a local resident

49 52 55 57 120 126 128

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 3.1

Inflow into care by age range in Hungary, 1977 Number of children in care in Hungary, 1946–1983 Grounds for being placed into care in Budapest, 1974

44 46 73

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CHAPTER 1

Care as a Frame for Understanding the Mutual Constitution of State and Kinship

The mother as well as the father of the minor can get angry very quickly and they have made it clear that they will take their child out of the children’s home if the fees are not reduced. Of course, a child who has left the family under such circumstances [due to rough treatment by his parents] cannot go back there. We recommend that the fees be lowered so that József can remain in state care because in our opinion the parents do not treat the other three children [siblings living at home] in the nicest way.

This recommendation was written by a social worker in 1977 in her assessment of a family living in a village in southwestern Hungary. I read the case file in the Somogy County Archives in 2013, as part of my fieldwork on the relationships of children living in state care in late socialist Hungary. I had spent the previous six months carrying out oral history interviews with care leavers who had grown up in children’s homes in Hungary in the late 1970s and early 1980s and was now looking for further data on the connections between parents, caseworkers and children in care. This book studies the nature and range of relationships and kinship ties for children living in Hungary’s residential childcare system as a means of analysing how care, kinship and state practices are mutually constituted and interrelated. Until he was five, József lived with his maternal grandparents and their children (József’s uncle and aunts—four of whom were still minors). After his fifth birthday his parents collected him, but his stay with them was short and he was taken cut and bruised into residential care, prompting the negotiations over state care fees mentioned above. His grandparents © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rasell, Care of the State, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49484-1_1

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wished to take József out of care, but were not permitted because they were not his parents. They thus decided to legally adopt him in 1978. When his adoptive father died a year later, the adoption was dissolved and József returned to his biological parents. This time around caseworkers deemed József’s parents to be ‘calmer’ and praised the ‘orderly financial circumstances’ and that they had solved their housing problems. The village school teacher was asked her opinion and she saw hope that József would develop with his family, but added that as both parents work during the day their oldest daughter, József’s eleven-year-old sister Ildikó, missed school to do housework and look after the younger children. The case was closed soon thereafter. József was allowed to stay with his parents and there was no record of a follow-up of the teacher’s impression that Ildikó was endangered. József’s views are not included at any point in the thick case file, so it is not clear how he felt about being circulated among his (extended) family and state care. We do not know what he thought about being collected by his mother, thus separating him from his grandparents and young aunts and uncles. There is also no information on his feelings about being adopted and then un-adopted. There were two further children when he returned to his parents’ house—his new siblings born in his absence. It is such constellations of relatedness and the personal views of people who lived in state care about their relationships to parents and siblings as well as care received outside of kinship relations that I explore in this book. I look at the varied nature of kin relations, their sometimes absent or cruel nature and processes leading to their possible dissolution. József’s case hints at the competing images of ‘proper’ parenting and the ideal family that different professionals working with children held in late socialist Hungary. While the social worker focused on the household budget and approved that the mother of five children was in paid employment, the teacher prioritised the education of the children and thus advocated a mother-at-home policy. The case also illustrates how norms of ‘appropriate’ family units that seemingly excluded grandparents from the upbringing of children became enacted on the ground through the refusal to let József’s grandparents care for him. Finally, the case provides an example of the room of manoeuvre that families could have to get state officials to act in their interest. Not only did the parents negotiate lower fees, but the grandparents adopted József, so that they officially fitted the nuclear family ideal promoted in most central family policies.

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In this book, I argue that the various relationships of children in care were shaped by images of the family, childhood and the state held by different actors. I will show how images of ‘proper’ kinship focussed on parent-­child relations, thereby systematically undervaluing the relationships of children in care to institutional carers, teachers and local residents, along with connections to classmates and siblings. The nature of these multiple relationships provides the topic for this book. I ask how being in state care interrupted, ended, maintained or created personal relationships for children in care in late socialist Hungary. Rather than assuming that biological parents are the key point in figuring out kinship relations, I look at the importance of care for establishing personal relations spanning the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres (Thelen 2015). The starting premise of this book is that the child protection system and state care provide an entry point to explore the mutual constituency of state and family in children’s relationships. State care settings are particularly suited to observe the negotiation of boundaries between the state and family because state-paid staff take on tasks of raising and caring for children, which is usually seen as the ‘private’ realm of parents. I will explore how the concepts of ‘state’ and ‘family’ were constructed in interactions between parents, state officials and children in care and the implications of such classificatory practices in characterising certain kinship or state practices as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (cf. Thelen and Alber 2017). My research focuses on Hungary in the 1970s and early 1980s and will show how children’s relationships were shaped by increased ‘expert’ scrutiny of parenting and a policy shift to holding parents responsible for social ills. Conceiving of parents as incompetent and thus in need of expert advice on how to raise children was not a reserve of socialist policy and demonstrates the wider implications of this book for understanding the increased state activity in regards to parent-child relations beyond the immediate Hungarian context. In this introduction I present the conceptual frame for my book. My work is at the intersection of the anthropology of the state and the anthropology of kinship. I first draw on recent theorisations of care and kinship that look at the processes through which relatedness is formed and reverse processes of de-kinning. I next discuss the relational approach to the state that characterises my research. I pursue this approach in order to emphasise the various relational modes in which officials interacted with children in care and the significance of concrete relations in negotiating and producing state-kin boundaries. The third part focuses on understanding

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state care and the context of late socialist Hungary. This is followed by a discussion of my mixed-method qualitative research strategy. Finally, I outline the structure of my book, summarising the main arguments of each chapter about the diverse relations of children in care and the co-­ production of kinship and state through care practices. As the book will ultimately show, child protection policies, caseworkers and state carers did not diminish, and actually reinforced, an ‘ideal’ of relationships to biological parents for children in care, thereby devaluing other possible kinship connections.

Care to Kin Me This study is framed by anthropological understandings of kinship as ‘produced through social practices rather than determined by the physical act of birth’ (Thelen et al. 2013: 1). Although anthropological studies of kinship were heavily criticised for rigid and ethnocentric schemas in the 1970s and 1980s (Needham 1971; Schneider 1984), the new kinship studies ‘taught us to study relations’ rather than presupposing relational classifications (Howell 2006: 38). Interest in the making of kinship relations around issues such as gay/lesbian kinship (Weston 1991) or reproductive technologies (Franklin and Ragoné 1998) fitted into the social constructivist turn in social anthropology and its neighbouring. By focussing on practices, processes and meanings, anthropologists raise questions of how kinship is negotiated and confirmed in daily actions and changed through an ever-evolving policy and legal system. This also entails exploration of what is known and passed on about kinship relations by different actors (see Astuti 2000 on who saves and produces knowledge about kinship in the context of Madagascar). My data will show that children in care since birth with no contact with their parents nonetheless received information about their relatives based on information in their case file and birth record that was relayed by social workers and staff in care homes. Anthropological research highlights that there is a tension between the fluid notion of kinship in anthropological debates as constructed by processes of ‘kinning,’ relating, nurturing or belonging that can create kin with friends, colleagues (Fischer 2010), places and even the nation state (Carsten 1995) and the ways in which kinship can be fixed into legal or religious frameworks and restricted by state practices. Howell (2006: 40) points out that anthropologists argue that kinship relations are constructed

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whilst a different view is expressed in family law. In my research we will clearly see that biology and not relations mattered to the formal right of parents to take their children out of state care. Lambek (2013: 242) suggests that kinship should be understood as constituted through certain kinds of performative acts, which are recognised, regulated and even constituted by the law, and then as the histories produced by such acts. Registering a birth, for example, is intended to produce responsibilities and informs people of their commitments to one another. A birth certificate does not of course produce behaviour, but rather criteria for judging what is right and wrong with respect to specific relationships. Such state-­ produced or state-authorised acts of kinship can exclude other candidates such as the staff in state-run residential homes, local community or friends that feature in my research. There is no legal recognition in such cases of the actual relationships in which people experience the need to care and be cared for (Borneman 2001). The focus of a large segment of new kinship studies on the processes that produce kinship gives kinship by default a positive overtone. Research on surrogacy (Goodwin 2010; Pande 2014) or gamete donation (Edwards 2015; Kahn 2006; Klotz 2014) presents kinship as created through intention, choice and love. It is often overlooked that hierarchy, exclusion, dominance and subordination are just as much part of kinship as amity or solidarity (Franklin and McKinnon 2001: 18). Thelen (2015: 507) highlights that care is also ‘still overwhelmingly seen as something positive’ despite the stress in disability studies on power and hierarchies within caring relationships. My study will show that not all care is good nor is care always intended to produce lasting relationships. The emphasis on kinship as a form of connection means there are few studies about disconnection, rupture or ‘de-kinning,’ to use Howell’s concept developed to understand transnational adoption practices. Howell (2006: 63) defines kinning, which is her focus, as ‘the process by which a foetus or newborn child (or a previously unconnected person) is brought into a significant and permanent relationship with a group of people that is expressed in a kin idiom.’ It is de-kinning, she argues, that makes adoption possible—creating the ‘socially naked child’ (Howell 2007: 26–27). It is important to ask from whose perspective the de-kinning takes place and whether it was successful. My book deals with this flip side of kinship: how the personal relationships of children in care were interrupted though not necessarily ended. The hard work of making and maintaining relations is not something anthropologists have frequently studied (Carsten 2000: 26) because

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permanence is often assumed to be an inherent quality of kinship (cf. Bloch 1973; Fortes 1969). In an important corrective to such thinking, Edwards and Strathern (2000) show how inhabitants of a town in northern England supplement and truncate their interconnections by bringing different kinds of link into play—belonging to a family, or to a place, various kinds of ownership, names or biological ties—and that mediators are required to make these links. Such results drive research to consider the multiple influences on the formation and maintenance of relationships. My analysis shows how the parental and sibling relations of children in care changed when living in residential care (see Chap. 4) as did the connections to friends, peers and different professionals (see Chap. 5). The ‘new’ kinship literature of the mid-1990s that emerged from mainly non-Western field sites (Weismantel 1995; Carsten 1995) stressed that kinship results from care and not the other way around. It moved anthropological discussions beyond the theoretical stalemate of kinship as biological, instant and permanent. Carsten (1995), for example, presented kinship as mutable and fluid for Malays living in rural Langkawi, who become kin through living and eating together in houses. In local Malay perception, the core substance of kinship—that which makes people related to each other—was blood, which was thought to be produced and replenished over time by the food one ate, thus creating relatedness to the people one shared food with. In Chap. 4 I take up the theme of the substance of kinship and how state officials attributed kinship based on shared genes whereas many siblings needed such biological ties to be substantiated by shared experiences and perspectives (cf. Pauli 2013). Thelen (2010, 2014, 2015) is one of the few authors to apply these insights on the importance to kinship of shared experiences and interaction back to the West. Her work focuses in particular on connections between care and kinship, for example in studies about how kinship in old age in (East) Germany is confirmed by taking meals together and different forms of mutual help. Care is a central concept for the research presented in this book. In the past ten to fifteen years, anthropological literature on care has developed with studies focused on care and kinship (Alber and Drotbohm 2015), the migration of care workers (Deneva 2012; Ticktin 2011; Yeates 2009) and neo-liberal restructuring of care (Han 2012; Mol 2008; Read and Thelen 2007). Buch’s understanding of care as ‘simultaneously resource and relational practice’ (2015: 279) makes clear that care involves affective states, moral economies and is often scarce. ‘Care’ in the English language

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transports both emotional attachment (caring about) and practical doing (caring for). This duality reinforces expectations that caring actions come from caring feelings (Tronto 1994; Ungerson 1990). The expansion of paid care (home help, nursing homes, children’s homes) raises concerns about the commodification of intimacy (Hochschild 2003), but also of falsely placed emotions. I will show in Chap. 5 that there could be elements of love and affection in the interactions between care staff and children, but also that not all care practices in the institution were infused with ‘good feelings’ or intended to produce lasting relationships. The cases I discuss in Chap. 4 demonstrate that care provided by relatives could be abusive. My emphasis is on the creative power of care to generate and sustain social ties, but also to end relations where care was ‘bad’ or absent. Instead of assuming the salience or meaning of particular kinship connections, such a conceptualisation of care means openly looking at the relations and ties that children in care could have, including relationships that might have been devalued by state practices because they were not kin. Crucially, Thelen’s work also looks at the importance of strong emotional support and mutual care outside of kinship circles such as between work colleagues or neighbours, which are often underestimated. Such a focus on care is productive for social analysis by looking at what is made invisible by division along kinship lines. Four points are central to Thelen’s conceptualisation of care (2015: 508). First, care should highlight the connections between giving and receiving care and not focus solely on the carer as constructing need and responsibility. Secondly, care needs to be contextualised within state and economic structures as well as within different temporalities. Third, discussions of care should not be limited to what is perceived as the realm of the family. Fourth, it has to be recognised that care can be negative and is thus an open process that might lead to the dissolution of significant ties. Following Thelen, I therefore pay attention to care practices and their evolving relationships and do not presuppose a relational classification. This requires an open research approach to trace the various relationships that may have arisen and analyse the different actors and dynamics shaping their changing nature over time. Thus, I will consider in Chap. 5 the presence or absence of care beyond kinship relations—inside children’s homes, schools and local areas where residential institutions were located—to see the breadth of personal relationships that children in care had.

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Taking a Relational Approach to the State A research project on the experiences and relationships of children in state care requires an understanding of ‘the state’ in order to analyse how decisions in the child welfare system are made and more generally to explore how relationships are shaped by images of ‘proper’ parenting that become enacted in policies and regulations and in the everyday practices of state officials. Recent anthropological literature highlights that ‘the state’ is comprised of a diverse and often divergent range of institutions, people, practices and places (Kay 2018: 58). It was no coincidence that the new wave of interest in the state among anthropologists, who historically had concentrated more on understanding non-state contexts and stateless societies, happened in the 1990s ‘at a time when other were already agonizing about the apparent withering away of the state’ (Thelen et  al. 2018b: 3). The strong focus on how states are constructed in everyday practices and the imagination of ordinary people (Yang 2005: 489) fitted into the broader cultural turn of the social sciences. Thelen et al. (2018b) argue that this emphasis on culturally constructed images and discourses of the state (for instance the image of an orderly and effective state or of an irresponsible and indifferent state) within recent anthropological studies has created an imbalance with insufficient work on the everyday practices of local bureaucracies and also difficulties in identifying the ties between how the state is ‘seen’ and ‘done’ (cf. Migdal and Schlichte 2005). The missing link between ideas about the state (seeing the state) and concrete state practices (doing the state) makes it difficult to understand how specific state constellations and boundaries of the state emerge and are reproduced or contested. Thelen et al. (2018b: 7) suggest understanding the state as ‘ever-changing political formations with institutional settings that are structured by social relations in interactions characterised by different state images.’ This view of the state makes relations the starting point of analysis and they propose three axes to implement such a relational approach to the state: relational modalities, boundary work and embeddedness. I apply these three interrelated areas of analysis, particularly the first two, to my data to generate insights into the workings of the Hungarian socialist state in shaping the kinship, relationships and lives of children in state care. The first avenue of analysis, relational modalities, refers to the different ways in which state officials interact with clients. Such modalities draw on different normative concepts of what a state should be and how it should

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act. I describe two distinct relational modalities employed by state employees in Chaps. 3 and 5. One was based on fostering a certain distance, seen as professionalism, and having to ‘be even’ and not show favouritism. The other mode of interacting with parents and children in care was more personal and rested on the close proximity of staff employed in state organisations in a village or the children’s home. State action emerged through such relational modalities and the modes employed by state officials depended on the social and institutional settings in which they are personally embedded. For instance, Chap. 3 demonstrates the different norms and interests of caseworkers and family experts that contributed to contradictory decisions over whether mothers should soon return to paid employment or the role of grandparents in childcare. With my set of sources, it was not possible to explore what other ties these state officials had within the local community, but it is important to recognise individual embeddings that might involve different sets of personal and professional norms. The second axis of a relational understanding of statehood relates to understanding how the state coexists and is co-determined with other spheres. The perimeters of the state and what could be called kinship, family or even civil society are fuzzy, which requires focusing on boundary work. As Mitchell (1991: 90) observes, there is no ‘intrinsic entity [of the state], which can be thought of as a free-standing object or actor’ and thus we must look at the distinction as well as the blurring of boundaries to other entities—in my case to the family. A good example of the blurring of boundaries between the state and family is what Donzelot (1979) terms the ‘tutelary complex’ of French state officials that turned the supposedly private family sphere into a series of meetings with caseworkers, support officers, doctors and education counsellors about how to ‘properly’ look after children. Donzelot described a change at the end of the nineteenth century from direct state intervention to a more subtle but pervasive intrusion of expert knowledge into the daily lives of parents and their children. It is with these ideas in mind that I will look in Chap. 3 at tactical collusion, alliances and compromises between caseworkers (representing ‘the state’) and parents (representing ‘family’) in Hungary in the late 1970s, thereby showing the mutual constitution of the state and family. Boundary work—looking at how people enact boundaries in areas that encompass both private and public domains—is not just a theoretical exercise. It is about how people arrange particular practices and reflects how the state can be differently constructed depending on the situation. Thelen

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et al. (2018a) show this in their work on two elder care projects in Serbia where state carers came to be seen as kin by investing far more time and emotions into their job than they were expected to or paid for, thus erasing the officialdom of the state from these relationships and keeping the boundaries between kinship and the state intact. The caring, affectionate nature of these relations between state-paid carers and their elderly clients stood in stark contrast to the widespread image of the Serbian state as unresponsive and distant. This contradiction between practices and images of the state was overcome by a process of ‘state kinning’ and ‘kinning the state’—an expansion of Howell’s (2006) concept of ‘kinning’ discussed earlier to describe situations in which state carers came to be counted as kin while working with clients and vice versa. References to kinship are used in this case by clients and care staff as a means of authenticating paid care and explaining its emotional content. The assumed separation between kinship and the state is thus interpreted by these actors as stable. Indeed, as Thelen and Alber (2017: 1) observe, the idea that kinship and the state are mutually exclusive is ‘so deeply ingrained in the Western worldview and in processes of knowledge production that decoding their co-production poses a considerable challenge.’ Given the mutual constitution of kinship and state, the everyday boundary making of what is understood to be the state is an interesting question for anthropologists because it leads to diverse forms of inclusion and exclusion. In Chap. 5 we will see the close, affectionate relationship of a state-paid carer to a child in care that went far beyond the call of duty being curtailed by the children’s home director because such actions were not expected or seen as appropriate for state officials. Inclusion and exclusion in the sphere of the state also relates to teachers, schools and even factories that employed parents—as discussed in Chap. 3—and whether they considered (or could be made to consider) themselves as arms of the state on child protection issues. In these latter relations it is ambiguous whether or not a state-sector individual or organisation actually represented the state, thus contributing to the blurring of the state’s boundaries. Through their relational approach to the state, Thelen et al. (2018b) demonstrate how images of the state held by citizens and state officials are at once reaffirmed and transformed within concrete state practices. The state could variously be envisioned as a paternalistic figure that cares for deserving citizens (Vetters 2018), as corrupt (Gupta 1995) or disinterested and uncaring (Thelen et al. 2018a) and will affect how people act and relate to the state structures. I extend these discussions of the linkages

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between images and practices of the state by demonstrating in Chap. 3 that images of ‘appropriate’ family forms and ‘proper’ parenting are important parts of central state policies on child protection and become enacted on the ground. The interactions between different state officials and parents that I describe are characterised by contradictory images of the ideal family as well as a variety of relational modalities. Reconsidering state practices through specific images of parents (who as we will see are increasingly conceived as incapable and in need of expert interventions) complements other work on the linkages between state and kinship instead of the predominant focus by scholars on how families are affected by the state (Thelen and Alber 2017: 13). The different relational modes of state actors and the contradictory moments that I highlight in this book do not imply that the organisational entity called ‘state’ is incoherent or unstable. I suggest thinking of the state as a Rubik’s cube to understand the multidimensionality and contradictory processual nature of the state. On the one hand a Rubik’s cube appears solid when looked at, which mirrors what we know about societal images of the state that are often monolithic. On the other hand, the cube’s structure is highly (though not randomly) variable though rotations of the micro-cubes. With each turn of the cube, the different micro-­ cubes (representing actors like caseworkers, education counsellors, parents and teachers) held in place by intersecting axes (e.g. the local child protection office, the children’s home, the child guidance centre) interact and it is possible for an edge to be in the right place but misoriented (flipped or twisted) without the whole system falling apart. Rather than studying the (macro-cubic) images of the state, I propose to look at the highly diverse practices and influences of the state (the micro-cubes and the axes) in order to explore the state’s concrete and complex nature. The research therefore seeks to understand how ‘the state’ features as images, practices and ultimately relationships in the experiences of children who were subject to child protection procedures and placement in state care.

Understanding the Context of State Care in Socialist Hungary State care refers to both the wide range of child protection services for children and more narrowly to just residential childcare. In this book, by state care I mean specifically children growing up in children’s homes and

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not those in foster care because living in residential institutions was the main form of state care for children outside the care of families in state socialist Hungary. Over 33,000 children were in a children’s home in any year in my research period (see Table 2.2). It is a common misconception that most institutionalised children are orphans (cf. Brandes 2016; Murdoch 2006). It is true that after the Second World War, 80% of the 22,000 residents in Hungarian state care were motherless or fatherless. Fast forward to 1983 and out of the 33,000 children in care only 5 per cent had lost their parents, 25 per cent were not orphans but had been ‘abandoned,’ while 70 per cent were in (loose) contact with their parents (Szenes 1983: 20). To make family connections more visible I refer to the state-run homes where my interviewees grew up as children’s homes and not orphanages. I use the term children in care, but recognise that the word ‘child’ is ambiguous and must be qualified with further adjectives such as young, nursery or school (cf. Brockliss and Montgomery 2010: 4). The research in this book focuses on the relationships of children in care in the age range six to thirteen where memories are largely accessible and children were in a residential home as opposed to a workers’ hostel or dormitory for further education where older children were usually placed. Residential childcare under state socialism tends to be associated with the infamous images of Romanian orphanages that surfaced in the 1990s. Asked what I research, the invariable response to me saying children in care in state socialist Hungary was: ‘It must have been terrible.’ However, the coercive pro-natalist policies in Romania after 1966 that contributed to unwanted births1 and institutionalised children totally without kin is not what caseworkers and health officials in Hungary were implementing. State socialism is often imagined as monolithic across the populations and countries of Central and Eastern Europe—as if it was ‘fundamentally instructed by “Moscow” and … performed in a totally standardized way’ (Hering 2009: 11). Yet, my book will show that there was considerable diversity in socialist care and emphasise the room for manoeuvre that existed for families and state professionals (cf. Karge et al. 2017).

1  In 1966, Romanian socialist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu issued Decree 770 criminalising abortion and later women were subjected to regular gynaecological testing in an attempt to increase the birth rate. Abortions had become the most widely practised method of fertility control in Romania. For all practical purposes, modern contraceptives were unavailable at the time.

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The economic conditions in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s were, moreover, far better than neighbouring Romania where the population ‘shivered in dimly lit homes or stood endlessly in lines in the hope of minimally providing for themselves and their families’ (Kligman 1998: 206). After the 1956 uprising in Hungary the authorities systematically concentrated on raising the standard of living as a guarantee for political stability. The new trajectory became ‘the archetype of a kind of “consumption-­ oriented” socialism, maximising disposable income and everyday consumption’ (Benczes 2016: 150). The real wages more than doubled between 1957 and 1978 and more than ten times as many durables (e.g. furniture, electrical household appliances, a washing machine, a telephone, a refrigerator, a motorbike, a car) were purchased (Valuch 1998/99: 143). In 1964, the Hungarian political and social weekly Magyarország projected an optimistic future by advertising a ‘television to every house’ (Nyyssönen 2006: 162). In a report by the Ministry of Health, the falling Hungarian birth rate was related to the rising consumption aspirations of the population (Melegh 2011: 274–275). The slogan kicsi vagy kocsi, the choice between a baby or a car, characterises the deliberations of families at that time (Nyyssönen 2006: 162). The reforms launched in 1968 under the name of the New Economic Mechanism (NEM), which introduced market incentives, made the country one of the most economically successful in the Eastern Bloc, with consumption rising by an annual average of 5.3% until 1975 (Kornai 1997: 172). However, by the time of the two oil crises (in 1973 and 1979) Hungary had become ‘an open and highly vulnerable economy’ dependant on foreign capital to finance current consumption levels, which meant an increase in external debt (Benczes 2016: 150). By the late 1970s the global economy in which Hungary found itself was marked by international debt, deteriorating terms of trade and sharply rising energy prices (Melegh 2011: 280). In Hungary in the summer of 1979 there were radical price increases of around 9% to bring domestic prices in line with international ones. The national newspaper Népszabadság published on 26 September 1979 a pledge by political leader János Kádár to ‘defend the already achieved [high] level of living standard’ in the country (Benczes 2016: 150), but living standards deteriorated and the significance of social benefits dramatically increased. For instance, the share of social benefits in total income reached 32% in 1980 (Flakierski 1986: 125). In the next chapter I discuss the extensive welfare payments to compensate the losers

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of (micro-)economic and political reforms, such as the introduction of regular financial assistance for needy families (RNS) in 1974. To date there has been no comprehensive study of the experiences of children in care in state socialist Hungary. Haney (2002) explored the transformations in the state policies and institutional practices towards mothers from 1948 to 1996 identifying three distinct regimes of social policy. She argues that by the 1970s caseworkers armed with domesticity tests focused on the nuclear family, so when they encountered ‘problematic’ nuclear families they turned less to extended families and more to state institutions with the number of children in care almost doubling from 1965 to 1985 (Haney 2002: 116). This is complemented by a small number of articles or doctoral work that focus on the regulation of preschool education and child protection in early state socialism as the intersection between the productive and reproductive roles of women (Bicskei 2006; Varsa 2011). Varsa (2011: 72ff) demonstrates a shift in child protection regulations around 1953 that meant poor mothers ‘able to work’ were no longer entitled to have their children placed free of charge into state care. The preconditions for placement into care on material grounds shifted from a postwar understanding of need to inability to work. Historical research has looked at poverty and child protection in Budapest and Vienna before the First World War (Zimmerman 2007) and the practices and (visual) narratives of international humanitarian aid for starving children in Hungary after the First World War (Kind-Kovács 2016). Kind-­ Kovács highlights how images of American relief for suffering children generated ‘social sympathy,’ but also served political goals to associate America with making the world a better place. Even Hungarian-language publications in this area are sparse and focus mainly on the history of child protection (Gergely 1997) and not a ‘child-centred perspective’ of the experiences of children in care. Horváth (2009) offers a brief discussion of care leavers as part of youth gangs in Hungary in the 1970s, but overall the children who grew up in care in late socialist Hungary have little presence in research by local and overseas academics. More broadly, with the notable exception of Kelly (2007) and Harwin (1996)—both on the USSR—childhood in the late socialist period is also understudied. Classically theorised as ‘total institutions’ by Goffman (1961), much research on children’s homes continues to use this framing to highlight the loss of individuality and vulnerability of children in care (Berndt 2011; Khlinovskaya Rockhill 2010). Goffman (1961: xiii) defined total institutions as ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of

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like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.’ As will be shown, these encompassing tendencies are less prominent in the institutions I studied because the children in care attended local schools and some regularly spent the weekends at home. My research findings highlight that there can be continuities between life within and beyond children’s homes. This chimes with nursing home ethnographies that show how personal histories, temporality, the incorporation of residents’ families and the forging of new human connections within the nursing home affect the extent to which nursing homes rupture social relations and personhood (Robbins 2013; Shield 2003). Following Read and Thelen’s (2007) work on practices of care giving and receiving outside of kin relations that nevertheless invoke notions of ‘privateness’ and intimacy, in this book I will look at how care practices could blur the boundaries between group life in an institution and family life. Shield points out that we tend to think of only positive qualities when thinking about the idea of home with its ‘balm of domesticity,’ yet the reality is often harsher than the idealised construct (Shield 2003: 228). The qualities we think of as home include ‘a sense of being known and accepted, a feeling of comfort, a measure of sensory satisfaction, and continuity with caring people in a familiar and safe setting’ (Shield 2003: 229). I will explore in Chap. 5 the basic tone of the children’s home of one of my research participants, Zsolt, where attention was paid more to rules than relationships. The children’s home had no aspiration to be home-like, but nevertheless, as I discuss in Chap. 4, some children in care felt better in the children’s home than on home visits to their parents. An increasing body of social work literature from several Western countries has started to look at the impact of growing up in care (CLAN 2008; Stein and Munro 2008; Dixon 2008). These works focus mainly on the care experience itself or how care leavers fare (largely negatively) in the first five years after leaving state care. Knowledge about what happened to former children in care largely ceases when they reach their early twenties (Murray and Goddard 2014). A notable exception is Duncalf’s Listen Up report (2010) that reveals many care leavers return to education much later in life. In the following chapters I offer experiences from my research participants’ lives—who are now in their forties—long after state care. I draw attention in Chaps. 2 and 4 to the educational and lifestyle differences between siblings that state care could establish, citing examples where state care meant an advantage by providing access to better schools.

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Indeed, the difficult life circumstances my interviewees find themselves in at the time of research—long-term homeless, on social benefits, loss of their business, unemployed—they often attribute more to the economic reforms of the early 1990s than to their state care experiences. The voice of those who have largely positive memories of state care is very underrepresented in research and not surprisingly in government and other inquiries that usually stem from abuse investigations (see Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and Ryan 2009; Law Commission of Canada 2000; Mullighan 2008). While the cases I cite are few, they nevertheless complicate a view of children in care as victims of an oppressing socialist state (Laudien and Dreier-Horning 2016). At the same time, it is empirically and ethnically important to be aware of potential violence and harsh treatment in state care. Major scandals of historic abuse such as claims of organised prostitution in the Wilhelminenberg children’s home in Vienna (Helige et al. 2013) or ‘black pedagogy’ in the Torgau Youth Work Camp in East Germany (Gatzemann 2008) have contributed to a perception of children’s homes as dangerous and uncaring environments that offer only negative experiences to young people. Indeed, the new surge of academic interest on the lives of children in care in the twentieth century (Abrams 1998; Adams 1995; Child 1998; Hil and Branigan 2010; Penglase 2007) has been fuelled by current public debates on the abuses they suffered. This colours the way that we approach the topic of state care. My research has its roots in this assumption being part of a historical research network on physical violence in late socialism. Punishment and discipline were aspects of relationship creation that I explore in Chap. 3 (on parents) and Chap. 5 (on care staff and teachers). The boundaries by which punishment may be defined as violence are moveable, both in time and space. I look at punishment administered while my interviewees were children that is recalled after a significant period has elapsed. Accepted everyday practice might retrospectively be viewed as violent although it was ‘not directly and consciously experienced as such at the time’ (Hacking 1992: 229). The social acceptance of acts of force against children also depends on the setting and who does the punishing. Ferguson (2007: 129–130) argues that children in Irish industrial schools were regarded as ‘moral dirt’ and that the community may have accepted their harsh treatment because they were viewed as ‘socially dangerous.’ Former teachers in interviews with me and in the pages at the time of the Hungarian practitioner journal Köznevelés (Public Education) said that they relied on parents to discipline children. In their professional

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capacity they could not slap a child, but some expected parents to do just that when a child came home with a negative comment in their homework book. A theme that I will consider in Chap. 5 is the parental role that teachers seemingly took on alone for children in care—one part of which was (physical) disciplining—and punishment as both limiting and facilitating relationships and feelings of belonging.

Methodology and Analysis This book analyses how being in state care shaped children’s relationships by combining a range of qualitative data. The main body of data stems from two three-month stays in Hungary from January to March and October to December 2012 and an intensive two-week period in February 2013. Through biographical interviews with care leavers I examine relations of children in care to parents, siblings, peers, care staff, teachers and local residents. In addition, I draw on observations from visits to former sites of children’s homes, in one case with a care leaver, to reveal unexpected friendships that were muted in the interviews. I use case files to illuminate images of ‘proper’ families and parenting, to show the sometimes contradictory decisions of diverse state layers and to demonstrate the room to manoeuvre that this gave parents. Drawing on semi-­structured interviews with former care staff I explore management practices regarding the atmosphere of children’s homes and ‘appropriate’ care practices for state carers. I also draw on articles in the Hungarian journal Köznevelés (Public Education) to show the use and contestation of corporal punishment in schools and the assimilationist policy toward Roma children. Such mixed methods are especially important when researching past experiences because the opportunity to do ethnographic fieldwork is limited. The interaction between caseworkers and parents that I present is based on analysis of case files from the child protection services (the Gyámhatóság) in Somogy county, southwestern Hungary, that stop in 1979, 1980 or 1981. I worked mainly with three categories of files: state care, endangerment/financial assistance cases and adoption. The documents in the thicker files stretch back over several years and contain elaborate notes of home visits, official decisions, statements by kindergarten tutors and teachers, records of conversations that took place in the state offices, comments of caseworkers and letters from parents. I had authorisation from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to access files with personal data and permission to use a digital camera, which helped me offer a very rich

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account, particularly as my analysis was not restricted to notes made in the archive. I am greatly indebted to the families whose files I read and have vigorously changed all names and other identifying information. I began my fieldwork with life stories and in total was in contact with 17 care leavers and 6 former carers. In order to safeguard their anonymity, I gave each research participant a pseudonym and used fictional names for the children’s homes and villages that I discuss in detail. I chose to work with oral history to be able to study the subjective points of view of children in care whose voice and agency is underrepresented in the archival material, as illustrated in the opening case of József. I carried out 25 full-­ length taped interviews ranging from one-and-a-half to three hours. The interviews were all in Hungarian and took place in the home or workplace of my research participants, in the group room of a homeless shelter or in cafes depending on my interviewees’ preferences. As the months passed, I deepened my knowledge of relationships, processes and dynamics in state care by visiting three functioning and two former children’s homes at the invite of former staff of these institutions. Decisive to the initial success of my fieldwork was the interviews organised for me by a retired children’s home director who still had links to several care leavers and to his former institution. Although I was initially concerned that his selection process would create a bias in that these care leavers would have more positive experiences of relationships in state care, the opinions I heard were in fact very mixed and for one interview the care leaver did not turn up so his brother stood in, whom the director knew less well (see the biography of Károly in Chap. 2). My second entry point to the field was through a popular staff member at a homeless shelter who arranged several interviews with residents, knowing who had been in state care. My third access to interview partners was mediated and facilitated by the longstanding research connections in Eastern Hungary of my PhD supervisor Tatjana Thelen. Other scholars working in my area have noted the difficulty of ‘snowballing’ from respondents to gain further interview partners because care leavers often do not stay in touch with each other (Varsa 2011: 45). However, the social media platform iWiW (a Hungarian version of Facebook) proved a lucky break for me. A short message over iWiW explaining from whom I had their name and that I would like to meet to talk about growing up in care secured a positive answer in the three cases where an interviewee remembered a boy from the children’s home, but where contact had long since ceased.

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The oldest care leaver to take part in an interview was 50 and the youngest 28 at the time of the interview, sharing memories of experiences in state care across the 1970s and 1980s. In 1977 60% of the children entering state care in Hungary were under three (Siklós 1983: 174) and this reflects itself in my eclectic sample. I introduced myself as a British PhD student researching what it was like to grow up in state care in late socialist Hungary. None of my interviewees were particularly curious about me, which is not very surprising. Such narrative approaches to research are ‘postulated to allow silenced voices to be heard’ and the focus is on the chance to speak and to be listened to (Smith 2010: 306). Zsolt, a long-term homeless care leaver in his late thirties who we will hear more from in each chapter, melancholically said that it was really good that he could talk to me about his care experiences, but a shame that interest was only coming from abroad. I started interviews with care leavers by asking how old they were when they came into care. The interviews were designed to have a life history quality to them, but this generally produced disappointing accounts. In fact, it seems the biographical interview method (Rosenthal 2004) can inhibit memory just as much as a highly structured interview, because respondents may be unsure of what to say and therefore leave out seemingly inessential personal details. Stories and conversations started to flow much more freely once I began to ask questions, which were directed mainly to their childhood due to my interest in state care and relations. I raised general themes about everyday life in the children’s home (food, leisure activities, school work, bedtime, etc.) in the first part of an interview and tried to draw out details in the second part by asking the interviewee to say more about what they had already mentioned. In the third part, once at ease, the interviewee often freely narrated their experiences. If the participant became upset I would check if we should continue with the interview and we would pause to have a cigarette or get another coffee. Overall, however, the interviews lacked strong emotions. Other researchers have had similar experiences. Hanák (1978: 130) argued that due to the charmless institutional environment all the events in the long years spent in care fit into a few short sentences. The interviews were bemusing at times for my research participants, as we see in the following quotation by Károly: ‘In truth there is nothing to say because one was just there [in the children’s home]. And this “how was a day?”– or well– it–…’ It seemed so obvious to my interviewee Károly to not be worth telling. What he felt should be told was his exit story from

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care: ‘What in that time was the most evil, why it hurt a little, not now– But you ask such general things. Well, it was the same everywhere, when we ate and all–. What was a lot harder, you know– I finished in ‘80– in precisely 1980 the tailor’s school. And then, you know, [I was] 18– you know it was possible for me to stay another year. 19– –81 they threw me out of the institution.’ This was said in a continuous stream with no pauses between the restarted sentences. Some of my questions seemed trivial to Károly because they were designed to illuminate everyday details in care that do not have extended reportability (Linde 1993: 22). A story about what happened in a dinner queue may be reportable for a day or two, but it is unlikely to be reportable six months later, let alone after 30  years. What Károly was trying to express is the unexceptional nature of life in care—you sleep, you eat, you go to school. For an event to be turned into a story it must either be unusual in some way or run counter to expectations. I tried to resolve this issue of research participants feeling baffled in interviews by explaining that, as I had not grown up under state socialism, it was really helpful to me to explain such everyday occurrences. Aware of the difficulty to do so, I asked the research participant Zsolt whether we could visit the village of his former children’s home together in order to explore the physical setting of care and memories possibly associated with it. After thinking it over he agreed. Being back in the environment of his childhood, Zsolt started to comment on whatever came to mind while looking at and moving through familiar places. Kusenbach (2003: 472) stated in relation to the ‘go-along’ research method that the ‘environment we dwell in on a daily basis becomes a sort of personal biographer’ that stimulates the most trivial details of day-to-day experiences. The ethnographic insights that this visit offered into Zsolt’s ‘emotional and imaginative engagements’ (Ross et al. 2009: 609) with the village and its residents were invaluable to my work. Research rarely considers that children in care are part of a wider community than just a children’s home. It was only through observations during the fieldtrip that I got hints of Zsolt’s relationships with local residents. From the interviews with him in Budapest, my interpretation would have positioned Zsolt as much more isolated. Gallinat (2009) has shown that ethnographic methods can help shed light on the narrative structures used in interviews (and importantly the discourses underpinning these), and in Chap. 5 I suggest that it is the emphasis on parent-child relations within the overall care system that led Zsolt to not mention his relations to villagers that were revealed in the visit to the site.

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In Zmora’s (1993: xii) book on child institutions in Progressive-Era Baltimore, she asks how many interviews are needed to make conclusive statements, herself interviewing 45 care leavers from three orphanages. How many interviews is ‘enough’ is not a question that is frequently posed within anthropology,2 which is committed to the idea that individual accounts elucidate larger issues. I had most of the interviews transcribed and overlaid this with my field notes on the physicality of the situation such as sitting arrangements, fidgeting, foot tapping, (lack of) eye contact and how this changed during the interview. An eye to such detail characterises oral history completed in the context of ethnography in contrast to much oral history interviewing by historians (Di Leonardo 1987: 4–5). Scholars have noted how productive it can be to undertake a fine-­ grained analysis of the start of a biographical interview as this passage often contains pointers to the logic of the entire narrative (Bude 1999: 252; Wierling 2003: 138). For example, the first remark to me by Zsolt was that ‘The thing is– [gets quieter] that I remember everything clearly from a young age.’ He took two seconds before getting out the words ‘that– that strong discipline’ but in an even tone continued that ‘somehow it was good for me.’ The question of strictness was something to which Zsolt often returned. Towards the end of the first interview—which was a group interview with two other homeless men—a discussion developed about how their take on state care has changed: If we would have had to talk about it in 1988 [when he left care], then I think it would have been better if I didn’t speak. Then only swear words– would have come out’, said Zsolt in an emotionless tone. Asked why his views changed, Zsolt said with force ‘because we thought– that they could have solved this– this upbringing differently. Not with such strictness. And today– exactly the opposite because [swallows] we think differently about the whole thing.’ Norbert mumbles, ‘If I’m honest, I think that at least my view is, if I look at it now, that strictness, well, we deserved it, because if it had not been like that, then it is not certain that we would have become such people. It’s possible that we would now be in jail.’

This shows how people revise their narratives throughout their life and that what is said relates not just to the past, but to the current circumstances of the speaker. The start-stop quality to Zsolt’s description likely 2  See, for example, anthropological work using the extended case method and concentrating on just one figure like the young woman named Catrina in João Biehl’s Vita (2013).

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derives from him trying to change the interpretation of memories that still carry strong emotions, which is discussed in detail in Chap. 5. As the life story is a unit that is both structurally and interpretatively open (Linde 1993: 31), it is in a constant state of change—in this case by the reinterpretation of old stories to express new evaluations. More than 25 years have passed since my core research participants left state care and all are themselves now parents. How they narrate their time in state care reflects what they have since experienced and reveals current values, behavioural expectations and taboos (Raleigh 2012: 12). It is also important to note that narratives involve a negotiation between the speaker and addressee about their values and how actions are to be understood. This negotiation is part of an attempt by speakers to position themselves as good people (Linde 1993: 81), which the quotation above reflects that they are ‘such people.’ I discussed above that an approach that allows the researcher to hear narratives of an interviewee in a range of settings (such as in the village of Zsolt’s children’s home) stimulated different memories. More broadly, researchers need to be aware of the context dependency of narrative forms. Indeed, Kirmayer (1996: 178) argues that ‘even where retelling does not – and may never – occur, there is a “virtual space,” a potential social context of retelling that influences the most private reconstructions of memory.’ I, however, did not detect any shifting by my interviewees between a public and private register. The social and political context in Hungary at the time of my fieldwork in 2012 and 2013 seemingly did not set a tone or offer a frame for the interviews. My research participants in Hungary were not reacting to media reports and public scrutiny of residential care, as was the context for the Wilhelminenberg Commission where the Austrian newspaper Kurier published accusations of organised prostitution said to have taken place in that children’s home. There has similarly been no political attention in Hungary to the topic of historical abuse in state care in comparison to Germany (the parliamentary Round Table that led to the creation of compensatory funds in 2012) or Ireland (the €110 million Residential Institutions Redress Board). No stories are circulating that could crystallise into a collective memory of Hungarian state care under socialism.

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Outline of Chapters Woven into the chapters that follow are quotes, observations and personal stories from transcripts, field notes and the case files. Using this data, I explore the relationships that developed in and through state care in late socialist Hungary. This book is divided into four parts—one devoted to the overall system of state support for families in state socialist Hungary, one on images of ‘proper’ parenting practices and the actions of different state officials, one on children’s relations to parents and siblings and one on care outside of kinship relationships. In Chap. 2 I analyse the development of child protection policies in Hungary from the 1950s to the 1980s, arguing that the organisational structures of the state welfare system bolstered parent-child ties yet restricted sibling relations. I show that this period was characterised by an increasing moralisation of poverty and greater state activity in relation to ‘proper’ parenting. Negotiations of the imagined boundaries between ‘family’ and ‘the state’ were required so that professional knowledge on education and childhood and the regulation of parent-child relations were not perceived by families as an undue intrusion into the private sphere. The contextualisation provided in this chapter constitutes a first step in overcoming a narrow perspective on children’s homes by exploring wider social and policy processes that shaped experiences of state care. In addition, I introduce three main participants in the research – Zsolt, Katalin and Károly. Both parts of the chapter serve as an important background to understanding state influences on the kinship ties of children in care as well as the underlying images of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ parents that could shape children’s trajectories into and experiences in state care in socialist Hungary. Chapter 3 is about the relations between professionals and families around child protection issues given the significance of such interactions for children’s lives. Typically, the connections between kinship and the state are analysed in terms of how political processes contribute to transformations in kinship. Instead, in Chap. 3 I draw on case files to explore how images of the ideal family and gendered norms of parenting influenced central policies and state interventions on the ground. We see that there were multiple and often competing professional viewpoints about the ideal type of family behaviour, which contributed to inconsistent decisions, but also opened up some room for parents to manoeuvre and shape the responses of state officials. By looking at how decisions about a child’s

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care and family relationships were the outcome of negotiations between parents and state actors at different levels, I demonstrate that the state was a fragmented form of social organisation that was fashioned through interactions. Chapter 4 looks at the ongoing or re-established contacts that children in care had with their birth families. Various examples show the complexity and ambiguity of care relations by state and kin actors. Child protection staff had to decide if contact with birth families would be positive or detrimental to a child’s well-being. Some reunions were experienced as difficult and even seen as risking the physical or emotional welfare of the child. Certain children in residential care seem to have felt more secure and emotionally closer to the children’s home and its staff whilst others— mostly those who came into care at a later age—had stronger attachments to their birth families. The second part of the chapter explores the biological basis on which carers constructed siblingship, an approach that was often rejected by children in care who required shared experiences and meaningful ties to feel connected to brothers and sisters. Chapter 5 centres on relationships outside the family, namely to carers, teachers, local residents and peers, as well as belonging to an ethnic community. I argue that these potential relationships were all devalued by the primacy accorded to biological parenting by social policies, state services and carers, contributing to children in care perceiving their childhood as a series of lack of relationships. One puzzle that I try to understand is why care leavers recalled individual teachers and their actions more often and with greater clarity than the care staff that were constantly present in children’s homes. I suggest this is because children in care received more personalised attention in school settings, be it educational or disciplinary. Connected to this is the answer to a second puzzle of why my research was nearly universally assumed to be about Roma in both academic discussions and everyday conversations, yet none of my interview partners recalled being labelled or labelling a child in care as ‘Gypsy.’ I demonstrate how group-based interaction in children’s homes homogenised the children into one category of ‘in care,’ de-ethnicising differences that were emphasised in wider Hungarian society. The concluding chapter draws out four broader themes that are important to discussions about the co-production of kinship and state relations. I first highlight the analytical point that applying the conceptual lens of care gives a clearer picture of how children’s relationships are created, maintained and dissolved. It lets us take the nature and location of care

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work seriously so that significant non-kin relations are not overlooked. Secondly, I explain how my work contributes to the relational anthropology of the state by highlighting how images of ‘proper’ parenting and ‘appropriate’ family units influence concrete and contradictory state practices. Connected to this, my third theme is how the emphasis on parent-­ child relations in the child welfare system of late socialist Hungary devalued other possible relations and the care provided by them. I focus fourthly on the distinction or blurring of the boundaries between kinship and the state that could vary depending on different management practices and ideas of professionalism. Ultimately, the book affirms the fluid, changing and negotiated nature of care and kinship relationships within residential childcare during Hungary’s state socialist period.

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CHAPTER 2

Not a Fading Problem: Child Protection from the 1950s to the 1980s

The People’s Republic of Hungary expected that the need for child protection services would wither away under state socialism. High-level policy documents suggested that firstly the accomplishment of socialism would lead to the end of material shortages and result in the automatic reduction of criminality, prostitution, alcoholism and vagrancy—seen as factors contributing to state care placements—and secondly that once it was convincingly explained to people what was ‘good’ and what was ‘bad’ conduct, life patterns, attitudes and behaviour would adjust towards ‘proper’ parenting (Hanák 1978: 29–30). The rising number of children in state care in the late 1950s and ongoing identification of children at risk already hinted that either the assumptions were wrong or that not enough informational work had been carried out. This chapter traces the development of forms of support for families and children in socialist Hungary from the 1950s to the 1980s. I examine how this support focused on bolstering parent-child relations while the organisational structure of residential care often separated siblings. I will show an increased state engagement with parent-child relations based on expert knowledge of how to ‘properly’ educate and raise children. Where there were problems parents were now often interpreted as personally failing and the chapter points to an increasing moralisation of poverty. The policies described here set up the state welfare environment of families during late socialism and this chapter is meant to equip the reader to understand the context of my data. With this aim in mind at the end of © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rasell, Care of the State, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49484-1_2

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this chapter I also introduce three care leavers who I interviewed in 2012—Katalin, Károly and Zsolt. They are main characters in my book and their lives illuminate different aspects of relations to family and other significant connections that were shaped by state care. The three short biographies are intended as a place to refer back to while reading the later chapters to avoid repetition and to put the reader in a position to place statements from these three care leavers within their current and past circumstances. More generally, this chapter contributes to our understanding of state influences on kinship ties as well as the images of state and family that underpin state processes in relation to child protection.

Supporting Children Through Family Policies and Regulations Hungary unwillingly became a satellite state of the Soviet Union after the Second World War. With little choice of how to approach postwar reconstruction, by the early 1950s, industry, mining and banking had been nationalised and agriculture was collectivised (Haney 2002: 25–26). With half of Hungary’s national assets destroyed in the war and much of the basic infrastructure and industry demolished, economic realities prohibited the building of an extensive welfare system. As mentioned above, within the new socialist order there was also expected to be no need for targeted social provisions, which West European states introduced. At the ministry level, the antipathy to this welfare model that was associated with the West was demonstrated by the government abolishing the Ministry of Welfare in 1952. Although there was no longer the Ministry of Welfare, this did not mean the end to welfare work in Hungary. As Sabine Hering (2009: 11) observes on social care under state socialism, ‘many social risks could be avoided by a comprehensive social system, and … the assistance for people in need was actually transferred to other responsible instances rather than being neglected.’ The government created a network of local child protection agencies, the Gyámhatóság. These institutions operated out of state offices in every district of the country. They were formed out of the existing Árvaszék offices, the pre-war orphan system that evolved during the Second World War into an important force at the local level. In the postwar period the government increased the responsibilities and competencies in relation to family relations of these former adoption and

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institutionalisation offices. The Gyámhatóság was responsible for maintaining the large bureaucracy surrounding the family (registering births, enforcing child support arrangements, resolving housing problems) and overseeing the general raising of children in their districts. In this capacity the two to three caseworkers in each local office acted as both a parental advice centre and as a coercive body with the legal authority to take children into care (Haney 2002: 45). It was expected that the factors that play a role in putting children into care would disappear under socialism, so little energy was exerted on building new children’s homes or developing specialist pedagogy for such children. Nationalised castles were used as children’s homes, some presumably only for a short time due to their unsuitability (war damaged, lack of running water, etc.) as the fluctuation in the number of children’s homes suggests. There were 70 children’s homes in 1950, 51  in 1951, 49 in 1952, 61 in 1953 (Rákó 2010: 79) and 91 homes in 1957 (Hegedűs 2009: 80). A contribution to the costs of residential care was expected of parents tied to their income, but proved difficult to enforce with estimates that only one out of four parents paid in 1954 in Szabolcs-Szatmár county (Gál 2007: 53 cited in Varsa 2011: 90). The countryside was seemingly ascribed an almost mythic role in childhoods and specifically in child protection. In the first half-year after the Second World War, 20,000 Hungarian children from cities were placed in the countryside by the organisation Nemzeti Segélyakció [National Help Action] (Domszky 1994: 274). It may have been practical dictates of space that led to children’s homes being installed in castles, but connected to the use of buildings in rural locations was a policy that glorified fresh air, the outdoors and nature as a place for healthy children in contrast to the indoors, bad influences and smog of the city. This belief in the restorative properties of a rural environment and the contaminating effects of the city has a long history in Europe and the USA in relation to children from disadvantaged families.1 The proportion of youth classed as endangered in Hungary was far higher in the capital than in the rest of the country. Hungarian sociologist Katalin Hanák (1978: 73) put this in the context of a city infrastructure that had not kept pace with the growing 1  For instance, in the United States the Orphan Trains out of New York City placed around 150,000 children in foster families in the Midwest and West between 1854 and 1929 and from the 1920s to the 1970s more than 130,000 children were moved from the United Kingdom to the Commonwealth countries under the child migrant scheme.

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number of urban residents, particularly in housing construction, but also in the crèche and kindergarten network. This left children unsupervised while parents worked, under-stimulated as they were not part of group activities led by childcare professionals and living in poor conditions. We will see in Chap. 5 that a sense of place is important to the care leavers I interviewed who grew up in the countryside who identified with the region, the village or the grounds of the children’s home. The often isolated location of the children’s homes made visiting home or being visited by family difficult due to the distances involved, the need to fit visits around the public transport timetable and the associated travel costs, which particularly were felt by parents already struggling financially. A second consequence of the out-of-the-way location was that children who ran away found it more difficult to disappear, as there were fewer people living in the area to provide (sometimes unwittingly) shelter and food. The location of children’s homes thus affected relations or the lack thereof. A series of reforms to the child protection system was started by the short-lived National Child Protection Council (Országos Gyermekvédelmi Tanács—OGYIT) that was founded in 1957—a year after the defeated Hungarian revolution when the basic requirement of the new Kádár regime increasingly became ‘a silent acceptance and respect for the ideological and historical taboos of the existing political system’ rather than the unconditional support of the goals set by the political leadership demanded in the 1950s (Valuch 1998/99: 146). OGYIT’s president Ferenc Münnich became the deputy prime minister of Hungary and used his position to try and gain the political support necessary to introduce new family policies and strengthen the existing child protection infrastructure. Among other things, OGYIT employed psychologists to work at the child protection institutions (Gyermek és Ifjúságvédő Intézet—GYIVI), recommended the introduction of paid maternity leave (which was introduced a decade later), tried to reduce the workload of the overburdened Gyámhatóság by employing more caseworkers, put child protection onto the syllabus for pedagogues, took steps against child abuse and carried out fourteen national studies on child protection themes. OGYIT was the first to try and gauge the number of children living in family circumstances deemed unsuitable. In 1961 there were already 25,340 children in state care and OGYIT suggested that it might become necessary for a further 29,000 children to join them (Gáti 1986: 42, cited in Kerezsi 1995: 25). In the same year OGYIT was axed, seemingly for its recognition of problems that did not fit the image that politicians wished publicised of

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families. The closure of OGYIT marked a confining of Hungary’s sphere of child protection to special child protection issues understood as the remedying of consequences arising from medical problems (Kerezsi 1995: 25). Nevertheless, the direction in which OGYIT tried to take child protection won out by the end of the 1960s. Child protection was no longer regarded as dealing with a fading problem. Increased responsibility was levelled at the family for the endangerment of the child or the child’s social deviance (truancy, gang membership, vagrancy, stealing, etc.) and therefore the family increasingly became a site where state officials were active. In 1968 a network of Child Guidance Centres (Nevelési Tanácsadó Központ) was established, which addressed child development and child-­ rearing problems and was staffed ‘by a new cadre of family experts who considered it their job to “rationalize” the Hungarian family’ (Haney 2002: 11). By ‘family,’ Haney argues, caseworkers meant mothers because family policies increasingly shifted to the scrutiny and control of mothering/domestic qualities instead of maternal need (Haney 2002: 91–131). The 1974 Family Law, Art 72(1) states that parents are jointly responsible for parental supervision, but the level of debate on sharing parental tasks was seemingly low. A new maternity leave benefit (GYES) was introduced in 1967 that provided six months of support equivalent to the mother’s salary and up to two additional years of support at a fixed rate (extended in 1969 by six months to provide mothers with a total of three years subsidised mothering). Eligible were mothers who had worked full-time or for 120 days at an agricultural cooperative in the twelve months preceding the birth. In addition to new policies, the provision of family allowance (családi pótlék) was expanded in 1968 to include students, home workers and part-time employees and offered to families with two or more children—previously for agricultural workers it had been a minimum of three children (Haney 2002: 43 and 108). New financial assistance was also introduced for very low income families. Caseworkers at the Gyámhatóság could provide from 1969 occasional financial assistance (rendkívüli segély) to parents who were temporarily in financial difficulties, which Haney describes as used by caseworkers as ‘one-time boosts to their clients’ incomes’ to purchase clothing, furniture or bedding (Haney 2002: 109). In 1974 regular financial assistance for needy families (rendszeres nevelési segély—RNS) was added to the list of protection measures that caseworkers could use to support the care of children at home. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative criteria

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determined who was eligible for RNS. The parents’ income needed to be lower than the average pension (960 Hungarian forints in 1974) through no fault of their own and their home life and environment had to be otherwise suitable for the care of the child. I discuss the assessment process for RNS in detail in the next chapter as one important field in which the responsibility of the family and state was negotiated. In the first five years of RNS fewer than half of the applications were successful (Haney 2002: 111). Data for all of Hungary shows 3535 RNS recipients in 1975 and 10,066  in 1979. By 1983 this had nearly doubled to 19,689 families receiving regular financial assistance (Haney 2002: 112) as RNS evolved into a broader programme supporting poor families that were deemed as ‘trying’ to improve. On the basis of interviews with policy makers and government officials, Haney (2002: 281) suggests that it was not just the frustration of Gyámhatóság caseworkers in having to remove children from their family purely on financial grounds that led to the introduction of RNS. This measure can also be interpreted as a move to bolster women’s reproductive roles in response to the plummeting birth rate—by the early 1960s the birth rate in Hungary was among the lowest in the world (Haney 2002: 92). Supporting women’s exit from the workforce also reduced unemployment levels and pressure on jobs in times of economic reform. Women made up 29% of the economically active population in 1949; by 1975 this had risen to 44% (Valuch 1998/99: 140). The government’s commitment to full employment had been consistent with its larger economic imperatives of postwar reconstruction and industrialisation, but by the mid-1960s the industrial growth rate had slowed to one percent and the government had even begun to speak of labour ‘surpluses’ and ‘redundancies’ (Haney 2002: 93). The full employment of women was no longer a goal. Haney (2002: 94–95) argues that focussing on women’s reproductive responsibilities achieved three goals: economic downsizing, increasing the birth rate and creating emotionally stable children. Material conditions in families were a major concern of staff at the Gyámhatóság and Chap. 3 shows how this translated into encouraging mothers to return to paid work, advocating a different position than taken by state economists, demographers and child psychologists. An increase in living standards was a central aspect of the Kádár regime. Between 1957 and 1978 real wages more than doubled, personal consumption per capita increased by 150 percent and three-and-a-half times as much household energy was consumed (Valuch 1998/99: 143). Financed by foreign loans,

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this material increase could however not be maintained and from 1979 the directors of economic policy tried decisively to limit wages directly affecting the population. A study on child protection by Katalin Hanák, a researcher at the Institute for Sociology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, that was published in 1978 suggested that 79% of children entered state care due to their family’s financial situation or housing circumstances (Hanák 1978: 106). The Family Law of 1974, which reformed the Family Law of 1952, introduced yet another wide set of changes to child protection aimed at reducing material shortages in families and improving parenting. A series of child protection steps before placement into state care was specified by the law, the mildest of which was a formal warning of the parent(s) and the giving of advice. It became compulsory for teachers, doctors and other state officials to register children they deemed as at risk, so that the caseworkers in the Gyámhatóság would hear of families to check upon, the success of which I discuss in Chap. 3. Parents could be obliged to enrol their children in a crèche or kindergarten or weekly boarding home and to regularly meet with childcare advisors (nevelési tanácsadó). The Gyámhatóság was not the sole organisation carrying out these measures. Staff could inform the parents’ employers, the relevant trade union or the residents’ committee (lakóbizottság) of a family’s circumstances and ask for support. Where the work demands of the parents were unsuited to the care of a child, for instance rotating shifts or a long distance to the workplace, the Gyámhatóság tried to broker improved working conditions (Oktatási Minisztérium 1976: 7–8). The Gyámhatóság could fine parents, but this was problematic as it further decreased the often tight household finances. This is what the head of the Siófok Gyámhatóság explained to the Siófok municipal police administration in 1979 as regards measures taken against a violent father: ‘we have not fined the father so far, as the fine would strike the family, not him.’2 The Family Law of 1974 contained a strong statement that ‘good’ parents would be supported in the care at home of their children. Article 13 stated that children put at risk by the ill health of a parent or family member, bad financial circumstances or adverse housing conditions should not be taken into state care. This was a place for abandoned, orphaned or 2  Gyámhatóság Case file 14013/1979 Correspondence by the head of the Siófok Gyámhatóság to the Siófok police administration on 26 October 1979 informing about measures taken against a violent father.

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delinquent children and problematic families. National-level social programmes such as RNS were to support ‘good’ families in need. Only if these measures did not bring success could placement in care on a voluntary basis be considered (intézeti elhelyezés). This form was not the same as non-voluntary state care (nem önkéntes intézeti elhelyezés) because it did not affect the legal guardianship rights of the parents. József, who we me at the start of this book, had a voluntary placement, meaning his parents could decide to take him out of state care at any point, which led to the negotiation over fees. Parent’s use of voluntary state care where they agreed to or requested such an arrangement came under pressure when the Family Law of 1974 sharply raised the costs of care that parents or relatives liable for the care of the child had to pay. Fees were increased to 20 percent of the parents’ average monthly income, calculated separately for each parent and transferred directly by the employer from the wages. This made state care no longer a cheap option and some parents pulled their children from state care (see Table 2.2 for the drop in numbers in 1974). One such mother who had to weigh up the advantage to her son of remaining in care against the financial strain it put on her family was Mrs Kiss. Her son Ákos was in year seven when the law came into effect and recalled crying when it looked like his single mother could not afford for him to remain in state care for his last year of school. He had failed two years at his former school on the large housing estate where his mother lived and been involved in some trouble in the neighbourhood. The local council recommended that he be put in a correctional institution, but Mrs Kiss negotiated a place for him in a children’s home in Budapest’s leafy second district in the Buda hills (for more on parents negotiating with state officials, see Chap. 3). The location meant that the other pupils in his new school were the children of doctors, lawyers and military officers and he thrived under his new teacher. Ákos resat year six and year seven and his mother ‘somehow endured’ paying for year eight with the increased fees. He hints in his interview that his five siblings at home suffered from the decision to invest in his education because ‘it was really a lot.’ In Chap. 4 I will discuss state influence on inequality between siblings based on different access to education. According to Dr. Judit Cseres, head of the child protection department at the Ministry of Education in 1983, in practice the average contribution to care costs paid by families was 500 forints per month for one child. This she felt was very little, but many parents of children in care did not work

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regularly, so it was only possible to take into account odd jobs (Népszabadság 1983: 11). Fees were waived under set circumstances: where the parents were unfit to work; if their social situation was one where they could not care for the child through no fault of their own; if the child was at direct risk at home from infection with tuberculosis; if the child was in a medical care home; or if a child was placed in a young offender institution (Oktatási Minisztérium 1976: 11 and 17). In 1983 Dr. László Vabrik, head of the child protection department at the Chief Prosecutor’s Office, observed that the Gyámhatóság and the council finance offices did not work together and the state was owed millions in care fees from parents (Népszabadság 1983: 11). A brochure printed by the Ministry of Education in 1976 entitled ‘What you need to know about state care’ explained that supporting parents was the best way to support children in care: …state care has two directions: primarily ensuring the placement of children into safety, their education and care, but at the same time also helping the family to solve its problems. This is understandable because the aim is that children return as soon as possible to the family environment. The family must become suitable to take children back. Neglecting family care can lead precisely to the result that not only can children in care not return over time to their family circle, but that other children at home and future children born to the parents might have to be taken into care too. In line with this, the family care carried out by the Gyámhatóság serves the interests of the child by ending the reasons for a state care placement. (Oktatási Minisztérium 1976: 18)

In 1979 a large national research project into societal problems started (Társadalmi Beilleszkedési Zavarok Kutatási Program—TBZ). The results of the TBZ study provided a basis for later reform efforts. The tasks and actors involved in child protection were understood much more broadly, seeing, for example, marriage counsellors—who were working patchily across the country—as an avenue to help deal with family problems that affected children. In 1985 the first Family Support Centres (Családsegítő Központ) were trialled. These centres were intended to fight the root causes of child protection issues and unite all forms of family support in one place. This system was rolled-out nationally under a 1987 regulation that stipulated a local Family Support Centre be opened for every 10,000 people living in an area (Varga 2012: 47). The new cadre of social workers

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in these organisations ‘set out to teach clients to economize and change life-style “defects” as a way of curtailing poverty’ (Haney 2002: 12). According to the Budapest Youth Policy Concept of 1987 a ‘competent’ family had become the most important institution for the prevention and reduction of social deviance and the endangerment of children. It is estimated that the proportion of children classified as endangered rose by around 60 percent between 1970 and 1980 to 100,000 children in Hungary (Domszky 1994: 278–279). The above-mentioned Youth Policy Concept of 1987 stated that the number of families where the Gyámhatóság had declared the children to be at risk had doubled in the past five years (p. 42). I now turn to a detailed analysis of the numbers of children in care.

Changing Policies and Ideals of Parenting Reflected in State Care Numbers The increasing numbers in care are partly an expression of shifting images of the family held by state officials in relation to what was perceived as a ‘good’ childhood and the kind and quality of relations children should have. Hungarian policy makers came to focus on childrearing and not just childbirth and found parents lacking. The basis for the following discussion of state care figures from 1946 to 1983 is Table 2.2 below. In 1949 there were 25,940 children in state care in Hungary. To get a sense of this number, there were in total 2,290,090 children aged 0–14 at that time in Hungary (Központi Statisztikai Hivatal 2001), meaning 1.1 percent of all children in Hungary were in state care. State care numbers decreased from 1949 to 1951 and then rose sharply in 1952 and again in 1953—specifically the number of children in children’s homes nearly doubled over these five years to 11,302 children across 61 children’s homes in 1953. The size of the children’s homes varied, but as an indication if distributed equally each children’s home would have looked after 185 children. The capacity of the homes was stretched. An official inquiry into child protection in Budapest concluded that into ‘the children’s homes – instead of an appropriate development – came more and more bunk beds’ (Hanák 1978: 28). A strictly confidential report produced by the Central Statistical Office in 1955—cited in Varsa 2011: 54—admits that despite high need the

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inflow into state care was deliberately kept down in 1954 and 1955 contributing to 5728 fewer children in care over two years. By 1957 though numbers in care had started to rise again. In 1962 the numbers in care reached 27,277 children, two years later 31,380 children and in 1970 there were 35,626 children in state care. The 0–14-year-old population in Hungary in 1970 was 2,173,554, meaning 1.6 percent of the total children’s population was in state care. In two decades the absolute numbers in care had increased by 37 percent. The sharp decrease in the overall percentage in foster care from 58 percent in 1950 to 39 percent five years later and under 30 percent from 1957 is often pointed to as the socialist state’s distrust of families, but when we look at the actual numbers in Table 2.2 the changes in foster care are undramatic. According to a report by the Central Statistical Office the large decrease in foster numbers from 1954 to 1955-nearly 4000 fewer foster children—was due to a radical cut in foster placements to scattered farms that were difficult to oversee. The increased number of children in children’s homes was not due to a transfer of children out of foster care, but due to an influx in the number of children entering care overall, who were placed in institutions. The column ‘At own parents’ in Table 2.2 refers to increasing kinship care, i.e. children could be taken into care to keep them at home where the parents’ financial resources and not parenting skills were in question. The parents then received foster care payments to look after their own children. In 1973 the parents of 763 children used this arrangement— representing 2.1 percent of all children in care. The introduction of regular financial assistance for needy families (RNS) in 1974 repackaged this support of parent-child relations. Such children no longer entered state care. Under the RNS scheme ‘worthy’ parents received a grant to help raise their children at home that was set at the same amount that foster parents received. From 1978 the total number of children in care went down. The numbers in foster care decreased more quickly than those in institutions. This could hint to a lack of foster parents. Already in the 1950s policy makers criticised that the main body of foster parents was old (Járó 1961: 24 in Hegedűs 2009: 80). They were now retiring, which, we will see below, affected Zsolt’s state care experiences and relationships with his siblings. There were campaigns on television and in various weekly newspapers that aimed at widening the network of fosterers. A journalist for the national newspaper Hírlap wrote in 1983 ‘that one has to be a saint, who for 800

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to 1,200 forints takes on the responsibility of being a foster parent, whose work is accompanied by strong prejudices’ (Szenes 1983: 20). Child protection staff and the general public suspected fosterers of taking in children only to overwork them (frequently in agriculture) or that foster parents were only after the salary and unsuited to raising children. The debates around the quality of foster parenting highlight that childhood and childcare were understood as outside of the economic realm. While the year-for-year figures in Table 2.2 show a stable decrease in overall numbers in care from the late 1970s the far increased number of families receiving RNS is not directly expressed in the numbers. In 1983 there were nearly 10,000 more RNS grants paid to families than in 1979, but over those five years numbers in care dropped by 1804 children. Caseworkers seemingly did not financially bolster the parent-child relations of those in care to bring them home, rather they ensured that ‘worthy’ families with children at risk of care—remember the estimates were of 100,000 endangered children in 1980—were supported. In 1977 of those entering state care in Hungary 60 percent were under three years old (Siklós 1983: 174), as Table 2.1 shows. State officers variously recommended, cajoled or agreed to take newborns and toddlers into care while leaving older children, often siblings of those taken into care, at home. In financially struggling large families there was seemingly a cut-off point for child protection staff. Once one newborn had not been allowed to leave the hospital with its mother or had been left there it set up the expectation for subsequent births in that family. The case history of Károly exemplifies this kind of intervention. He was the middle child of seven and the last not to go into care at birth. His mother was at that time every year pregnant (births in 1963, 1964, 1965 and 1966). Katalin’s case also comes to mind as it hints at the unexpected outcome that this could have on new partnerships. She was the youngest of ten siblings, the bottom Table 2.1  Inflow into care by age range in Hungary, 1977

Age 0–3 4–13 14–15 16–18

Inflow into state care in 1977 3369 1332 622 322

Source: Siklós 1983: 174

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four of whom were in state care from birth. Katalin referred to her six siblings at home as half-brothers while she called her siblings in care sister or brother, which suggests that her mother might have changed partners. In such cases the offspring of new partnerships went into care, while leaving the children from a past relationship in the household. The rationale of caseworkers at the Gyámhatóság to place very young children into care rather than older siblings was about getting women back into the labour market, which I discuss in the next chapter, but also concerned value for money. A sociological text on child protection written at the time hints that caring for older age ranges was not seen as a good investment if the teens had already formed their own opinions about the world and had had too many damaging sexual experiences (Siklós 1983: 175). This might have been the attitude held by officers of the child protection subunit of the Kaposvár police, who did not heed the numerous requests made by the director of GYIVI for assistance in bringing a young person called Ágnes back to GYIVI.  The case file records that Ágnes entered state care in May 1977 for ‘moral’ reasons over being frequently drunk, inviting boys over when her mother was out and not starting to work months after having finished compulsory education. She often ran off from GYIVI and when her mother found her unsupervised in town in July 1977 she brought her home. Ágnes’ behaviour at home remained unchanged, but she refused to go back to the children’s home prompting the director at GYIVI to ask multiple times for police support in returning her to the institution. The officers might have thought it was futile to collect her or the written requests by GYIVI might have been for form’s sake only, but Ágnes was left living at home for the three years of state care. In other matters in this case the police acted, for example twice taking Ágnes into custody on the charge of work avoidance. Of the many instances of teen state care not being enforced that I encountered in the archives, one case exemplified that state care was preoccupied with getting children through school, i.e. interest was less in admitting those who had finished compulsory education, usually around the age of 14. At a meeting in February 1981 of the Committee for Young Offender Institutions (Nevelőintézeti Bizottság) the director of GYIVI requested a place in a closed institution for Mária who kept running away from the children’s home, but this could not be arranged before the end of the school year. The question of whether a space would be available in the following year was not answered, seemingly as for the committee it was no longer of interest because Mária would by then have finished

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compulsory education. The head of the Nagyatád Gyámhatóság ended the state care of Mária in August 1981 as ‘no result can be expected.’ Such statements reflect that care, including state care, was a scarce resource and was prioritised for school-age children. A dimension not captured in Table 2.2 on the numbers in care is the circulation of children moving in and out of care multiple times with Table 2.2  Number of children in care in Hungary, 1946–1983 Year

Total no. of children in care

Out of these In institutions

1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974

21,930 25,059 24,921 25,940 24,356 21,656 23,752 25,055 23,314 19,327 19,153 19,931 21,542 22,600 23,408 25,340 27,277 29,365 31,380 33,420 33,584 34,483 35,077 35,396 35,626 36,098 35,666 35,761 34,999

At foster parents

6323 8267

17,406 16,132

11,302 11,644 11,748 12,368 14,455 16,107 17,038 17,213 18,537 19,844 21,150 21,243 22,181 22,175 22,939 23,710 24,076 24,372 24,646 24,366 24,745 24,386

13,558 11,393 7481 6709 5331 5280 5401 6041 6589 7196 7908 9790 10,828 10,961 11,102 10,895 10,785 10,635 10,746 10,618 10,253 10,613

% in care but not in an institution At own parents

195 277 98 76 145 155 161 154 214 237 307 347 411 448 442 472 535 619 706 682 763

79.4 80.4 66.1 57.9 61.1 54.1 54.9 50.1 39.2 35.4 27.5 25.2 24.6 26.5 26.8 27.3 28.0 32.3 33.6 34.0 33.5 32.4 32.0 31.6 31.7 31.7 30.8 30.3 (continued)

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Table 2.2 (continued) Year

Total no. of children in care

Out of these In institutions

1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983

34,326 34,380 34,424 33,411 33,160 33,148 32,821 32,213 31,356

24,621 24,602 25,080 24,416 24,481 24,726 24,681 24,398 23,598

At foster parents

% in care but not in an institution At own parents

9705 9779 9344 8995 8679 8422 8140 7815 7758

28.3 28.4 27.1 26.9 26.3 25.4 24.8 24.3 24.7

Sources: Statisztikai Tájékoztató 1974 [Statistical Information 1974] cited in Hanák 1978: 39 Szociális intézmények 1950. évi adatok: A KSH jelentése [Statistical data on social institutions from 1950: Report by the Central Statistical Office]. Budapest: Central Statistical Office, 1951, 12, cited in Varsa 2011: 174 Ministry for Culture, statistical information 1983, cited in Árokszállási 1986: 148

shorter or longer stays at home. One of the best examples of how children boomeranged between state care and the home occurred in the case of the single father, Mr Csonka. He received sole custody of his three children (b. 1960, 1962 and 1970) when their mother left the family in 1971. The children were registered as endangered in 1974. In summer 1975 they were taken into care. Mr Csonka appealed and had his children returned in December 1975. Within a year all three were back in state care. In August 1978 the youngest was allowed home, but in July 1979 had to return to the children’s home. The frequency of moves was accentuated by the organisational structure of state care that I turn to next, which foresaw children changing children’s homes several times.

The System of Residential Care There was a division in ministerial responsibility for state care with the Ministry of Education in charge of child protection institutions and residential homes for ‘trainable’ (képezhető) disabled children and the Ministry of Health overseeing the state care of children under three and ‘non-­trainable’ (képezhetetlen) disabled children (Varsa 2011: 76). This division is indicative

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of how child protection in Hungary was predominantly understood as an educational issue, which showed in officials’ lack of interest in state care for teens who had completed compulsory education or the tying of regular financial assistance for needy families (RNS) to school attendance. In the 1950s there was not a strict institutional separation between regular and special children’s homes and the schooling was internal. Thus, finding themselves together were children from very poor households, abandoned children, abused or neglected children, mentally and physically disabled children and ‘delinquent’ children. In the 1960s separate homes were introduced for disabled care, regular state care and stricter care (to work alongside existing young offender institutions such as in Rákospalota or Aszód). This differentiation paved the way for children in regular state care to attend external schools, aiming to reduce their isolation (Domszky 1994: 278). Figure 2.1 taken from the Budapest Youth Policy Concept of 1987 is a diagram of the children’s home network, which highlights that state care was organised around school provision. State care started with children living in a child protection institution (Gyermek és Ifjúságvédő Intézet— GYIVI) while their cases were processed. As Fig. 2.1 shows, this meant minors waited either in the child protection institution or with foster families to hear whether they would be taken into state care permanently and for caseworkers to find them a place. Where the endangerment of the child was not acute, caseworkers could negotiate a place in a children’s home while the child still lived at home and then be taken directly there. GYIVI was conceived as a transitional place and therefore there was no school provision, but in practice it could take months for the initial decision to be taken into state care to be assessed. Children’s homes were divided by age following the school system as initially most schooling was internal. Accordingly, there were homes for kindergarten-age children and homes catering to children in school years one to eight. This was flanked by weekly boarding homes for these two age ranges for the children of families who could only look after them at the weekend due to work commitments or health reasons. Figure 2.1 indicates that in 1987 there were ten children’s homes in Budapest for school-­ aged children, one with an internal school, three with external schooling and six offering specialised care. The categories of special care reflect socialist concerns at the time with children labelled ‘neurotic’ or ‘anti-­ social.’ ‘Over-aged’ refers to children who were too old for their school year because they had failed classes. Upon finishing compulsory education, there were homes for teenagers continuing to study, after care homes for youth and homes for ‘anti-social’ youth. It is interesting that there was

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Child Protection Institution (GYIVI)

temporary care home foster parents

preschool children’s home

Budapest (5) rest of the country (1)

children’s home (school years 1-8)

Budapest

external school (3)

internal school (1)

rest of the country (7)

special education neurotic (2) anti-social (2) over-aged (1) disabled (1)

youth home aftercare home weekly boarding home

further studies (2) anti-social (3) boys (1) girls (1) kindergarten age (1) external school (2) internal school (1)

Fig. 2.1  Organisational structure of the children’s home network, 1987

more provision for ‘anti-social’ youth than there was for youth in further studies. In both the children’s home and those for weekly boarders the trend was for children to attend local schools rather than receive education on site. The organisational structure of the children’s home network meant children in care since birth had to move homes and say goodbye to carers and peers at least three times by the time they had finished compulsory education. Siblings often got separated as they fell into different age brackets and most homes were single sex. There were however variations in age range with larger institutions taking children from kindergarten up to the end of school year eight and a few co-education places. Beyond a specialisation by age, sex, disability and delinquency, the director of the

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children’s home had some space to set the basic atmosphere of the institution that strongly influenced the quality of the relationships formed there. All the care leavers I interviewed who were in regular children’s homes—being born sometime in the mid or end of the 1960s or the 1970s—attended local schools. We will see the relevance of this to their relatedness in the next chapters: for example Éva utilised the opportunity of being outside the children’s home to run home after school (Chap. 4) and it was through getting to know a child in care at school that Péter requested to go into care himself (Chap. 3). It could be unpopular with the parents of other school children that children in care attended the same school as their children, and Hanák (1978) reports that some schools had separate classes for children in care. A conversation with a Hungarian man who grew up in the same district as the children’s home of Ákos, albeit ten years later, comes to mind. He said that some parents boycotted what was seen as the ‘state care school.’ This was not an option in villages where the school was often reliant on the large children’s home for numbers. Zsolt was thus educated in the same classroom as the village children but depending on the teacher the children in care were sat in separate rows. Zsolt’s school interactions and the village setting are discussed in Chap. 5 as important arenas for personal relationships, but for now I introduce Zsolt more and two other care leavers.

Care Leaver Biographies In the short biographies of the three protagonists—Zsolt, Katalin and Károly—that I present next, we see how the child protection policies and the organisational structure of state care shaped their relational experiences. They were born shortly before the shift in policy in the early 1970s to focus on (financially) supporting the family and for Károly the concern of the Ministry of Education quoted above became real: it was not just that his younger siblings in care could not come home, but he had to join them. In presenting their lives here, I wish to avoid repetition in the following chapters by creating a place for the reader to refer back to. My aim is also to sate curiosity about what happened after care and to offer an outline through which their narratives can be seen. They represent a mix of care experiences coming into care at birth or aged eight with episodic or no parental contact; had from one to eight care placements; were in care in the countryside or in Budapest; and are now in different places in their life from being homeless to a single mother dependent on state benefits to self-employed and employing others. How state policies and local

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practices shaped their relationships to others is explored in detail in the following chapters. I provide a timeline for Zsolt (Fig. 2.2), Katalin (Fig. 2.3) and Károly (Fig. 2.4). The timelines are divided into periods of state support and family support. While presented as two separate lines it is important not to lose sight of the co-production of family and state relations and how the very unit of the state is produced and negated in interactions between state officials and families. I interviewed Zsolt four times in 2012 in February, March, June and November. My access to him was through a popular staff member at the homeless shelter where he lived. Zsolt

Born in 1974 in Somogy county, southwestern Hungary, Zsolt was the last of ten children, the youngest four of whom went into care at birth. In 1979 the foster parents of the four of them retired and five-­ year-­ old Zsolt and his one-year-older brother moved to a boys’ home in the village that I call Délifalva, while his two sisters were placed in a girls’ home in the city. Zsolt’s children’s home was in the nationalised castle of the family I name Dúzsy and he refers to the home not by its proper name, simply as ‘Dúzsy.’ Zsolt was at Dúzsy from 1979 until 1988 for all eight years of school. Aged 14 he followed his brother to the city of Kaposvár to start a locksmith course, but soon dropped out. Just before his 15th birthday on the suggestion of boys from his year group at Dúzsy he moved to Budapest for a three-year training course as a tanner in the same leather factory as them. After receiving his qualification, he completed compulsory military service for a year. He was discharged from the army in 1993 and went back to the leather factory, but did not like the work anymore and left. In 1994 he returned to Kaposvár. He secured a job at a military base from 1995 to 2001. Zsolt met his former partner in 1996. They separated for a year in 1998, but she looked him up again and when she fell pregnant they decided to move in together. In 2000 their first child was born. At Zsolt’s insistence their son gained a brother in 2003. Their rowing got worse and they broke up shortly after their second child arrived. She stayed with the children in Kaposvár in their local government flat and Zsolt moved in May 2004 into a homeless shelter in Budapest where he was still living when I met him in 2012.

Until 5 at foster parents together with 4 siblings

Fig. 2.2  Zsolt timeline

Born in 1974. Youngest of 10 children, last 4 in state care since birth

1974

FAMILY

1974

STATE

1979-1988 at the children’s home in Dúzsy Castle in Délifalva together with his brother István

1979 1992 military service

1988 finished compulsory education. Moved to Kaposvár for vocational training as locksmith but soon quit. Lived at GYIVI

1989-1991 moved to Budapest. 3 years vocational training as . a tanner Lived in workers’ hostel

1989

1992

1988

1993 went back to the leather factory to work

1993

1996 got together with his partner 1998 split up for a year 2000 Máté born 2003 Dániel born Afterwards separated

1995-2001 worked at military base

1994 moved back to Kaposvár

1994

2015

2003

2015

2003 2004-2015 local govt. provided Estranged from his family a flat for the family Living in a homeless shelter in Budapest

2003

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Zsolt was one of 3657 children under three who entered state care in 1974 (Siklós 1983: 171). As described above, the policy was seemingly to take the youngest out of a struggling family, which in this case was Zsolt and the three siblings closest in age to him. The lack of foster carers in Hungary at the end of the 1970s meant that when his foster parents retired in 1979, replacement fosterers were not found to take over the care of the four of them. In total, there were 8679 children in foster care that year, representing 26 percent of all children in care. The single sex organisation of most children’s homes led to Zsolt and his brother being separated from their two sisters upon switching from foster care to residential care. Figure 2.2 visually highlights that Zsolt has spent more than half his life in some form of state institution. He was from age 0 to 18 under child protection measures and from age 30 to 41 supported by the state’s provisions for homeless people. There is remarkable stability in his life with nine years at the Dúzsy home and eleven years in the same homeless shelter. He told me that he is not homeless because he does not sleep rough. His statement reflects that living in state care is seen as more acceptable for children than adults because as a child at Dúzsy he was not deemed homeless. He was assigned this label as an adult living again in state residential care (the shelter). I got to meet Katalin in February 2013 through the research relations of my doctoral supervisor Tatjana Thelen. Katalin

The youngest of ten children, Katalin was born in Szabolcs-Szatmár county in 1968 and grew up from birth in state care, as had the three siblings closest in age to her. By the time she was 14 she had moved eight times between six children’s homes and one stay in foster care that ended due to violence. The first seven placements were in her home county, the last in Szolnok county. After finishing compulsory education, she moved to a small town where she undertook vocational training (szakmunkásképző) in a factory. Katalin was 18 when she met her first partner on the shop floor. They moved in together and in 1986 her first child was born. Three months later they moved to the village where her partner had (continued)

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(continued) grown up. Their second child was born in 1993, followed by a third in 1995. The family home belonged to her partner and it remained his when they separated in the late 1990s. She and the children moved into social housing, where she still lived in 2013 at the time of our interview. Katalin works in the fields when there is need for agricultural help. In 2007 Katalin had another son with her new partner, who soon after becoming a couple moved into the apartment next door. Each of the four apartments in the row consist of one room and a small kitchen. Heated by a wood stove, there is no piped water and the residents share an outdoor toilet. In the late 1990s as a very low income single mother the possibility that Katalin’s children might be taken into care was always on her mind. Katalin desperately wanted to keep her children with her, but this was mingled with the awareness that their home does not have such basic material comforts as running water and an inside toilet. Remembering the annual holidays she had as a child to Lake Balaton, she said in a strong clear voice that ‘I would not be able to pay that for my children. Nothing’ and then broke-­ down in tears. Legally poverty alone does not put Katalin’s children at risk of state care. Under Article 7(1) of the Child Protection Act of 1997 a child shall not be separated from its family exclusively on account of endangerment prevailing from material reasons, but this did little to assuage her fears. Katalin was six years old when regular financial assistance for very low income families (RNS) was introduced in 1974. It came too late for her own mother to try to apply for RNS to keep Katalin at home. Katalin’s high number of placements reflects the structure of the residential care system that mirrored the Hungarian school system. She was in a home for babies, a home for kindergarten children, a home for the lower classes of school, a home for the upper classes of school and in a home for apprentices. Figure 2.3 shows that up until Katalin was fourteen she lived in villages in Szabolcs county and in particular in three castles. Chapter 5 explores her longing for Héldy Castle in Bakod (both fictional names) and her strong identity as from Szabolcs and not Szolnok county where she has lived since 1982.

Aged 4 placed with foster parents. Taken back into care after 1 year as the couple beat her

Fig. 2.3  Katalin timeline

Born in 1968. Youngest of 10 children. 6 half-brothers at home, 3 siblings in state care. No contact with her mother or brothers at home

1968

FAMILY

Aged 5 met her 2 sisters (age 11 and 14) in Bakod. They soon left and no further contact

Briefly met her brother in care. Ran into him again by chance in 1984. No further contact

Baby home in a castle Kindergarten home in Héldy Castlein Bakod 1 year foster care placement Back to Bakod for school years 1-4 Different children’s home for years 5-6 Short stay in mixed-sex children’s home in a castle Back to children’s home for year 7

1968-1984 7 different care placements in villages

Living in Szabolcs-Szatmár county

In state care from birth

1968

STATE 1986

1986 state care ended at 18

After finishing started work in the same factory

Vocational training at a shoe factory . Lived in halls of residence for state care girls

2013

Met her partner in the factory 1988 Zoltán born Moved to the village of her partner 1993 Fanny born 1995 Rózsa born Separated from her partner 2007József born to a new partner

2013

Seen as the ‘problem family’ of the village by the city case worker

1997 moved into social housing with her children

1997

1986-1997

Living in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county

Year 8 in children’s home in the town Újháza

1982

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The biographical interview with Károly was actually supposed to be with his younger brother, László, who had agreed to meet me after his shift—he was working in Károly’s store—but had not turned up for work that day. The interview was arranged by a former children’s home director, Mr Németh, who had mentored László since being his state carer in the mid-1970s. Mr Németh knew both brothers from state care, but Károly less well. Károly was 16 when Mr Németh started as the director of the boys’ home he was in. When László did not show up for the interview in February 2012, Károly stepped in for his brother. Károly

Károly was born in 1963, the middle child of seven, and the last to partly grow up at home. His younger siblings, László and two sisters, went straight into care at birth. After Károly’s birth the family kept going for eight years. In 1971 it was over: the father was confined to bed due to his ill health and both parents drank. The four brothers living at home went into care. Károly was placed in a mixed-­ sex children’s home in Budapest, his siblings elsewhere. His parents never visited him. He heard that his father died in 1973 and that his mother had two further children. After finishing compulsory education, Károly lived in a home for boys undertaking vocational training. He trained as a men’s tailor and was allowed to remain in the boys’ home until 1981 aged 19. The next three years involved bouts of sleeping rough, alcohol abuse, glue sniffing and a short prison sentence. In 1986 he converted to Christianity and is still a practicing member. He met his wife at his church and they became parents in 1991. At the time of the interview he owned a store where he employed László. His older daughter was turning 21 and had just graduated from university, his younger daughter was 18 and his son would soon be 15. The preference of caseworkers to take newborns into care while leaving older children at home is reflected in all three biographies. There was an apparent point where any further children went into care—after child number four in Károly’s family. His younger siblings did not experience what it was like to be at home with two alcoholic parents and his father in

No further contact with his parents. His father died when he was 10. He heard his mother had more children

Fig. 2.4  Károly timeline

1981

Aged 15 moved to a boys’ home for vocational training as a men’s tailor. Finished in 1980 aged 18. Allowed to stay in the home until 19

1978

Met for the first time his younger siblings at state care sport fixtures. He tried to avoid them

The 7 siblings were in 6 institutions across Hungary

Was at a co-ed children’s home for children aged 3-18 in Budapest

Entered care aged 8 with his 3 older brothers as his parents were alcoholics

1971

Born in 1963, 1 of 7 children. Lived with his 3 older brothers at home, 3 younger siblings were in state care from birth

1963

FAMILY

1963

STATE

Chaotic 3 years after leaving state care. With no permanent registered address he could not get a bed at the workers’ hostel. Slept at various friends and on the streets

8 months in prison

6 months in the aftercare section of a children’s home

2012 owner of a store Employs his younger brother László in hisstore

Had their first child in1991 Second child in 1993 Third child in 1997

His wife is part of the same church

1986 converted to Christianity 25 years later still part of the church

2013

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ill health. I discuss in Chap. 4 how such shared experiences is important to forming sibling connections. When all seven children were in care just the two girls were in the same children’s home. The four youngest were in Budapest and Károly said he avoided them at city-wide events such as sport fixtures. He told me that it was important to him that his own children did not grow up like this; they should be welded together as siblings and have a strict upbringing without alcohol, discos and drugs. Károly was part of the youth ‘hooligan’ scene (jampecok, galeritagok) at the end of the 1970s in Budapest and Mr Németh, who was the director of Károly’s home at that time, gave this as an example of why the countryside with its nature and attached village control was the right place for children’s homes.3 In Chap. 1 I quoted Károly’s anger at not being allowed to remain in the children’s home past 19 years old and Fig. 2.4 shows that his precarious years after state care was when he had neither state nor family support. The responsibility of the children’s home for Károly had ended—he had reached the boundaries of state care. The difficulty for Károly was that in crossing this boundary he was in ‘no man’s land.’ His well-being could not successfully be domained as up to his family because he was not in contact with any relatives, who could have provided him with a permanent registered address—a legal requirement in Hungary that was needed to get a space in a workers’ hostel, which I discuss in Chap. 4. From these three biographies we can see that life stories are complex with great variation in risk, finances and family relations over time. At 19 for three years Károly was living on-and-off on the streets and in prison, while when I met him at age 49 he owned his own store and his oldest daughter had just finished university. Zsolt at 18 wished to change jobs and move back to Kaposvár, which he managed. He had a flat, a partner and two children up until he was 30. It was only when his relationship with his partner broke down that the story he was in would seem to change. Similarly with Katalin it was only when she separated from her partner that she came to be in social housing and a single mother reliant on state welfare. These insights complicate static categorisations of young people leaving care as ‘strugglers,’ ‘survivors’ and those who ‘move on’ (Stein 2012).

3  For the connection in Hungary between care leavers and youth revolts as part of the 1968 movement, see Sándor Horváth’s book Kádár gyermekei [Kádár’s children] (2009).

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The Quality Control of Parenthood Early socialist governments expected child protection to become obsolete as poverty and deviance faded away under the new political and economic order. When problems persisted it was parents seen as failing their children. Paradoxically, at a time of increasing prosperity under the Kádár regime and dramatically low birth rates, the number of children in state care steadily increased, hinting at an uneven distribution of the higher living standards and that parents in ‘problematic’ families were no longer seen as best prepared to raise their children. In 1975, 1.4 percent of all children in Hungary were institutionalised (Haney 2002: 117) making the experiences of state care and its effects on relationships not just those of a few. In a parallel development to much of the western world, expert knowledge on ‘proper’ education and childhood led to ever more state activity in parent-child relations. Mothers applying for financial support had to demonstrate that they were ‘good’ mothers according to state standards and were obliged to meet with teachers and family psychologists for help in raising their children. As I explore in the next chapter, that this was not seen as an undue intrusion into family life needed to be negotiated and made boundary work necessary.

References Árokszállási, É. (1986). Szülőkre várva [Waiting for Parents]. Budapest: Népszava. Domszky, A. (1994). A gyermek- és ifjúságvédelem rendszere Magyarországon [The Child and Youth Protection System in Hungary]. In L.  Csókay, A.  Domszky, V.  Hazai, & M.  Herczog (Eds.), A gyermekvédelem nemzetközi gyóorlata [International Child Protection Practices] (pp. 270–328). Budapest: Pont Kiadó. Gál, I. (2007). A közigazgatás feladatkörébe utalt gyermekvédelem Szabolcs és Szatmár Vármegyében, 1867–1950 [State Provided Child Protection in Szabolcs and Szatmár County, 1867–1950]. Nyíregyháza: Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Megyei Múzeumok Igazgatósága. Gáti, F. (1986). Visszaemlékezések a hazai gyermek- és ifjúságvédelem felszabadulás utáni évtizedeire. Gáti Ferenc előadása [Reminiscences of Domestic Child and Youth Protection Decades After the Liberation. A Lecture by Ferenc Gáti] (Vol. 1, pp. 34–43). Gyermek- és Ifjúságvédelem. Hanák, K. (1978). Társadalom és gyermekvédelem [Society and Child Protection]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

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Haney, L. (2002). Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hegedűs, J. (2009). Kinderschutz der 50er Jahre [Child Protection in the 1950s]. In A. Németh & E. Skiera (Eds.), Lehrerbildung in Europa. Geschichte, Struktur und Reform [Teacher Training in Europe. History, Structure and Reforms] (pp. 79–86). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Hering, S. (2009). Introduction. In S.  Hering (Ed.), Social Care under State Socialism 1945–1989 (pp.  11–23). Barbara Budrich: Opladen and Farmington Hill. Horváth, S. (2009). Kádár gyermekei. Ifjúsági lázadás a hatvanas években [Kádár’s Children. Youth Gangs in the 1960s]. Budapest: Nyitott Könyvműhely Kiadó. Járó, M. (1961, October 5–6). A gyermek- és ifjúságvédelem mai helyzete [The Situation of Child and Youth Protection Today]. In A gyermekvédelmi konferencia előadási és vitaanyaga [Discussion and Presentations at the Child Protection Conference] (pp. 13–53). Kerezsi, K. (1995). A védtelen gyermek (Erőszak és elhanyagolás a családban) [The Defenceless Child. Violence and Neglect in the Family]. Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal. (2001) Demográfia adatok 1.13 A népesség fontosabb korcsoport és nemek szerint, 1870–2001 [Demographic Facts. Table  1.13. Population by Important Age Groups and Sex, 1870–2001]. Budapest: Central Statistical Office. Népszabadság. (1983, November 26). Az állami gondozásról [About State Care]. Népszabadság newspaper, pp. 9–11. Oktatási Minisztérium [Ministry of Education]. (1976). Mit kell tudni az állami gondozásról [What You Need to Know About State Care], Brochure, Budapest. Rákó, E. (2010). Gyermekvédelmi intézményekben elhelyezett gyerekek élet körülményeinek vizsgálata [A Study of the Life Circumstances of Children Placed in Child Protection Institutions]. PhD dissertation, Debrecen University, Hungary. Siklós, L. (1983). Gyerekek veszélyben [Children in Danger]. Dabas: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó. Stein, M. (2012). Young People Leaving Care: Supporting Pathways to Adulthood. London: Jessica Kingsley. Szenes, É. (1983, October 20). Gondozottak gondjai [Problems of Children in Care], Hírlap newspaper, p. 20. Valuch, T. (1998/99). Toward the Middle Classes  – With Detours? (Social Changes in Hungary 1945–1995). Hungarian Studies, 13(1), 139–149. Varga, A. (2012). Gyermekvédelem és iskola [Child Protection and School]. Budapest: Virágmandula. Varsa, E. (2011). Gender, “Race”/Ethnicity, Class and the Institution of Child Protection in Hungary, 1949–1956. PhD dissertation, Central European University, Hungary.

CHAPTER 3

Negotiating Care Between Parents and State Officials

In August 1976 a mother on maternity leave wrote in eight short sentences to the regional district council that her current income was insufficient to look after her three children born in 1961, 1966 and 1974. She requested regular financial assistance through the RNS provision introduced in 1974 to prevent children from very low income families going into care purely due to financial problems. An assessment of their home life was prepared by a caseworker from their village state office outlining that the applicant was paying instalments for the one room house that she had recently bought and that since the birth of her third child she was not receiving child maintenance payments from her husband – who was not the father of the youngest child – or anyone else. Their house was in a very bad condition and the kitchen was missing furniture. There was no separate sleeping place for the children and their clothes were threadbare. The district medical officer certified that the children were healthy and free from infectious diseases. The next document in the case file dated October 1976 was from the director of the child protection institution (GYIVI) recommending a voluntary place in care for her youngest child on the basis of a talk with the mother: ‘By doing this we would really be able to help the family because the mother will be able to go and work after the placement of her little girl.’ A week later the mother went to the regional district council to say that she had been too hasty. She had agreed to the state care of her youngest daughter, but had reconsidered since then and decided that ‘I would not at all part from my children. My children are very attached to me. They cling to me and I to them.’ She © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rasell, Care of the State, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49484-1_3

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asked for RNS and for clothes, which would put her in a position to care for her children at home. The record of this meeting signed by the mother states that her second child, currently in year three at school, should go into care when he reaches the fifth grade because he needs to attend a special school and there was no such school locally. The last entry in the case file was two years later: the mother petitioned the regional district council to ask that RNS benefits continue to be paid and that her son should ‘win’ [sic] a place in state care. The mother in the case above was one of the 6873 clients in Hungary in 1976 who was granted regular financial assistance (Horváth 1982: 240)—less than half of applicants for RNS were successful from 1974 to 1979 (Haney 2002: 111). This chapter will look at the ideas and norms in the case files about ‘proper’ parenting and ‘appropriate’ family units used by state officials when deciding whether parents were ‘worthy’ of RNS, thus keeping children in the care of their parents. My findings will show how different images of the state and families shaped the relationships and outcomes between various state officials and families. I follow the proposal by Thelen et  al. (2018)—outlined in Chap. 1—to explore the linkages between multiple and sometimes competing images of the state and practices within the state sector through the analytical concepts of relational modalities, embeddedness and boundary work. We will see that images of the family varied systematically according to the professional body that the state official was embedded in and that some officials, like in the case file above, envisaged the family as an economic unit and thus supported mothers returning to paid employment (by offering a state care placement) while other state actors associated the family with social control or child development and followed instead a mother-at-home policy (keeping the child at home). The role of state images and boundary work in determining the implementation of central state policy will be demonstrated in how teachers and employers tried to resist a reformulation of state boundaries that would include them in child protection tasks. I begin this chapter by first exploring the different organisations and levels of the state welfare bureaucracy in late socialist Hungary and what this meant for interactions between parents and state actors on child protection. I then focus on the various images of the family and of ‘proper’ parenting that could be seen in assessments and interventions by caseworkers on gendered roles in economic provision, on the role of grandparents in childcare, and in evaluations of parents around housing issues, educational issues and parental discipline. In the third section I look at

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negotiations between families and caseworkers in the child protection services, the Gyámhatóság, which highlight state care was not always prompted by state officials. It could also be the result of actions by families trying to harness state care for their own aims. The analysis in this chapter is based on Gyámhatóság case files from the late 1970s and early 1980s from Somogy county and statistics on the grounds for state care. Overall, the chapter shows a responsibilisation of parents for raising children ‘properly’ and demonstrates the translation of overlapping, at times contradicting, norms of parenting into practices of state care that shaped the relationships that children had.

Multiple Layers, Images and Modalities of the State The case files in my analysis show multiple meetings with parents at the local state office over child welfare, petitions for support and appeals of decisions of the Gyámhatóság that went to higher instances. In the previous chapter I discussed state infrastructure (policies, regulations and institutions) around child protection, highlighting the intensified state engagement with parenting through the provision of new financial assistance and expert advice. Here I move to focus on the everyday practices of staff who worked in these different institutions that make up the multiple layers of ‘the state.’ I will show how the local state was at times perceived by parents as uncaring and humiliating and a professional mode of interaction with caseworkers was wished for. The seemingly rather unsuccessful attempts of central state policy to include schools and workplaces in child protection will point to the limits of state intervention in family life and therefore contested images of the state. In Hungary state services were organised at different levels: in increasing order of size, village [község], municipality [város], regional district [járás] and county [megye]. Information compiled by staff at village state offices was passed on to the child protection services, the Gyámhatóság, at the municipal administrative department (igazgatási osztály) to take a decision on cases. Appeals of decisions were heard by the regional district and the county Gyámhatóság. The highest decision body was the county secretary (titkár). Each county had at least one child protection institution (Gyermek és Ifjúságvédő Intézet—GYIVI) that temporarily housed children at risk while a decision was taken about whether state care was necessary and a place found in foster care or a children’s home. The Gyámhatóság assigned a support worker, a pártfogó, to families whose behaviour did not

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meet society’s norms and expectations. The pártfogó provided parents with care advice, met regularly with the children and informed the Gyámhatóság about the results at least every three months. On the basis of reports by the pártfogó, the Gyámhatóság decided whether to stop the supervision or whether other measures (such as being taken into care) were required. It could be a full-time position or a voluntary responsibility taken on by people of high standing in the community. The number of letters in the case files suggest that parents preferred to write to state officials rather than appear in person due to the time needed off work to visit, offices not always being local, caseworkers perceived as unsympathetic and anxiety about outcomes. Those who went to the Gyámhatóság office tended to be summoned there, illiterate as evidenced by a cross for a signature in the documents or not confident at expressing themselves on paper. For instance, as one simple (his own description) sugar factory worker put it in a letter in 1976 to the county Gyámhatóság: ‘I would like it if you could hear me in person because I cannot write what I think.’1 Lynne Haney’s analysis of Hungarian family services describes how workers at the child guidance centre (Nevelési Tanácsadó Központ), which were established in 1968 to address child development and parenting problems, distinguished themselves as a group from Gyámhatóság workers who they often referred to as ‘amateurs’—as ‘untrained, uneducated, and unskilled women who were unable to grasp clients’ complex problems’ (Haney 2002: 119). This reflects that images of the state could be specific to different state entities. Differences in practices and images of the state also existed within the same institution between local and higher-level officials. For instance, reservations about the professionalism of staff in a village office were implied in the instructions in 1978 by the director of the Siófok regional district Gyámhatóság. He reminded the village director that the re-assessment of the home circumstances of a teenage girl in care should be carried out ‘with the greatest care and attention because if I discover that there were any breaches of duty I will take the necessary steps to hold you responsible.’2 The local council in question was at that time responsible for four villages with just under 4500 inhabitants in total. We 1  Gyámhatóság case file 3020/1976 Handwritten letter by Mr. Csonka to the county Gyámhatóság, Kaposvár, 1 December 1976. 2  Gyámhatóság case file 618/1980 Communication regarding the follow-up assessment of the state care of Éva by the director of the Siófok Gyámhatóság, 18 April 1978.

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do not know what led the director in Siófok to emphasise that due care should be taken, but it is something that was not present in his instructions to other village offices. This image of lower rungs of the state as unprofessional was presented in one case where the mother went straight to a higher-level authority. She appeared at the county Gyámhatóság in 1981 and declared ‘I do not wish to go to the Kaposvár municipal Gyámhatóság and make my appeal there because, with respect, the caseworker does not pay attention to what I say and ridicules me, and they laugh if I cry.’3 In this case the office of the municipal and county Gyámhatóság was in the same city, making it a viable option for the mother to bypass the municipal level and go straight to the county Gyámhatóság. While interactions at the lower levels could be humiliating, local could equally mean more approachable, informal and more understanding. Local state officials in villages often had a deep and personal knowledge about most inhabitants with whom they shared and would continue to share life with in the village. The case files show local child protection officials outlining the next steps and consequences of non-compliance more plainly than the legalese used by higher-up bureaucrats or in the decisions of the Gyámhatóság. My data hints that ‘off-state’ proximity was one mode of caseworkers relating to families. ‘Off-state activities’ is a term coined by Franz von Benda-Beckmann and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann (1998) in relation to how state actors in rural Indonesia are called upon by their relatives to draw on their state position in private settings. I am using their concept in a different way to highlight how knowledge acquired in private settings as a neighbour or through village gossip is used then in ‘on-state’ activities such as deciding whether a home environment is suitable for children to be returned to their parents. Another example of ‘on-state’ activities based on the private interaction of officials was the agreement between two children’s home directors that led to a child with mild brain damage, Béla, being transferred from a special home to a regular children’s home. The director I interviewed emphasised that ‘It was just between the two of us. It was not a system. We agreed that if a child demonstrated that he could do more than the rest of the group, we transferred the child across.’ This is an example of spaces of freedom from state policies generated and used by the two directors as agents of the state. 3  Gyámhatóság case file 3020/1981 Appeal regarding the state care of the minor Ferenc by his mother at the office of the county Gyámhatóság, 29 June 1981.

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The case files show that the use of bureaucratic tools such as a school report was a way for families to shape their interaction and relationship with state officials (cf Street 2012). In the case of the mother who went straight to the county Gyámhatóság because she did not find the local caseworker responsive, she used the positive school report of her son in order to be heard. She was appealing the decision to keep her son in care. She stated that her son’s school report was …all 4s [5 being the highest grade]. I didn’t see it but received the information from a carer and the director too. They said that there was no problem with my son. He had changed for the better and that the children’s home would recommend ending state care if I wanted it. That is why it is not understandable to me that the Gyámhatóság rejected my application referring to the opinion of the children’s home.

The Gyámhatóság had based its decision to keep Ferenc in care on a recommendation from the children’s home written six months earlier. Her son’s behaviour and school grades had since improved. While the Gyámhatóság had a duty to check at least once a year whether the circumstances requiring state care remained,4 this boy’s mother tried to make state officials act sooner using the school report. The school report made it harder to dismiss her appeal and convinced the director of the Gyámhatóság to ask for an update from the children’s home. The director of the children’s home confirmed that there had been a big improvement in Ferenc’s behaviour and agreed that his further stay in state care was unnecessary. In Chap. 1 I proposed conceiving of the state as a Rubik’s cube. Such a conceptualisation of the state grasps the state as a process and the multi-layered nature of the state seen in this example. It took several rotations of the different micro-cubes—the school that issued the school report, the staff at the children’s home who the mother spoke with, the mother who went to the Gyámhatóság—to solve the Rubik’s cube puzzle in a way that Ferenc was allowed home. Looking at the implementation of the reforms in 1974 to the Family Law (for more on the reforms, see Chap. 2) reveals how boundary work 4  Under Para 115(2) of Decree No. 1 from 27 June 1974 (Ministry of Education) the Gyámhatóság was under a duty to check at least once a year that the circumstances requiring state care were ongoing (both the home environment and within state care) and whether the contribution to costs of state care that parents had to pay was set at the correct level—maximum 20% of the average monthly income of the parents calculated separately for each parent.

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and thus images of the state permeated interactions between state officials and state intermediaries over surveillance into family life. The reforms introduced a series of measures that attempted to enlarge the scope of child protection to include actors previously outside this realm. Thus, teachers came under an obligation to report to the Gyámhatóság cases where they suspected a child was endangered at home. My findings show that shifts in central policies would only trickle down to the different layers of the state with some delay and needed to be supported by local actors. For instance, it was four years after the reform that joint guidelines between the Somogy Department of Education and the Somogy Gyámhatóság setting out how the two organisations should work together on child protection were issued. The guidelines emphasised the mutual obligation to provide information about children at risk. A case from 1980 concerning the ten-year-old boy Szilárd demonstrates that agencies in the education sector had formally implemented this policy change, but that it was not anchored or accepted in the work of all teachers. The Gyámhatóság was not informed by Szilárd’s school or the kindergarten of his two younger sisters that the staff saw signs of the children having been regularly beaten. There was an appointed staff member at both institutions to deal with child protection issues (this was a remunerated post), but the observations of school staff were only shared when the Gyámhatóság specifically requested information about the children. In a report by the director of the county Gyámhatóság on lessons to be learned from this case, he reiterated that schools and kindergartens were ‘arms of the state’ and were under a duty to be involved in child protection.5 For the director, places of education were unambiguously part of the state on child protection issues, but this image of the state seemed to be contested by the actors in this case and contributed to the children remaining for years in a violent situation. In the development of child protection in the 1974 reforms, the central state envisioned a larger role for workplaces. The Gyámhatóság could inform an employer, the relevant trade union or the residents’ committee (lakóbizottság) about a family’s circumstances and ask for support in monitoring parents. Not all employers cooperated, however, with the Gyámhatóság, creating an ambiguity about whether or not employers were part of the state on child protection issues and thus a blurring of the state’s 5  Gyámhatóság case file 4113/1980 Report by the head of the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 3 November 1980.

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boundaries. A former director of the Fót children’s town, Dr. Lajos Barna, speaking on a panel about state care arranged by the newspaper Népszabadság said: ‘For instance it is scarcely possible to persuade a workplace director to record information in a quality control process about the chaotic [zilált] private life of staff who cannot look after their family. They say that it is not their concern’ (Népszabadság 1983: 11). At a minimum the Gyámhatóság could ask an employer to remove the family allowance (családi pótlék) from a father’s wages and pay it directly to the mother. Such a request was made to one agricultural co-operative in 1979 in relation to Mr. Vass. The father of three went through a string of workplaces in the nine months of the case file with the Gyámhatóság informing each employer of Mr. Vass’ alcohol problems and family life details. For example, the director of the Gyámhatóság wrote to the president of a farmers’ co-operative that Mr. Vass was under local police surveillance, that his wife had left him and that he had appeared at the wife’s new address and frightened the children. He requested that ‘the educative strength of the collective be used to deter Mr. Vass.’6 This quote demonstrates that the director saw the workplace as part of the state on child protection issues and therefore such details about the private life of an employee could be shared between state entities. In sum, the different organisations and levels of the state welfare bureaucracy offered a variety of relational modalities ranging from professionalism to proximity that at times blurred the boundaries between the public and private spheres. This could be of advantage to children that local caseworkers might be well informed of their family history, but equally could be perceived as an undue intrusion into their family life. It is important to look at relational modalities to understand the individual quality of relations between parents and caseworkers at local and higher levels. The next section will explore the various images of the family that different organisations held, which led to different priorities and thus created room to manoeuvre for parents over forms of state support. My findings show that boundary work was required in trying to enact more control functions on workplaces and educational facilities, who could sometimes resist a reformulation of their duties. Thus, we see the limits of state interference in family life when actors excluded themselves from the 6  Gyámhatóság case file 1403/1979 Letter from the director of the Siófok Gyámhatóság to the president of an agricultural cooperative, 6 November 1979.

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state. This points to the importance of looking at the state as a process and as made in the interactions with families because it complicates singular and homogenising descriptions of welfare interventions.

State Images of the Family and Assessments of Parenting The Gyámhatóság case files reveal a clear emphasis on increasing the family income as the way to solve problems with children. In this section I will explore how state images of the family by child protection workers focussed on household finances and thus bringing mothers back into paid employment. We will see that state images of ‘appropriate’ family units changed and became critical of the role of grandparents in childcare. After having looked at images of what families should be, I turn to statistics on the grounds for state care placements and the images of parents that the different categories reflected. This then brings my attention to norms of ‘proper’ parenting that caseworkers assessed in their decisions of whether to grant very low income families regular financial assistance (RNS) and over state care placements. The decision to award RNS benefits to a family prevented children from entering state care purely due to poverty and thus the criteria to judge whether parents were ‘worthy’ of RNS was highly relevant to the family relationships of children. The Molnár case from 1979 exemplifies how caseworkers at the Gyámhatóság often prioritised a family’s attempt to improve their economic situation over other family roles. The two older Molnár boys aged 8 and 11 were engaging in theft and the parents admitted that they could not supervise them during the day because they both worked.7 Nowhere on file is the mother faulted for ignoring the needs of her children or advised to leave her job or reduce her hours. At a meeting at the Gyámhatóság the father said that they were saving to buy a house and that he was for work in Budapest and not living with his family. The image of the ‘proper’ family projected by the father was of providing materially for the children. This image seemed to be shared by the caseworker who perceived the parents as ‘deserving’ because they were both working and aimed to improve their poor housing conditions. In other cases mothers were severely criticised for not taking on occasional work, such as Mrs. 7  Gyámhatóság case file 652/1980 Minutes of a meeting regarding the endangerment of the Molnár minors, 16 August 1979.

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Horváth.8 The disabled mother had eight children, born one a year from 1964 to 1971. Due to the mother’s disability all of the children were in daycare. The caseworker insinuated that the mother was ‘lazy’ because she did not wish to work despite the monthly family income being only 740 forints. Her parenting methods were not discussed in the file. All comments focused on the parents failing to provide financially for their children. I started this chapter with the director of the child protection institution (GYIVI) offering to put the young child of a separated mother into care ‘to help the family’ by enabling the mother to get back into paid employment. The mother was in her second year on maternity leave and received 1010 forints a month maternity leave grant (GYES).9 Her monthly salary as a cleaner had been 1400 forints. Returning to her job would mean an increase of the household budget by roughly a third. A comparison with Haney’s analysis of case files from the Child Guidance Centre (Nevelési Tanácsadó Központ) suggests that this prioritisation of family finances was not shared by educational counsellors. Haney uncovered a ‘GYES effect’ on decisions by education counsellors about whether children were ready to start school. She found that women who remained on GYES for at least two years were twice as likely to have their children pass the school entrance exam required of all children and be placed in a normal or advanced group (Haney 2002: 120). Mothers returning to work were criticised and she describes the disapproval of a counsellor in 1976 that a mother did not accompany her child to tutoring sessions that conflicted with her work schedule. This mother was told ‘She must be more involved’ (Haney 2002: 121). Thus, different images about the role of the family were held by the newly appearing experts and the more long-­ established Gyámhatóság and GYIVI professionals based on their institutional embedding. As we saw, the mother in the case I discussed decided to remain on GYES. The strategy followed by the GYIVI director would increase the number of young children in care, while at the same time supported older children remaining at home through the extra wages, raising the family’s income and thereby reducing the risk of a state care placement due to lack of financial means to care for the children. 8  Gyámhatóság case file 638/1980. Notes of a visit to Mrs. Horváth’s home regarding the payment of RNS benefits, 27 March 1980. 9  This was 1976 when the maternity leave grant (GYES) provided six months of support equivalent to the mother’s salary and up to 2.5 additional years of support at a fixed rate.

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Images of what was considered ‘appropriate’ family by state actors changed over time. Haney argues that with the advent in 1974 of regular financial assistance for very low income families (RNS), caseworkers in the Gyámhatóság began to de-emphasise the extended family, which in the first two decades of socialism had been a much used resource to solve client’s childcare problems (Haney 2002: 116). State funds were now available to support ‘worthy’ parents and this help by grandparents became regarded as problematic by caseworkers. We saw this in the case of József discussed at the start of Chap. 1 in the refusal to allow his grandparents take him out of care in 1976. To manage this, they had to legally adopt him. Horváth’s study of RNS applications included a case where receiving RNS was made conditional on the grandfather moving out of his daughter’s flat (Horváth 1982: 251). In 1974, with 31% of families with three children and 44% of families with four children or more living in a one-­ room flat in Hungary (Horváth 1982: 284), it seems more is behind the objection to multigenerational households than a lack of space. Children being brought up by their grandparents while their parents were at work did not seem to fit the nuclear family ideal of most central policies coming in the 1970s. The new regulations on state care fees hint that the role of the extended family went from keeping children out of care to potentially funding care in state institutions. Paragraph 107 of Decree No. 1 from 27 June 1974 (Ministry of Education) held parents primarily liable for state care fees, but it fell to the grandparents or older siblings if the parents were dead or did not possess an income. This raised the question of whether the extended family could take the child out of care if they were asked to pay for state care. This question could only be decided empirically in each actual case, but more generally caseworkers worked to the ideal of the nuclear family and thus did not always find these relations appropriate and social security provisions did not support other relatives taking on this care. In one case from 1978 the file records a clarification from the municipal Gyámhatóság that the grandmother who was 40 and employed would not receive paid sick leave if her grandchild, Ilona, fell ill.10 Under these conditions, the grandparents felt they could not take on the responsibility for her care. They tried to get around this by requesting that Ilona’s 10  The system of paid sick leave was established in 1973 explicitly to protect mothers and ‘to permit them to fulfil the special responsibilities that accompany child rearing’ (Haney 2002: 281).

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placement with them end automatically if Ilona did fall sick and the grandma could not receive sick pay.11 The file does not contain the final decision of the county Gyámhatóság, but the case nevertheless illustrates how clients tried to find creative ways to reach their desired outcomes and how images of the ‘proper’ family that seemed to exclude grandparents shaped state practices and decisions. Changing state ideas about families can be seen in reforms to the family allowance system (családi pótlék). Family allowance was paid directly to the ‘head’ of large households, who had to be in full-time employment. The system was extended in 1968 to make students, home workers and part-­ time employees eligible and was now for families from two children upwards. In 1974 the head-of-household provision was replaced by a primary-­caretaker clause, making the allowance more accessible to separated and divorced mothers. An appeal system was also set up through which married women could have the allowance transferred to their wages and thus bypass their husbands (Haney 2002: 108), like we saw above in the Vass case. Thus, if a family did not fit the state image of an ideal family then financial support for the male breadwinner was shifted to the ‘caring person’ in the family. The cases discussed so far show multiple state images of what families should do that could vary depending on the institutional embedding of the professional. This contributed to contradictory advice by caseworkers at the Gyámhatóság and educational counsellors at the Nevelési Tanácsadó Központ about when mothers should return to work that could affect children being placed into care. I turn next to the state images of ‘failing’ families expressed in statistics on the reasons for state care placements and a discussion of caseworkers’ images of ‘proper’ parenting prevalent in child welfare interventions over RNS and institutionalisation of children. Grounds for State Care Statistics on the reasons why children came into care in Budapest in 1974 (presented in Table 3.1) and the circumstances documented in the Gyámhatóság case files present very different understandings of the family in state approaches to child welfare: one of moral decay and the other of poverty. The statistics created a tidy order out of the decisions of 11  Gyámhatóság case file 3988/1979  Minutes of a meeting regarding the state care of Ilona, 15 October 1979.

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Table 3.1  Grounds for being placed into care in Budapest, 1974

Grounds

Death Illness Divorce Prison Alcoholism Social situation Homelessness Abandonment Abuse Youth vagrancy Youth crime Other Total

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Taken into state care Number (of people)

Percentage

23 96 276 62 156 128 93 45 2 213 3 242 1339

1.7 7.2 20.6 4.6 11.7 9.6 6.9 3.3 0.2 15.9 0.2 18.1 100

Source: Budapest Fővárosi Tanács Végrehajtó Bizottsága [Executive committee of the Budapest municipal council], cited in Hanák 1978: 102–103

caseworkers, who generally offered multiple grounds for state care. Of main interest in Table 3.1 is less the actual figures than the categories of representation. The statistics did not explicitly include poverty, financial issues or unemployment as reasons for children entering state care that would have hinted to state failings. These problems were grouped into the vaguer category of ‘social situation.’ Moreover, rather than the broad category of housing issues that would have highlighted housing shortages and the poor quality of the housing stock, the table included the narrow category ‘homelessness.’ Interesting is also the order of the categories in the table, which seems to follow a logic of blameworthiness. Rather than in ascending order of the most common reason for placement in care, it is in ascending order of how much the parents were to blame from ‘death’ to ‘illness’ to ‘alcoholism’ to ‘abuse.’ Overall, the image that the table presents of the need for state care in late socialist Hungary was perceived parental failure and its association with a feared moral decay of society, as illustrated by ‘divorce’ being cited as the most frequent cause (20.6%) and that ‘youth crime’ (0.2%) was singled out despite the large category of ‘other reasons’ (18.1%). The high incidence of ‘divorce’ as a reason for a child to be

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placed in care shows how the image of the ideal family as having two parents found its way into bureaucratic practice. It served two purposes: to focus on family breakdown as regards high divorce rates and to deemphasise housing shortages, which the Gyámhatóság case files show was a frequent problem for divorced parents that they did not have a new place to stay that could accommodate children. This was the case for Mrs. Lengyel who returned to her parents’ flat in May 1981. She placed her daughter in care, but hoped that in August when her brother would move away from home to do military service her parents would give his room to her to raise her child.12 The content of the different grounds in Table  3.1 spills from one category to the next. For instance, ‘alcoholism’ (11.7%) likely contributed to the ground ‘prison’ and ‘abuse.’ A child protection specialist argued that children were most likely to be taken into care if it was the mother who had an alcohol addiction ‘not just [due to] the general opinion that judges alcoholic men more mildly than alcoholic women… [It reflects] rather the importance of women’s function in keeping the family together’ (Hanák 1978: 116).13 Gendered norms of parenting were abundantly clear in the assumptions a caseworker made in her home assessment of the divorced Mr. Csonka in 1976.14 He kept custody of his three children when their mother left in 1971. The caseworker’s first observation after stating that the father works in a factory was that the flat is adequately furnished, suggesting that he fulfils his role in providing financially for his family. The next sentence was that the cement floor of their home is dirty, but ‘probably he will marry again.’ She implied that the floor is dirty because he has no wife and that this will change when he remarries. In the meantime, the caseworker observed that the 13-year-old daughter looks after the household. The father’s statement that he regularly does laundry and looks after his children was met somewhat sceptically by the caseworker who adds in her notes ‘according to the father he regularly does laundry…’ (italics added by the author). The assessment operates with an image of the family in which it is the mother

 Gyámhatóság case file 3521/1981.  In the mid-1970s in 52.6% of cases where the child’s father was the alcoholic the parents were still living together. If it was the mother this dropped to 25.3%. Where both parents were alcoholics it was 78.3% (Hanák 1978: 117). 14  Gyámhatóság case file 4010/1979 Home visit report, 21 January 1976. 12 13

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(or mother substitute) who should take care of washing clothes, cooking and cleaning the flat. The images of crumbling family values and drunken parents that can be found in Table 3.1 did not always map onto the negotiations that caseworkers were having with families on the brink of state care. Caseworkers were interested in three main dimensions of family life: whether clients kept an ‘orderly,’ ‘appropriate’ flat, whether they invested in their child’s school development and whether they exhibited ‘secure’ parenting practices, which included the ‘right’ level of force. Housing Issues and Living Conditions State socialist Hungary had a housing shortage and most of the case files in my sample stated that the flat was in a bad to very bad condition. In 1960 political leader János Kádár announced the ‘First Fifteen-Year Construction Plan’ to build a million residences. The goal was indeed met, but only because 600,000 houses were built from private funds in the form of housing cooperatives. These were mainly in the countryside, whereas the state financed just 400,000 residences, most of these in the cities (von Klimó 2018: 105). Caseworkers at the Gyámhatóság seemed to take two approaches to the housing issues of clients, either putting the material problems to one side and assessing how clean and tidy the bad accommodation was kept or not getting past the condition of the house and faulting parents as irresponsible for raising children in such housing. In 1978 there were 413,000 applicants on the waiting list for council housing in Hungary, out of which 2000 lived in accommodation deemed to put their life at risk, and a further 20,000 in unhealthy living quarters.15 Cramped conditions did not seem overly problematic to caseworkers if domestic bliss prevailed. A home visit report in 1977 did not criticise that a family of six was living in a one-room flat. The 18m2 flat was ‘small,’ but more important was its ‘acceptable order,’ that the children had ‘a separate sleeping part’ and that there was bedding even if it ‘wasn’t exactly the cleanest.’ The caseworker at this state office in a village of under 500 inhabitants had a pragmatic take on the family sharing their flat with 15  This data is from the research programme A többoldalúan hátrányos helyzetű rétegek összetétele. A hátrányosság újratermelődésének okai [The composition of the many-sided disadvantaged strata. Causes of the reproduction of disadvantagement], cited in Horváth 1982: 284.

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piglets, simply remarking that ‘due to the time of the year [it was February] the piglets would have frozen outside.’16 Writing in support of ending state care in this case, the local school director emphasised that the family keep a lot of animals and poultry to ensure food and supplement their income. About the early 1970s, Valuch (1998/99: 144) wrote that commercial chains were so underdeveloped that rural households had to produce their own food and that selling the small surplus was an important part of their subsistence. The section on living conditions tended to be the most detailed in home assessments. A pedantic inventory lists not just the size of the flat and all items of furniture, but also the colour and subjective evaluations of the flat’s cleanliness and décor. As Golczyńska-Grondas (2014: 43) points out, the level of hygiene and tidiness of the household and its inhabitants was taken as synonymous of the ability of a family to cope despite a low income. A dirty, neglected flat was used as a marker of laziness and of problems different to poverty—of apathy, helplessness or alcohol addiction. The eligibility requirements for RNS excluded the ‘too poor’ who could not provide separate beds for their children or a study corner. The case files contain comments like ‘The Gyámhatóság sees no obstacles to RNS being paid once the housing situation is solved’ (Horváth 1982: 254, italics added by the author). A bad flat was an exclusion ground because it was seen as irresponsible to bring up children if a family had no ‘appropriate’ accommodation. This marked the family out as undeserving. Hungarian sociologist Zsuzsa Ferge (1986: 275) suggested that behind this consideration was the value judgement that ‘if the family would make an effort, it [the inadequate living conditions] would already be solved.’ Housing could therefore be used to make families responsible—either parents secured housing and thus were responsible people or a child entered care, which was the ‘responsible’ thing to do. Educational Concerns A second focus of caseworker scrutiny of parents related to evidence of concern about the education of children, which often boiled down to an assessment of whether the children regularly went to school. Guidelines from the Ministry of Education in 1977 stated that RNS benefits should be ended if a child had two unexcused absences in the school year (Horváth  Gyámhatóság case file 33/1980 Home visit report, 28 February 1977.

16

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1982: 240). A family might thus receive RNS benefits for some children and not others. This lowered the family income putting all the minors at risk of state care, as it is unlikely that the household budget was spent only on the ‘deserving’ children. Indeed, individual child-parent measures must be seen within wider family dynamics. There was a tension between expectations of state policies and officials that children attend school and parents expecting helping hands around the house and on household farms, especially where both parents worked. For instance, the class teacher of József noted in 1980 that ‘if both parents go to work at the same time, the housework and looking after the youngest falls to Ildikó and she misses out on school.’17 This was the case that I started this book with. József had been taken into care four years earlier because his parents mistreated him and caseworkers were now assessing whether he could return to them. They had qualms about his physical safety, while the schoolteacher who knew the family personally had educational concerns, but not seemingly for him, but his sister. In her eyes, 13-year-old Ildikó was the most endangered in the family and not her younger brother. József’s family had moved from their one-room 18m2 house to a three-room house with a kitchen in a separate building, vegetable plot and outhouses for pigs and chickens. Both parents now worked, which caseworkers saw as easing the family’s financial circumstances and as one factor in the parents now being ‘calmer’ and thus less likely to lash out at József. Yet, the teacher felt the mother starting paid work precisely jeopardised Ildikó’s schooling because someone had to look after the toddler, cook and clean. In the different assessments of the mother’s return to paid work, we see not only that different professionals held different viewpoints about family priorities but also how parent-child relations were not the same within one family. The value placed on undisturbed schooling was exemplified in a decree by the Ministry of Education from 1974 that stated that state care could only be ended in special cases before the end of the school year.18 It did not count as a special case in October 1980 when a divorced mother managed to get her aggressive ex-husband to move out. The court had dissolved the parents’ marriage in March that year, but against the legal judgement the father had not left the joint flat months later. This led to 17  Gyámhatóság case file 1203/1978 Assessment of the home environment by József’s class teacher, 13 January 1980. 18  Para 117(2) of Decree No. 1 from 27 June 1974 of the Ministry of Education.

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quarrels that escalated into physical fights and the two older children attempted to commit suicide through an overdose of medicine. Due to this the four minors were taken into care. The mother expected that her children would now be allowed home because the flat was appropriate and she had a regular income. To her dismay her children had, as she put it, been ‘made of the state’ (államosítani).19 Her appeal heard by the county Gyámhatóság was rejected. The caseworker acknowledged the changed circumstances, but suspected that this was not permanent and emphasised that the children needed ‘a quiet, undisturbed environment in which to study.’20 State care could only be terminated at the end of the school year (it was currently December) if her circumstances were still appropriate, but not before. This case shows that securing the stable education of children in order that they passed the end-of-year exams and could move up a class was an important goal of caseworkers at the Gyámhatóság and meant for families that they could expect children would remain in care until the summer break regardless of the home situation. Depending on when in the school year children entered care this could mean a long time separated from their parents and potentially other siblings. Issues of Parental Discipline A third area where caseworkers delineated ‘good’ parental practices from ‘bad’ ones was over the use of physical punishment in disciplining children. The case files suggest that mothers as well as (or indeed rather than) fathers were the ones responsible for physically punishing children. Indeed, in the context of late Soviet culture, Catriona Kelly suggests that ‘wait till your mother gets home’ might be the more apt adage, though fathers, where living with the family, were still expected to deal with the most recalcitrant cases (Kelly forthcoming). Likewise in 1980s Poland, sociological discourses on domestic violence developed around two distinct categories: abuse that was associated with a degenerate alcoholic and excessive punishment which was viewed as the actions of a violent mother (Klich-­ Kluczewska 2014). 19  Gyámhatóság case file 4256/1980 Handwritten appeal to the Gyámhatóság, undated. The verb államosítani is difficult to translate into English. It is comparable to the German verstaatlichen. To say ‘nationalised’ or ‘made state property’ conveys other aspects that are not implied in the Hungarian. 20  Gyámhatóság case file 4256/1980 Decision regarding state care by the director of the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 19 December 1980.

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The boundaries of what counted as excessive punishment shift over time and space, as well as varying locally (see Lareau 2011 on how social class shapes parenting practices). What was unacceptable within state care might excite less interest from caseworkers in families. A caseworker’s assessment in 1976 of Mr. Csonka, the single father with three children discussed above, states that he ‘only beats his children when it is necessary, e.g. during the summer he hit his son for staying out for days and vagrancy [csavargás].’21 The family’s support worker (pártfogó) reported that Mr. Csonka ‘does not go too far over the accepted level of physical punishment.’ Physical reprimands were deemed ‘cruel’ by family experts at Child Guidance Centres (Haney 2002: 127); however, teachers might have had some sympathy for parental discipline (which I discuss in Chap. 5), and there was also a significant group of parents who saw physical punishment as an acceptable way of exercising parental authority. A caseworker wrote in 1980 about a client’s parenting techniques, ‘Mrs Kalányos and her partner treat the child appropriately. They do not hit the children,’ as if this was the expectation.22 It is not clear whether the caseworker’s expectation that Mrs. Kalányos hits her children was due to her image of violent parenting practices among Roma families or more general expectations about childcare techniques. The point at which Mr. Csonka exceeded his authority to physically punish his children came in 1979 when his nine-year-old son was taken into care as ‘several times while drunk he hit the child to the extent that medical attention was required.’23 Caseworkers alternated between assessing individual child-parent relations and assessing the family as a unit. This meant that a decision to remove a child due to the brutality of the parents did not necessarily put a black mark against the parents’ names concerning their other children. Such was the case with five-year-old József, who we met at the start of this book. His parents hit him and tore out his hair, yet his three siblings were left in their care. Interestingly, when a child was taken into care due to what was perceived by caseworkers and officials as the child’s wild or immoral behaviour, this was generalised into unsound parenting practices and children could be taken into care to prevent them turning out like 21  Gyámhatóság case file 3020/1976 Notes on a home visit to Mr. Csonka by the head caseworker at the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 21 January 1976. 22  Gyámhatóság case file 603/1980 Home assessment regarding the endangerment of the Kalányos minors, 25 March 1980. 23  Gyámhatóság case file 4010/1979 Decision regarding the state care of the Csonka minors by the director of the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 28 September 1979.

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their siblings. For instance, the decision in 1976 to make the state care of Mr. Csonka’s youngest son permanent turned on his daughter’s ‘anti-­ social’ behaviour, which was understood as a reflection of Mr. Csonka’s parenting. The director of the Somogy county Gyámhatóság decided ‘In order that he [the youngest son] does not turn out like his sister he should be placed into state care.’24 This reflects how parental discipline was interpreted and thus shaped state involvement in determining the relationships of children. The candour with which one mother volunteered information about whipping her three children at a meeting in 1979 at the county Gyámhatóság office to decide whether her son Lajos could come home is an indicator that she did not find her care methods to be unusual.25 She was likely attempting to show that she was a good mother in ensuring that her son, who had been excluded from school, did not get out of control. She stated ‘It [physical disciplining] does not happen often, but when it does, then properly. It happened once when he ridiculed me. When I hit him, then it is usually with a cooking spoon or with a whip or I throw my slipper at him.’ The use of a whip is glaring because it is an item used solely for punishment. One can contrast this with domestic objects sanctioned by domestic familiarity and by their traditional use in disciplining children such as a belt or slipper (Kelly forthcoming). A sense of uncertainty at physically reprimanding her son is however also clear from the file. At a committee meeting to decide whether Lajos should be placed in a correctional unit, his parents said that that they are prepared to change their care methods.26 Thus, as Kelly remarks, ‘the physical punishment of children was less a matter of absolute conviction than a strategy to which parents resorted because they thought they were doing the right thing’ (Kelly forthcoming). György Konrád’s novel The Caseworker, which tells the professional life of a children’s welfare supervisor in state socialist Hungary (Konrád’s profession in the first half of the 1960s), starts with a filing cabinet full of homemade objects used by parents to physically punish their children. The main character states that ‘maybe they didn’t actually derive any pleasure 24  Gyámhatóság case file 3020/1976 Decision regarding the state care of the Csonka minors by the director of the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 31 December 1976. 25  Gyámhatóság case file 3355/1979 Record of a meeting between Lajos’ mother and the head caseworker at the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 28 March 1979. 26  Gyámhatóság case file 3355/1979  Minutes of a committee meeting at the Somogy county GYIVI, 2 March 1979.

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from them, but one day (they kept repeating) the child would be grateful for their severity’ (Konrád 1974: 7). The use of force against children was understood as a means to accomplish something positive. The case files suggest that the relationship of the person hitting a child, and not just the circumstances, was important to its perceived social legitimacy. It seems physical punishment was a right reserved to biological parents, as evidenced by the statements made by Lajos’ mother to staff at the county Gyámhatóság in 1979. She emphasised that ‘It’s only ever me who hits the children, never my husband.’ This was a husband from a second marriage and not the children’s father. When 200 forints went missing from her purse, she was the one to hit all three children with a whip. She reiterated ‘My husband did not hurt them.’27 The everyday practices of caseworkers as they interacted with parents were framed by images of ‘good’ families. Order in the family was an important value with several references in the case files to ‘orderly’ finances, the order of the flat or ‘orderly’ family circumstances. Focus shifted from children to the parents’ behaviour and led to increased monitoring and state intervention in the lives of families. In the next section I look at how parents negotiated childcare practices, rights and responsibilities in relation to these family ideals, thus trying to shape particular sets of relationships for their children.

Tactical Collusion, Alliances and Compromises Over Raising Children After having looked at images of the state and images of the ideal family, it is time to explore the negotiations between parents and officials over state care that were shaped by these images. The reforms in 1974 to the Family Law of 1952 reflect a reordering of responsibilities of the state and parents in raising children. Article 1 now read that the aim of the family law is ‘to increase the responsibility [of families] for children and forward the development and education of youth’ (italics added by the author). The previous wording had referred to the state ensuring the protection of the interests of children. This change is indicative of state officials increasingly holding parents responsible for the endangerment of children and children’s social deviance. Parents were to care for their children, but to 27  Gyámhatóság case file 3355/1979 Minutes of a meeting between Lajos’ mother and the head caseworker at the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 28 March 1979.

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do it in line with instructions given by state experts. As Haukanes and Thelen (2010: 14) observe, during the twentieth century the public regulation of childcare intensified at the same time as more responsibility was levelled at parents for looking after their children and children came to be seen as belonging to the private sphere, i.e. inside the home under the protection of their parents. This dynamic is exemplified in the 1979 Molnár case discussed above where the parents were not at home to supervise their children, who were vandalising property and stealing. The mother assured the caseworker that in future her boys ‘may only play in the backyard, cannot go to the beach without parental supervision, cannot go onto the streets,’ while at the same time she was informed that a support worker will be assigned to her family and she must follow the ‘instructions’ given at all times. Regular contact with the school and the child guidance centres was what put parents in a good light and the files are full of promises by mothers and fathers to discuss their children with state officials and to act on the expert advice. Take, for example, a separated father who tried to boost his wife’s application for RNS in 1981 by appearing at the county Gyámhatóság and assuring the staff that ‘I take note of the warnings of the child protection caseworker in respect of measures with the children. I will ensure that the children systematically prepare for their lessons and always bring with them the school materials. I promise that I will seek out the class tutors of my children and I will accept the care advice received from them.’28 Donzelot’s Policing the Family (1979) is a central work in the area of state-family relations and continues to exert a significant influence on most recent analyses of child welfare. As I discussed in Chap. 1, Donzelot argues that medical, educational and relational norms were propagated at the end of the nineteenth century in France by a new series of experts ‘to preserve children from the old customs, which were considered deadly’ (Donzelot 1979: xx). Tutelage was for ‘social categories that combine a difficulty in supplying their own needs with resistances to the new medical and educational norms’ (Donzelot 1979: xxi). While the concept of the ‘tutelary complex’ of the state towards working class families opens several avenues of research, we need to also look at the blind spots that it creates, such as de-emphasising that parents often agreed with social workers. The case files in my study reflect that the values to be instilled were not always 28  Gyámhatóság case file 3623/1981 Notes of a meeting between the father and the main caseworker at the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 28 May 1981.

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alien and that successful boundary work meant that state intervention into family life was not perceived as an undue intrusion of the ‘private’ sphere. As Van Krieken (1992: 136) argues in the Australian context, child welfare agencies were concerned with the construction of a certain kind of worker and a certain kind of family life and it is difficult to identify a clear working class/middle class opposition on both these questions: ‘If we perceive the ideology underlying social welfare as bourgeois or middle-class […] we come uncomfortably close to suggesting that the working class as a whole wanted, and perhaps still wants, to be dirty, drunk, poor, unemployed, unmarried, and to bash and abandon each other to destitution.’ Carol Stack (1974) similarly argued in her study of black kinship networks in an area around Chicago that it was not a different culture or values that accounted for the difference in family patterns. On the contrary, the poor black urban population shared the dominant ideal of the nuclear family headed up by a male breadwinner, but they would never be in a position to fulfil these ideals due to their precarious living circumstances, in most cases without stable employment. Varying compliance with professional childcare standards therefore does not necessarily mean that families are following different values. Kelly (forthcoming) points out that all Russian parents she interviewed cared about success at school, but it was mainly working class parents who chose to press home the point by physical means. The way parents negotiated their child raising practices with state officials is not grasped by questions about domination or resistance. Just as it is limiting to understand the actions of caseworkers in terms of compliance or resistance to rules, with families too we will learn more if we focus on how they try to reach what they see as their goals. This could involve striking alliances, tactical collusions or compromises with caseworkers. This is reflected in the appeal in 1980 by Lajos’ mother to end state care. Lajos was the case discussed above of only being disciplined by his biological mother. She exclaimed: Not to mention, it did not enter the minds of a single other parent that they should perhaps give their child into state care. They [their son’s friends] continue to behave in the same way as up to now or worse. Do only we, our family, have to suffer because we wish to make a person out of our child?29

29  Gyámhatóság case file 3924/1980 Typed appeal by Lajos’ parents to the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 14 August 1980.

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The aim of the parents and the caseworkers here was the same: to improve Lajos’ behaviour. That the parents later disagreed to state care as the best means of achieving this goal is common in the case files. Caseworkers provided advice to parents and tried to reach an agreement about what was best for the family, but once an agreement was reached over a state care placement this became difficult to challenge. For example, the parents of Szilvia were advised to leave her at birth in the hospital. The parents followed this advice, but seventeen months later tried to get their daughter back: ‘It is not that I left her in the hospital because we did not need her, rather that they did not recommend we take her home.’30 Once a minor was in a state space such as a children’s home, a hospital or with foster parents, it was the start of further negotiations that often led to ‘eventual confrontation with absolute choices that do not coincide with their [the parents’] priorities and expectancies’ (Leifsen 2010: 107 on how consent about transfer into childcare turned into child removal in urban Ecuador). This was the situation that Lajos’ parents found themselves in. According to the case file they requested state care because they thought that it was for a period of one year and could ask for it to be stopped. As we saw above, their two appeals to have state care ended were unsuccessful. Szilvia’s parents appealed that ‘We did not agree to our child going into care.’ It is not clear what their intentions were in leaving their baby at the hospital. The director of the county Gyámhatóság rejected their appeal and a subsequent request a year later as ‘the mother’s running of the household can be criticised’ (apparently it was disorderly and neglected) and the parents had not strived to form a relationship with the child while in care, which was decided on the basis of the number of visits. In this sense the mother was treated like a potential adoptive parent where part of the assessment criteria by the Gyámhatóság is regular visits and that the baby ‘already recognises them and shows pleasure when she sees them.’31 Papadaki (2017) has observed comparable techniques in Greece of establishing whether parents show an interest in their child through a secret attendance book being kept under a baby’s cradle so that the midwives could check how often the parents had visited. In these cases, the scrutiny 30  Gyámhatóság case file 3931/1981 Appeal by Szilvia’s parents of the decision of the Siófok Gyámhatóság to keep her in care, 14 November 1980. 31  Gyámhatóság case file 1023/1980 Comments by the director of the Siófok Gyámhatóság in support of the potential adoptive parents, 19 June 1980.

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and judgement of parents’ visible commitment to children was assessed by how much time they spend together. In negotiations over the ‘best’ ways to raise children, parents also reminded caseworkers of the state’s responsibilities. For instance, in 1981 on being informed by post that the state care of her child would soon be stopped, one mother wrote back to the authorities that she was ‘not very pleased about it’ because she lived a long bus journey away from the special school that her daughter would need to attend. She argued that state care was necessary to ensure the appropriate education of her child. The regional district Gyámhatóság agreed not to end state care despite an improvement in the mother’s circumstances that would have allowed for her daughter to live at home.32 Yet, parents did not always achieve their desired outcome in other instances where they tried to offer arguments based on the education of their children. Take the case of the single father Mr. Csonka. In December 1976 when a state care placement was being considered for his youngest son, he tried to curry favour with the caseworkers by demonstrating the features that led his children to be returned to him at the start of the year: regular school attendance, satisfactory grades and good behaviour.33 The director of the county Gyámhatóság focused on the same points as Mr. Csonka, but concluded that the disorderly lifestyle of the father hindered the studies of an otherwise talented child and therefore the child was placed in state care. One thread that ran through many care negotiations between parents and caseworkers was the state of household finances. Above we saw how some caseworkers tried to bring poor mothers into paid employment by arranging a state care placement. There is some evidence to suggest that some parents may have considered the financial aspects of state care to increase their income, although this was rarely seen as legitimate by officials. For instance, Mr. Csonka’s ex-wife who did not have custody of the three children requested that they be put into care in February 1976 because the father ‘leads a depraved life.’ The director of the county Gyámhatóság, who dismissed her appeal, deemed that the mother was motivated purely by material reasons because she would have to pay less in 32  Gyámhatóság case file 3269/1981 Decision regarding the continued state care of a child with special needs by the director of the Nagyatád regional district Gyámhatóság, 13 February 1981. 33  Gyámhatóság case file 3020/1976 Handwritten letter by Mr. Csonka to the county Gyámhatóság, 1 December 1976.

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state care fees than the level of child maintenance set by the court.34 She was found to have ‘no motherly intentions’ towards the children, which was equated with her not being in a position to take the children in. Her material living circumstances were reinterpreted as signs of being undeserving. Less than a year later Mr. Csonka requested that his two older children be put into a correctional institution, which unlike regular state care did not require parents to contribute to the costs. His petition stated that they ‘do little and are up to no good,’ that he does not take care of them and that ‘The council has to place them in an institute.’ He expected the child protection services to step in when he could do no more and in doing so alleviate his household budget to keep his youngest child at home. He may have favoured a stricter education for his older children, but the focus in his letter is on the household finances. After listing his income and expenses he asks ‘How am I to live from that?’ and begs ‘for this reason’ that a decision over state care be urgently taken.35 The Gyámhatóság took all three children into regular state care against the wishes of the father. It was, however, a short-lived disagreement as the interaction was ongoing. His daughter was soon transferred to a correctional institute because her behaviour in care had not improved and his youngest son was allowed home due to the father stopping drinking. This shows how parenting and interpretations of it were not single or constant patterns, but rather evolved and changed over many interactions. While some families felt that the caseworkers’ questions and advice were an intrusion into their private affairs, others complained about the under-implementation of policies and regulations. Mrs. Nagy was one such client and her case highlights capacity problems in the child protection network and hints that securing the state care of teenagers was not a priority for officials, as was discussed in Chap. 2. Mrs. Nagy’s 15-year-old daughter Ágnes was taken to GYIVI by the police in May 1977 on ‘moral grounds.’ The file states that she was witnessed drunk on several occasions, that while her mother was at work she invited boys over and that ‘her behaviour is causing public scandal in the community.’ Ágnes’ mother recommended that her daughter remain in state care because she had in 34  Gyámhatóság case file 3020/1976 Decision regarding the state care of the Csonka minors by the director of the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 11 March 1976. 35  Gyámhatóság case file 3020/1976 Handwritten letter by Mr. Csonka to the county Gyámhatóság, 1 December 1976.

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vain tried to make her good. In July 1977 Ágnes’ mother went to visit her daughter, but did not find her in the institution, rather causing a nuisance in town, so she brought her home. Disappointed with the supervision of her daughter at GYIVI, the mother thought she would after all be better able to control her daughter. In August 1977 the mother applied for state care to be ended because Ágnes was now behaving well at home. After a home visit the Gyámhatóság found Ágnes’ behaviour unchanged and rejected the application to end state care. In November 1977 the director of GYIVI asked to transfer Ágnes to a closed institution because she was living without permission at home. He secured a referral, but only ‘when a place arises.’ In the next three years no space became available. In May 1978 the caseworker at the Gyámhatóság reviewed the case in line with the regulation to check yearly if the circumstances requiring care had changed. Ágnes expressed at the meeting that if the police tried to take her back to GYIVI she would run home. The caseworker decided state care was still necessary, but left Ágnes at home. In July 1978 the mother went to the Gyámhatóság to ask that the monthly 500 forints state care fees that she was paying despite her daughter living at home be deducted from her daughter’s wages and not hers. She said her daughter ate at home but did not contribute to the household budget.36 This was one family struggle between mother and daughter that caseworkers did not get involved in. Ágnes turned 18 in September 1979 and was deleted from the register of children in care. It is not just parents who positioned themselves as clients with needs, but also minors who requested help from state officials. For example, the research participant Péter became friends with a boy in state care at school and asked the Gyámhatóság when he was 14 to be placed in the same children’s home because he no longer wanted to live with his mother due to her mental health problems. Péter’s request to be taken into care was granted, but he was placed in a different children’s home than his friend. Thus children could initiate interaction with state officials in their own right, but more generally the cases demonstrate that children were not actually heard or considered, particularly younger children. In only two of the case files that I discuss in this book were the views of the child recorded—both were teenagers, Ágnes and Lajos. The Gyámhatóság had to check yearly the circumstances at home and in state care, but the 36  Gyámhatóság case file 618/1980 Notes of a meeting between Mrs. Nagy and the caseworker at the village state office, 3 July 1978.

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assessments were of the living conditions at the parents and the child’s behaviour and school progress in the children’s homes. How children viewed their relationships to parents, siblings, state-paid carers and friends seemed not to factor into decisions over state care. Overall, it is not just ‘the state’ that we need to see as a collection of services and officials with different, perhaps conflicting, interests but ‘the family’ too. In doing this, we see that what might be the imposition of control on one family member could be a way out of an untenable situation for another (see Gordon 1988 on domestic violence). For instance, the director of the Siófok Gyámhatóság writing to the workplace of Mr. Vass—a case discussed above in the section on reconfiguring the roles of different state organisations in child protection—was attempting to stop Mr. Vass harassing his separated wife and children. The problem with seeing ‘the family’ as both an entity and the weakest party in family-state relations is that ‘there was often a conflict within the family’ (Van Krieken 1992: 140) into which caseworkers became embroiled. The positioning of parents in negotiations over state care cannot be easily typified. The case files show that state intervention in family life was often started by parents requesting help and thus opening their parenting to scrutiny. Parents actively used the policies and infrastructure around child protection described in Chap. 2 (financial assistance schemes, child guidance centres, GYIVI, etc.) to shape their relationships with children. For example, some parents hoped a short-term care placement would sort out behavioural problems of their children and thus improve their own relationship with them. There was much agreement over supporting children’s education and conduct, but also disagreements about how to best achieve this. The type of relations with state officials often changed from an initial agreement over placement in state care to loss of choice when parents asked to have their children returned and were denied. State officials were seen as unreliable allies in other ways too with sometimes claims of ‘too little’ state activity when a placement was ended against the wishes of the parents or when state care was not vigorously enforced, which could mean a double financial burden to families.

‘Proper’ Parenting and the State Overall, this chapter demonstrates how images of the ideal family guided the concrete forms of support offered by local state actors to parents and therefore the kin relationships that children had. Different professionals

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held different viewpoints that not only contributed to contradictory practices by various state officials, but also created some room to manoeuvre for parents in the negotiations surrounding a state care placement or receiving instead regular financial assistance. Families were variously imagined as economic units or about ensuring control and order of the house and children. Examining ideas of ‘appropriate’ family forms and ‘proper’ parenting opens up new comparative frameworks on a European and global level. Former socialist countries tend to only be compared with each other and not capitalist states due to a persistent Cold War dichotomy (Chari and Verdery 2009) that the different ideological systems must have led to substantially different practices between ‘East’ and ‘West.’ Instead of taking the difference for granted, focusing on parenting norms illuminates similarities between former socialist and capitalist states. For instance, in terms of having a conservative model of motherhood, state socialist Hungary could be regarded as closer to France and West Germany than it was to the East German state (Fahran 2012; Thelen 2006). It is not surprising that there was variation in parents’ experiences of interacting with institutions and state officials given the anthropological conceptualisation of the state as a diverse set of institutions, practices and values that is made through the relations between actors (Thelen et  al. 2018). Taking such a relational approach to the state illuminates the workings and contradictions of diverse state layers. Some of the shifts in central policy on child protection inscribed in the reforms to the Family Law in 1974 needed years to be implemented and had to be met with agreement from other actors. Thus, attempts to get workplaces and educational facilities to enact more control on ‘problematic’ families or family members seem to have been rather unsuccessful. Such insights complicate not only the picture of a uniform socialist world but also linear descriptions of change that could be obtained by focusing solely on official policy documents rather than individual cases. In approaching the relations between families and state officials, my findings portray ‘a process characterized less by coercion and more by a mutual co-optation of values in which care recipients reframe state-funded support in terms that are acceptable to them’ (Thelen et al. 2018: 13). Thus parents were not passive in the face of state officials and variously were the ones to initiate state interaction, request help and negotiate parenting techniques in a process that could be far from antagonistic. Assessments by caseworkers oscillated between imagining the family as individual parent-child relations and zooming out to see broader family

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dynamics and connections between siblings. Violence against one child was not always generalised into a risk for other children living at home, but at the same time ‘wild’ behaviour by one child could be taken as a sign of bad parenting and siblings might preventatively be taken into care. The case files and statistics on reasons for state care illustrate a moralizing of poverty. Home visit reports describe inadequate housing—often with the view that parents were not trying hard enough to improve their living conditions, while the categories used in statistics highlight a focus on ‘moral decay’ that accompanied the increase in the ‘responsibilisation’ of parents. Both interpretations held parents responsible for social ills, thus silencing any discussion of structural social problems. This responsibilisation of parents in the 1970s was not a reserve of socialist policy and again challenges the idea of an Eastern European Sonderweg. Of interest to caseworkers was whether children had an orderly, hygienic home environment, a separate sleeping space, food on the table, attended school regularly and were not beaten by their parents. If these were the areas in which parents could be faulted, they establish the standards for children’s homes to fulfil. As I explore in Chap. 5, state care worked to this concept—fed, clean and schooled children—and did not try to furnish children in care with strong relations to staff or peers. In the example with which I started this chapter, the mother stated ‘I cling to my children and my children cling to me’ and it is the quality of relationships between parents, children and siblings that I consider next.

References Chari, S., & Verdery, K. (2009). Thinking Between the Posts: Postcolonialism, Postsocialism, and Ethnography after the Cold War. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 51(1), 6–34. Donzelot, J. (1979). The Policing of Families, with a Foreword by Gilles Deleuze (Robert Hurley, Trans.) Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. (La Police des Familles first published by Les Éditions de Minuit 1977). Fahran, C. (2012). East German Women Going West: Family, Children and Partners in Life-Experience Literature. In H.  Carlbäck, Y.  Gradskova, & Z. Kravchenko (Eds.), And They Lived Happily Ever After. Norms and Everyday Practices of Parenthood in Russia and Eastern Europe (pp. 85–104). Budapest: Central European University Press. Ferge, Z. (1986). Fejeztek a magyar szegénypolitika történeteből [Chapters in the History of Hungarian Poverty Policies]. Budapest: Magvető Kiadó.

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Golczyńska-Grondas, A. (2014). Badges of Social Valuing and the Biography. Natalia’s Interview in the Perspective of Sociologist of Poverty and Social Exclusion. Qualitative Sociology Review, 10(1), 38–58. Gordon, L. (1988). Heroes of Their Own Lives. The Politics and History of Family Violence. New York: Viking Penguin. Hanák, K. (1978). Társadalom és gyermekvédelem [Society and Child Protection]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Haney, L. (2002). Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary. Berkeley: University of California Press. Haukanes, H., & Thelen, T. (2010). Parenthood and Childhood: Debates within the Social Sciences. In T. Thelen & H. Haukanes (Eds.), Parenting After the Century of the Child. Travelling Ideals, Institutional Negotiations and Individual Responses (pp. 11–32). Farnham: Ashgate. Horváth, Á. (1982). ‘Egy segély anatómiája. (Esettanulmány a rendszeres nevelési segélyről)’ [The Anatomy of a State Benefit. A Study About Regular Financial Assistance for Needy Families (RNS)]. In Z.  Ferge (Ed.), Oktatásról és társadalompolitikáról: Tanulmányok [About Education and Social Policy: Studies] (pp. 237–310). Szociológiai Kutató Intézet: Budapest. Kelly, C. (forthcoming). “Wait Til Your Father Gets Home:” Violence and Childhood in Late Socialist Russia. In J.  Behrends, T.  Lindenberger, and P.  Kolář (Eds.), Physical Violence After Stalin. Patterns and Legacies of Communist Rule in Comparative Perspective (book manuscript). Klich-Kluczewska, B. (2014). The Culture of Violence, Socialist Modernity and Social Health. Domestic Violence in People’s Poland of 1970s and 1980s. Paper at the Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Socialism final conference, Berlin, February 27–March 1. Konrád, G. 1974/1969. The Caseworker (P. Aston of A látogató, Trans.). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal Childhoods. In Class, Race, and Family Life (2nd edition with an update a decade later ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. Leifsen, E. (2010). Child Welfare, Biopower and Mestizo Relatedness in Quito, Ecuador. In T. Thelen & H. Haukanes (Eds.), Parenting After the Century of the Child. Travelling Ideals, Institutional Negotiations and Individual Responses (pp. 103–122). Farnham: Ashgate. Népszabadság. (1983, November 26). ‘Az állami gondozásról’ [About state care], Népszabadság newspaper, 9–11. Papadaki, E. (2017). Undoing Kinship: Producing Citizenship in a Public Maternity Hospital in Athens, Greece. In T.  Thelen & E.  Alber (Eds.), Reconnecting State and Kinship (pp.  178–199). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Stack, C. (1974). All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Basic Books.

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Street, A. (2012). Seen by the State: Bureaucracy, Visibility and Governmentality in a Papua New Guinean Hospital. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 23, 1–21. Thelen, T. (2006). Law and Mutual Assistance in Families: A Comparison of Socialist Legacies in Hungary and Eastern Germany. Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law, 38(53–54), 177–207. Thelen, T., Vetters, L., & von Benda-Beckmann, K. (2018). Introduction to Stategraphy. Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State. In T.  Thelen, L. Vetters, & K. von Benda-Beckmann (Eds.), Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State (pp.  1–19). New  York/Oxford: Berghahn Press. (republished from Social Analysis, 58:3, 1–19). Valuch, T. (1998/99). Toward the Middle Classes – with Detours? (Social Changes in Hungary 1945–1995). Hungarian Studies, 13(1), 139–149. Van Krieken, R. (1992). Children and the State. Social Control and the Formation of Australian Child Welfare. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. von Benda-Beckmann, F., & von Benda-Beckmann, K. (1998). Where Structures Merge: State and Off-State Involvement in Rural Social Security on Ambon, Indonesia. In S.  N. Pannell & F. von Benda-Beckmann (Eds.), Old World Places, New World Problems: Exploring Resource Management Issues in Eastern Indonesia (pp. 143–180). Canberra: Australian National University. Von Klimó, Á. (2018). Hungary Since 1945 (Kevin McAleer, Trans). London: Routledge. (Originally published in German © Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH& Co. KG Árpád von Klimó, Ungarn seit 1945, Göttingen, 2006).

CHAPTER 4

The Continuing Family Relations of Children in Care

‘We were pawned. That’s how we saw ourselves. That they put us in the pawn shop,’ was the view of András, who went into care in 1979 aged 12 after his mother committed suicide. ‘Pawn house kids’ (zacisok) is a phrase in Hungarian slang for children in care and was used by several of my research participants to refer to themselves. The use of the term hints at the poverty of their families and state care as a fall-back in hard family times—financial, emotional and health wise. It also suggests the possibility of relations resuming after a period of separation, be it short or long. The focus in this chapter is on how children in care experienced relationships to their parents and siblings and how the child protection system and the practices of carers contributed to producing, maintaining, interrupting or ending these kinship relations. I will explore how family relations that were constituted by state produced acts (cf. Lambek 2013), such as a birth certificate establishing who were parents and in a second step siblings, needed to be reproduced and sustained through parenting and for siblings through shared experiences (cf. Pauli 2013), support (cf. Alber 2013) or mediating ties (cf. Edwards and Strathern 2000) in order to be regarded and felt as meaningful. This chapter starts with the expectations that children in care had of ongoing relations to their parents, running home as a strategy to stay in touch and the distinction between being a parent and parenting. I then switch perspective to explore how carers and teachers viewed the involvement of parents in the lives of children in care as a pendulum between © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rasell, Care of the State, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49484-1_4

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emotional closeness and risk of abuse, which affected decisions over whether to allow a child to spend holidays with family members. The second part of this chapter considers how the organisation of children’s homes and everyday practices of carers shaped the sibling relations of children in care and how the children themselves made sense of such relations in different ways, often rejecting siblings attributed solely on the basis of biology. Overall, I will show that the ‘ideal’ of relationships to biological parents was very strong, but children in care actually associated kinship with contact, interaction and shared experiences. Nonetheless, as we shall see, even where children had no contact with their biological parents, the strong prioritisation of parent-child bonds within care homes could diminish relations to siblings in care.

Ongoing Parent Relations Within State Care The stories that my interviewees told show that children in care continued to have relations to their parents either figuratively or actually. The interviews illustrate that children in care since birth may have felt or been guided by norms in the care system to expect that their parents should visit them, yet it could be bewildering when parents appeared after many years because there had been no process of caring to produce kinship. While state care separated parents and children and the rural location of children’s homes could make it difficult to visit where this was permitted, we will see that care by the state and kin could coexist and that state care could actually support parent-child relations by reducing tensions at home over daily care. The various examples will show that there were times when kinship was taken as automatic and others when parental relations mattered. Katalin—whose short biographical note is given in Chap. 2—said that her family ‘didn’t come over, they didn’t visit. They left us in the institution. They did not care, didn’t even visit, nothing.’ This example shows that Katalin expected contact with her parents despite being in state care since birth. To her the use of state care to raise her was not supposed to end their relationship. As an adult Katalin tried in vain to get in contact with her mother, sending countless letters with the help of the local mayor’s office. It is from her birth certificate that she knows her mother’s name. Knowing her mother’s full name can be regarded as a sign of a distant relationship when contrasted to her foster parents, whose names she does not remember because she called them mum and dad. While she

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used kin-terms for her foster parents, the relation had actually been quite cruel, and staff at the Gyámhatóság (the child protection services) intervened to cancel the fostering arrangement. It seems that from a very early age Katalin nursed the idea that her mother would come for her. Asked if she remembered being in kindergarten, she replied matter-of-factly ‘I waited for my mum there too.’ She became quieter when she told me ‘They [parents] came. They came for the other children. They went [home].’ This suggests that the ‘ideal’ of relations to biological relations was very strong, which Katalin’s parents disappointed. Bundgaard and Fog Olwig (2017) show in their research on Danish kindergartens that it is in kindergarten that children learn to distinguish between their family relations and other relations with different behaviour expected in kindergarten as at home. Katalin waiting for her parents to visit could be fed by the distinction that children in care shared carers with a large group of other children, whereas parents could be for oneself (or at most for a sibling group) and thus had the most potential to shape the life trajectory of individual children. The installation of children’s homes in nationalised castles affected the ability of families to visit children in care and the possibility to meet during the week. Katalin fondly remembered the ‘crazy, big, beautiful’ children’s home in Héldy Castle in Bakod where she lived for several years, but the rural location of castles meant that the children’s homes were not served by frequent public transport links. This was highlighted by my research participant Zsolt, who said about his children’s home in Dúzsy Castle in Délifalva, ‘seriously, I think this village is not even on the map.’ Parents would visit the children’s home in Délifalva at the weekend because they could then spend more time with their son(s). Guests who came on a weekday received only two hours with their children because the rest of the day was timetabled for school, studying or meals (on this see Chap. 5). Children’s homes in towns and cities were far more accessible and made more frequent meetings with parents possible. State care and family care could exist in parallel when the children’s home was in the same locality as the parents. State care could in fact help maintain parent-child relations by reducing day-to-day frictions in family care (cf. Thelen et al. 2018). Ákos, for instance, told me that he did not miss home when he went into state care in 1977 because he remained in the same city and regularly saw his mother. Ákos went into care due to failing two years at school and getting mixed up into trouble. At the weekends he slept at home and continued going to football practice in his old

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neighbourhood. He visited his mother after football training or she would come to the pitch and give him a sandwich. His school performance improved at the new school he went to (as discussed in Chap. 2), which made his relationship with his mother less fraught. For the research participant Péter, who asked to go into state care due his mother’s mental health issues, state care was combined with support from his mother for extracurricular activities. She continued to chaperone him to TV shoots for his roles in different children’s series. Such regular contact with parents was easiest to achieve in urban areas or if the family lived in the village of the children’s homes. I was told about one case by a teacher at a special school in the 1980s where a wealthy family decided to move to the village of a renowned therapeutic home (gyógypedagógiai intézet) so that their disabled child could attend there and yet still see them regularly. She stated that parents learned from carers’ interaction with the children how to do the same. While such cases might have been exceptions, they nevertheless illustrate how state care could coexist with parental care and actually support parent-child relations. The case files show parents trying to use regular contact with children in care as a reason to have state care ended suggesting that their personal relationship with the child was important to their right to parent and marked them out as ‘good’ parents. For instance, in an appeal in March 1979 not to have her 15-year-old son, Lajos, who was staying at the child protection institution (GYIVI) put into state care, his mother argued that he comes homes two to three times a week and always at the weekends.1 Her appeal was unsuccessful and he was placed in a children’s home far away from where his family lived. His parents tried to end state care again in August 1980. Underlined in blue pen in their typed appeal is that contact to the family was regular in the form of letters and visits and that he spent the summer holiday at home. The ink is darker than that with which the parents signed the document and matches the handwritten date next to the ‘document received’ stamp, suggesting that continued contact was also a swaying issue for the caseworker dealing with the case who underlined those points.2 The request was however denied on the ground that the parents were not able to sufficiently manage the care and schooling of 1  Gyámhatóság case file 3355/1979 Minutes of a meeting between Lajos’ mother and the head caseworker at the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 28 March 1979. 2  Gyámhatóság case file 3924/1980 Appeal by the boy’s parents to the Somogy county Gyámhatóság, 14 August 1980.

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Lajos’ brother who lived at home and therefore Lajos should remain in the children’s home until the end of his welding course. This reflects the priority accorded to education discussed in Chap. 3, but also that children in care’s relations to their parents were part of wider family relations at home that could impact on decisions about their state care. The practical requirement for Hungarian citizens to have a permanent registered address meant another reshaping of relations with parents from often little contact with at least some link. A former director of a children’s home in Budapest recalls that staff started to search for and negotiate with the relatives of a child when state care was coming to an end to secure a permanent registered address. Journals such as Belügyi Szemle (Internal Affairs Review) discussed the problems that this legal requirement posed care leavers. A registered address was needed to get a bed in a worker’s hostel, but often the only place that care leavers had to register was the worker’s hostel (Szabó 1982: 76). A new regulation of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1983 solved the problem by stipulating that the permanent address of children in care remains their parent’s registered flat and not GYIVI.  Thus for bureaucratic purposes an ongoing link was established to parents for children in care, but this was not about actual care relations. Children Trying to Re-Kin by Running Home The intensity of family relations seems to have been measured by how often children were allowed home or visited by family in comparison to the other children in the residential home. In the interviews, this symbolic moment was used to measure parental love or neglect. Running home was one way for children in care to ensure that they saw their parents. In the view of its staff, bringing back children who had run away from GYIVI or the children’s homes formed a large part of the work of the child protection subunit of the police (Király 1982: 69). Those who ran away generally came into care in their teens and had family to stay with as well as mutual expectations of care through shared experiences in the past. In this section I will present material from an interview with Éva to illustrate the discretion that carers and police seemed to have in dealing with children running home and how norms in the family domain did not always cross easily into the state domain. Éva went into care in 1979 at the age of twelve when her maternal grandmother died. I do not know how long she had been living at her

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grandmothers, but there are hints that it was only for a short time. She and her half-brother were taken in by their grandmother when her stepfather left due to her mother’s drinking. In care, Éva frequently ran away— ‘always home to my mum. I– I really clung to her. When homesickness overcame me, so that I needed to go home, I went.’ The children took a bus to the school and, as she puts it, ‘who wasn’t back, had gone!’ The school was in the town making it easier for children to go and visit their family than from the rural children’s home. Éva energetically interrupted my question about whether relatives came to visit children in care saying ‘yes, to me,’ but then paused and in a quieter voice said that her mother only visited twice in three years. She might have been trying to convey that her mother loved her and that she was ‘worth’ visiting. Running home was a way to ensure that she got to see her mother. It seems that the child protection unit of the police had some room to manoeuvre because Éva was sometimes brought back to the children’s home within an hour while sometimes two weeks at home would elapse. I did not ask Éva whether she attended school while at home. This might have influenced the decision of when to collect her given the emphasis put on education by the child protection system and welfare workers that I described in Chap. 3. Ultimately, Éva’s decision to run home to regularly see her mother resulted in her being transferred to a young offender institution. This move meant she now attended an internal school and had less contact with her surroundings or the opportunity to see her mother. Éva’s case fits what Donzelot refers to as the ‘feedback effect’ of state care. Being ‘in the gear train of the judicial apparatus … creates the possibility of a capitalization of surveillance which overexposes the minors to a penal identification’ (Donzelot 1979: 110). Éva went into care due to a lack of relatives who were willing (step-father) or deemed capable (mother) of caring for her, and not due to her own behaviour. Once in care, however, she became a juvenile delinquent because she ran home to her mother and did not follow the rules. Behaviour that was acceptable out of care and indeed normatively expected like contact between children and their parents marked her out as a rule breaker. Éva was allowed home from the young offender institution for half a year when she was 16 because her mother was very ill. Her request to look after her mother fitted into the image that the caseworker held of ‘appropriate’ gender roles and a daughter caring for her mother. In this case we see that the value ascribed to parent-child relations travelled uneasily across domains into state care. As

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a twelve-year-old, Éva’s education was the priority of child protection staff and she had to remain in the children’s home even if, or precisely because, her mother did not visit. After finishing compulsory education, Éva’s actions of running home could be positively re-evaluated as daughterly love and she capitalised on this to negotiate six months at home to look after her ill mother. Her case shows that the care system split up children from their parents and did not support the wish for ongoing contact which put some children on the track to becoming ‘juvenile delinquents’ for running home. Parents Who Did Not Parent While Éva ran home to stay connected to her mother and Katalin expected that her mother should have visited her in care, Zsolt recalled how puzzling it was when his parents appeared for the first time that he could remember when he was seven (for more details on his biography see Chap. 2): I was really small. It was 1981 when they [staff at the children’s home] took us for a walk in the village. Then a supervisor came over. Me and my brother were told that our parents are here. I really didn’t know what that meant, parents, so I wasn’t interested at all in them. I think a visit anywhere means what was brought. That’s what you have to pay attention to: what sweets did the guest bring? That was the first time in 1981 when they took us home. Of course, they could take us for the winter break, but then, you know, in that system you had to take the responsibility too. Since the director really liked me, one of my visitors had to leave their ID card there as insurance that they would take on the responsibility, that we would come back. [To himself: It doesn’t work like that, that we take something and leave it there, no– What we take, we have to bring back.] But later this didn’t happen often of course, later it was only good to go home because it was possible to smoke there– nothing else– nothing else.

Zsolt did not know these people who suddenly appeared and could take him to their home. His description hints that he felt like a possession and was worried that he would be left lying around and not returned to the children’s home. Lambek (2013: 242) proposes framing kinship as constituted through certain kinds of acts that are ‘subject to recognition, regulation and even constitution by the law.’ Zsolt’s birth certificate constituted this man and woman as his parents. Such acts ‘produce commitments and

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inform people with, and of, their commitments to one another’ and establish ‘the criteria for how subsequent acts will be evaluated as right or wrong, adequate or inadequate’ (Lambek 2013: 248–249). This is perhaps the intended outcome of state-produced acts of kinship, but the process of registering Zsolt’s birth obviously failed to install such a commitment, as is clear from his bewilderment expressed in the above quotation. The birth certificate was ‘proof’ of kinship for the director of the children’s home and converted kinship into a (at least temporarily) non-negotiable fact entailing obligations (care) and entitlements (to care). Zsolt had a practical take on parents: what presents did they bring? His description of parental visits revolves around material gains—one might get an ice cream, lemonade or cake in the village pub and parents generally brought a bag of sweets with them. He ventured that the boys were glad of these visits ‘but not because his dad or mum was there, rather for what he received.’ Zsolt’s memories demonstrate competing ideas of kinship. The parents’ right to take their son home rests on the idea that kinship links people even without their knowledge, whereas for Zsolt kinship seems to be negotiated and he was frankly uninterested in his parents. He felt that his home life was in the children’s home and not in these infrequent visits to where his parents lived. They did not undertake acts of care that might have grounded him at their home. The hard work of kinship— its processual side of doing parenting in contrast to being a parent (Municio-Larsson 2012)—was missing. The idea that these two people could just as well be the parents of any of the children in care because there was no giving and receiving of care is exemplified in Róbert’s reunion story. He had been left in front of a food store when he was three months old. He grew up in care with no knowledge of his family. When he was 24, he decided to try and find his mother and sought help from the Gyámhatóság. He told me he had a picture in his head of how his mother would be, ‘what had filtered through from my classmates and the wider world about how a mother is.’ It is interesting that Róbert expected an easy intimacy with his mother. His expectations were guided by an idealised image of ‘appropriate’ mothering and not the negative experiences of family that he heard from other children in care about their home life or home visits. This knowledge was not necessarily applied to one’s own parents. The reunion lasted under an hour. His mother sat for a long time in a different room to him and their conversation was ‘not that meaningful,’ recalls Róbert. He said that the meeting was made easier for him by being accompanied by two other care leavers

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‘because it felt a bit like my two classmates would take away this type of responsibility [of being her son]. Because they were a similar age at the confrontation with my mum. Because he could also be her child.’ This hints that Róbert felt that caring about and for one’s child is central to being a parent and involves reciprocal obligations by the child to the parent. In his eyes, this woman was just as much the mother of his two classmates as his own. The example affirms that relationships result from care practices, not the other way around. Balancing Child Safety, Parental Love and Fear A direct way in which the relations of children in care to parents were shaped by child protection professionals was over decisions about whether to permit ongoing contact in the form of visits home. As I will discuss next, the physical safety of children in care when around relatives was an issue raised by the former teachers and carers I interviewed. In the previous chapters, I described many instances of violence, for example József was taken into state care because of abuse by his parents and Mr. Csonka hit his youngest son several times to the extent that medical treatment was required. By focussing on the processes that produce kinship, new kinship studies often emphasise love, choice and joy as aspects of kinship. Such a starting point closes off discussion about the less warm side of kinship (Franklin and McKinnon 2001: 18). While children in care like Katalin longed to be taken home, actual relations could entail physical danger for children. Zsolt told me that he was thankful that he had been in care since birth: ‘We [the boys in his group in the children’s home] only understood when we were older where we were and why.’ His few visits to his parents over the holidays gave him a comparison. In the long quotation towards the start of this chapter, he hints that it was reassuring that his parents had to leave an ID card at the children’s home to make sure he was returned. It is interesting that the children’s home provided a sense of security against the external ‘other’ of his parents. Children in care who regularly went home, like football-playing Ákos mentioned above, seem to remember such stays more positively. The picture was often different where contact was sporadic and ranged from nothing being good at home to being physically harmed by family members. The perspective of a former teacher in a therapeutic children’s home (gyógypedagógiai intézet), who I interviewed about her professional life,

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was that it could be unnerving for children at home because their parents did not know how to deal with them. She mentioned the extreme example of a child who had shouting fits and her parents could not calm her down and ended up throwing an iron at her. She did not remember any tears among her pupils at having to come back to the children’s home after home visits. All of her class had been in state care for a long time: ‘I noticed that they felt secure. They received everything. Ok, they didn’t receive parental love. But in many cases I think good, the child’s mother was good, but the child felt comparatively better, securer in the institution.’ Children often came back from home visits unsettled when they had not lived up to their ideals of family life. The teacher recalled ‘those poor little things who finally went home, then arrived back injured and said it was good, good at home, but that this had happened and that they didn’t understand why they weren’t loved.’ Asked whether the care staff were always of one opinion about what was best for the children, this former teacher raised the difficulty of deciding who was to be allowed to visit home: We really, really had to check: should we let a child home, should we not? Or if we had allowed a child home then, afterwards, what experiences did the child return with? Or what was our experience of the child? We always had to pay particular attention to that. Those who went and– um, um, um– back, who came back, in what condition did the child come back? If the child came back with such bruising, then you knew that– [breaks off]. There was a child who refused to tell and tried to deny what had happened at home, because the child just wanted to be at home. But when you knew that the child was in danger at home, that the child was not safe, then it was very difficult to weigh up whether to allow the child home.

It was part of this teacher’s work at the therapeutic home to be concerned that something might happen to a child when allowed to visit their family. Parents did not have much credibility with staff or management as the fact that the children were in care seemed an indication that parents had failed in their responsibilities (Penglase 2007: 197–198). The teacher felt empathy with the children that they really wanted to go home but needed to address possible dilemmas between emotional closeness versus protection against physical or emotional harm. Overall, the experiences of my research participants indicate that the idea of staying in touch with parents strongly existed even when biological

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ties were disrupted, but that reunions could be dangerous or bewildering as parents did not meet the ‘ideal.’

Sibling Power or a Discarded Relation? I now turn to the topic of sibling relations and how they were strongly influenced by the child protection system, the organisation of children’s homes and by the practices of state carers. In the interviews none of my research participants mentioned meaningful sibling ties, although there were hints that siblings mattered. I will show that compared to the strong ‘ideal’ of relations to biological parents discussed in the section above, sibling relations were less defined and tended to be undervalued and relatively unnoticed. We will see that with no strong emphasis on sibling ties by carers, expectations to take up these relations were more open. Rather than kinship being automatic, my data will show the need for shared experiences of siblings and that the care practices in the children’s homes were not oriented to supporting regular contact and interaction between siblings that could have led to strong relations. Alber et al. (2013) suggest that there are three broad ways in how siblingship is imagined to be established and maintained: on the basis of shared parentage, through shared childhoods and time spent together, and through reciprocal exchanges and care. The second perspective highlights the links created based on shared experiences, while the third perspective points to differences between siblings, particularly across the life course. I will explore how these three ways to become siblings were made sense of by my research participants, highlighting that the care system did not allow for these links. Most of my research partners knew that they had siblings without knowing them personally. For example, my research participant Katalin who was in care since birth with no contact with her parents said that there were ten children in her family and she was the youngest. She mentioned six half-brothers at home and three siblings in care. At a young age she was briefly in the same children’s home as her two sisters and later in the same institution as her youngest brother too. She recalls that in the children’s home, she was told that they were siblings based on their birth certificates. This hints to the role of state carers and bureaucratic tools as a repository of family knowledge for children in care. Although Katalin tried hard, she developed no lasting relationship with her siblings. She remembers that her sister Erika hit her: ‘She didn’t want me. I would have clung to her.’

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Katalin was not told where her sisters moved to after they left the children’s home, indicating perhaps that maintaining sibling ties was not given importance by carers. For Katalin, her sisters disappointed her expectations: ‘They left me in the same way [as her mother had] in the institution. They didn’t look out for me and they didn’t visit. Nothing.’ Katalin’s impression was that having the same parents seemingly meant little for the older girls, who rejected the responsibility and obligations of being her sister. As the experiences of Róbert show, the child protection services could identify who were siblings at a much later point too. In 1999, Róbert, who was in care since a very young age, inquired at the county Gyámhatóság about his mother, and a caseworker uncovered her (leading to the reunion described above) and an older half-brother: Meeting with him was a comfortable experience. He has a relatively big family, children, older and younger. Their way of life is relatively poor. It was completely good. It was good [pause], good [pause], good [pause] to see him. It was good to be there. But, however, I accepted that, as hard as it sounds, that was enough for me.

At the time of their meeting, Róbert was studying at university, single and had no children. He was confronted by societal norms that expected a relationship to be built between siblings, yet undercutting this were also constructions of siblingship that seem to imply some kind of educational similarity, which the brother disappointed. The half-brothers had very different socio-economic trajectories. Róbert had grown up in care, his half-­ brother at home. While there is a growing awareness of the educational disadvantages of growing up in state care (Korzh 2015; Connelly and Furnivall 2016), as we saw in the previous two chapters parents precisely used state care to improve the educational chances of their children. All of my research participants had a regular school education and some were supported into vocational training or like Róbert even academic life. It seems that state care established educational differences between the siblings through supporting Róbert’s studies, which in this case contributed to the rejection of the brother. The example of Károly’s dealings with his siblings exemplifies the importance of shared experiences in creating materially and emotionally meaningful sibling ties and how kinship ties can change over the life course. Károly—who I introduced at the end of Chap. 2—was born in

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1963 and went into care in 1971 together with his three older brothers. His three younger siblings, born in yearly succession after him, went into care at birth. In 1971, the seven siblings were in six different children’s homes, the youngest four based in Budapest and the oldest three (those who Károly knew) distributed across Hungary. There is a sadness in Károly’s voice when he told me ‘I don’t know why it was like that,’ particularly since he was at a co-education children’s home that accepted ages three to eighteen and thus could potentially have accepted his siblings. As explained in Chap. 2, there was no official policy to separate siblings, although this often happened due to the structure of children’s homes that were mainly divided by school age and sex. Károly told me that he avoided his younger siblings in care at events where children from different children’s homes came together like sports days or carnival celebrations. If a carer pointed out to Károly his two younger sisters he told me that he hid: ‘We were so foreign to each other. I did not want to meet with them. I am also like that with Laci [his younger brother], or I was. It didn’t mean anything to me that I have sisters. I don’t say that because I’m so hard. There was no connection or community among us.’ The carer, it seems, attributed siblingship on the basis of common descent and therefore pointed out children of the same parents. In not insisting that Károly spend time with his younger siblings, though, the carer did not make a sustained effort to activate these kin relations. Unlike the more clearly defined expectations of parent-child relations that, as discussed above, allowed Éva out of care to look after her sick mother, the rules for conducting a sibling relationship seemed vaguer. For Károly, it seems a lack of shared past undermined his willingness for kinship. The only time in the interview when Károly referred to himself and his siblings as ‘we’ was in reference to his parents and he excluded his younger siblings from this because they had not lived with them at home. It seems the younger children theoretically qualified as his siblings because they had the same parents, but common descent needed to be confirmed by the shared experience of the last years spent at home living ‘in poverty, in utter misery.’ For Károly, it was enduring irregular meals, the alcohol problems of his parents and the illness of his father that confined him to bed that bonded the brothers at home. The three children born after him went straight into state care and did not share the experiences of living with the parents: ‘There were no ties. I never felt with my siblings that we are siblings. It is not due to a lack of feeling, rather we grew up in a totally different world.’

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It had been more than 30  years since Károly left state care, but the ambivalent way in which carers dealt with siblings was still squarely present in how he interacted with his younger brother László: ‘Laci has been next to me for the last 20 years, and you know he works at mine, but I never tr– trea– treat him as my younger brother, rather as a friend. That’s Laci. We are not siblings together.’ It is not clear what Károly meant by treating him like a younger brother—whether implying something hierarchical or a care responsibility—or what the difference was for him between treating László as a friend or a brother (cf. van der Geest 2013). In the interview Károly talked about László being alone in care and how László would have needed someone to support him. Károly had actively avoided him in care. The two brothers really got to know each other only after state care as members of the same church. Károly told me ‘without church, it [their relationship] would not have been possible.’ Sibling relationships are thus shaped by other relations such as to a partner, one’s own children, to closer siblings or in this case by a congregation and its norms. Their relationship reflects that social and biological claims to kinship ‘serve equally to link and to truncate one another. Both afford perspectives from which kinship can be claimed, and the one may either lead to or be played off against the other’ (Edwards and Strathern 2000: 159, italics in the original). In this way, as a child Károly disowned László through a lack of interest, but as an adult he was claimed back on the basis of shared parentage. The experiences in state care of Éva, who we met above on running home, suggest that the degree to which siblings were related could also play a role in how sibling relations were handled by carers. Éva had a younger half-brother from her mother’s second marriage. The two children lived together first with their mother and later, when she started to drink heavily and the (step-)father left, they both went to stay with their maternal grandma. The co-residence of the children ended when the grandma died in 1979. Éva was placed in a children’s home and her half-­ brother was taken in by his father. Éva recalled that soon after entering state care there was some kind of national celebration and an outing was planned for the children. She wanted to go on the trip because her brother lived in the town that they would be visiting, but the staff denied that she had a brother and would not take her. In this case having the same mother was seemingly not enough for carers to recognise the two children as siblings. Their relationship required a maternal ‘mediator.’ In other words, ‘In ideas about relatedness, as in homeopathy, the trace element – in this case the biological vestige – is only potent when it reacts with a particular

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person’ (Edwards and Strathern 2000: 157). The falling-away of caregivers on the maternal side (the mother was an alcoholic, the grandma had died) interrupted relations to her half-brother as mediated by staff in the care home and the organisation of state care. Even where sibling sets were in the same children’s home, the organisation of all activities by year groups—for example eating at the same table— facilitated age homogenous relations over kin. There was only one year between my research participant Zsolt and his older brother István. Their stay in the Dúzsy children’s home overlapped for eight years, yet István was not in any of Zsolt’s stories of the children’s home. Caution is needed here because Zsolt overall spoke little about his experiences inside the Dúzsy home. From most of what Zsolt told me (and equally did not say), it seemed that their siblingship existed only before (at their foster parents), after (once both had left the children’s home) or outside (on infrequent visits to their parents) state care, but there must have been experiences to maintain their relationship while in the children’s home. On the one hand, their relationship sounded rather close and gave the impression of the siblings as a unit. For example, when Zsolt withdrew from his apprenticeship as a locksmith and his brother was expelled from his butchery course, in Zsolt’s words ‘it was again just the two of us.’ They were still in touch by phone in their mid-thirties, but by the time of our interview (Zsolt was 38) the telephone number no longer worked. On the other hand, at the start of our first interview, Zsolt’s voice was under considerable strain when he told me that he had profited from the strong discipline in the children’s home ‘because– to tell the truth [raw emotion in voice], now that we are grown up– one has to say that I have remained on my own.’ Despite the presence of his brother, Zsolt seemed to have felt devoid of support in the children’s home and solely responsible for his life once he left care. The residential care system did not value and often seemingly minimised sibling relations. Emphasis was placed on the centrality of parent-­child relations—whether direct contact or the image of connection to parents—and this seems to have contributed to children in care not focussing on possible sibling relations.

Expectations from a Birth Certificate Putting ongoing family relations of children in care at the centre of analysis allows for insights into the making and breaking of kinship ties across the life course and during time in care. This chapter suggests that the birth

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certificate of a child in care was key to establishing kinship from a legal perspective. The data shows this state-produced document fixed who was recognised as a parent and could be used many years later to take children out of care despite not knowing one another. For children in care, however, my findings indicate that the birth certificate did not imply an automatic link or end to negotiating relatedness. The legal system, it seems, thus produced parents, but this needed to be confirmed by actual parenting for a personal relationship to develop. The cases discussed in this chapter show that birth certificates also established siblings, but expectations of what sibling relations entailed seemed less clear. Carers informed siblings about each other, but no entitlements or responsibilities flowed from this kinship term while in state care. Sibling relations were constructed by carers on the basis of shared parentage, but to my research participants siblingship required shared experiences during their childhood that created feelings of similarity. In their retrospective accounts, younger children often clamoured for a biological sibling. Older siblings, in contrast, often rejected a sibling as they had not grown up together and felt ‘foreign.’ Constructing siblingship along the lines of common descent was often not ‘enough’ to make children feel similar where biological ties had been disrupted. This shows that connections were generally ‘made not in the abstract but through mediating human beings’ (Edwards and Strathern 2000: 158). Parents, carers or other figures were required to impress that siblings are related and should look after each other. The chapter suggests that children who did not know their parents learned from other children in care about positive and negative experiences at home. This knowledge was not, however, necessarily applied to one’s own parents. Even where there was no contact with parents or the contact had not been good, there was still a strong ‘ideal’ of parent-child relations that my research participants longed for and focussed on. The next chapter will consider what this strong emphasis on parents meant for wider possible circles of belonging of children in care—to the children’s home, the school, the village, ethnicity and to peers.

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References Alber, E. (2013). Within the Thicket of Intergenerational Sibling Relations: A Case Study from Northern Benin. In E. Alber, C. Coe, & T. Thelen (Eds.), The Anthropology of Sibling Relations. Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange (pp. 73–96). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Alber, E., Coe, C., & Thelen, T. (2013). The Anthropology of Sibling Relations. Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bundgaard, H., & Fog Olwig, K. (2017). Producing “Good” Families and Citizens in Danish Child Care Institutions. In T.  Thelen & E.  Alber (Eds.), Reconnecting Kinship and State (pp.  200–219). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Connelly, G., & Furnivall, J. (2016). Addressing Low Attainment of Children in Public Care: The Scottish Experience. In S.  Jackson & I.  Höjer (Eds.), The Education of Children and Young People in State Care (pp. 88–104). London/ New York: Routledge. Donzelot, J. (1979). The Policing of Families: With a Forew. by Gilles Deleuze; transl. from the French by Robert Hurley. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Edwards, J., & Strathern, M. (2000). Including Our Own. In J. Carsten (Ed.), Cultures of Relatedness. New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (pp. 149–166). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Franklin, S., & McKinnon, S. (2001). Introduction. Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. In S.  Franklin & S.  McKinnon (Eds.), Relative Values. Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (pp. 1–28). Durham: Duke University Press. Király, M. (1982). Az intézeti szökések tapasztalatai Nógrád megyében [Experiences of Runaways from Institutions in Nógrád County]. Belügyi Szemle, 20, 69–70. Korzh, A. (2015). Education in Ukrainian Orphanages: Hidden Curriculum for Social Reproduction or Transformation? In E.  L. Brown, P.  C. Gorski, & G.  Lazaridis (Eds.), Poverty, Class, and Schooling: Global Perspectives on Economic Justice and Educational Equity (pp. 281–302). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing. Lambek, M. (2013). Kinship, Modernity, and the Immodern. In S. McKinnon & F. Cannell (Eds.), Vital Relations. Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship (pp. 241–260). Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Municio-Larsson, I. (2012). Doing Parenting in Post-Socialist Estonia and Latvia. In H. Carlbäck, Y. Gradskova, & Z. Kravchenko (Eds.), And They Lived Happily Ever After: Norms and Everyday Practices of Family and Parenthood in Russia and Eastern Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press. Pauli, J. (2013). “Sharing Made Us Sisters”. Sisterhood, Migration, and Household Dynamics in Mexico and Namibia. In E. Alber, C. Coe, & T. Thelen (Eds.),

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The Anthropology of Sibling Relations. Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange (pp. 29–50). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Penglase, J. (2007). Orphans of the Living. Growing Up in ‘Care’ in Twentieth-­ Century Australia. Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Szabó, Z. (1982). A nevelőintézetekből kikerülő fiatalok lakcímbejelentési problémája [The Problem of Flat Registration for Youths Coming Out of Care Homes]. Belügyi Szemle, 20, 76–77. Thelen, T., Thiemannn, A., & Roth, D. (2018). State Kinning and Kinning the State in Serbian Elder Care Programs. In T.  Thelen, L.  Vetters, & K. von Benda-Beckmann (Eds.), Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State (pp. 107–123). New York, Oxford: Berghahn Press. (republished from Social Analysis, 58:3, 107–123). Van der Geest, S. (2013). Kinship as Friendship. Brothers and Sisters in Kwahu, Ghana. In E. Alber, C. Coe, & T. Thelen (Eds.), The Anthropology of Sibling Relations. Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange (pp. 51–70). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 5

Care in the Children’s Home and Wider Circles of Belonging

The thing is that– [gets quieter] that I remember everything clearly from a young age. That’s the thing. I don’t want to. It would be better to forget. Unfortunately, we had to live through it. We had to live. We weren’t there for fun. But, on the one hand, I have to say that– that the strong discipline that they dictated to us was somehow good for me. And also because– to tell the truth [raw emotion in voice], now that we are grown up– one has to say that I have remained on my own– and that somehow the teaching that we received there was good for me. There was very, very, very strict drill discipline. They ruled us with iron fists. In reality, it was the school that was very strict. Not the care home, rather the school. There they were very strict with us because I think they took advantage of the fact that there was no one who we could turn to. This quote is from an interview with Zsolt—who I introduced in detail at the end of Chap. 2—about the basic atmosphere at the Dúzsy children’s home in the village of Délifalva, where he lived from 1979 to 1988, that strongly influenced the quality of relationships formed there. Following Thelen’s (2015) emphasis on the centrality of care practices for both constituting and dissolving personal relations discussed in the introduction to this book, this chapter explores children in care’s wider relations to care staff, teachers, local residents and friends by looking at the care received and given by my research participants while growing up. This approach overcomes linking predefined relations to specific practices and thus collapses commonplace dichotomies about care and relationships © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rasell, Care of the State, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49484-1_5

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such as private-public, family-state and good-bad. This is not to say that state employees and children in care did not draw such boundaries themselves. I will show that the relationships of children in care were shaped by boundary work around such divisions and different modalities of care that could stress more individualised and emotional care in the school compared to the children’s home. Zsolt was five when he came to the village of Délifalva and fourteen when he left. In starting our first meeting with the above passage, he may have been trying to confirm what he saw as my expectation of state care as a dangerous and uncaring environment. His switching track to talk about discipline in the school rather than in the children’s home interested me because much research focuses on historical abuse in children’s homes (Abrams 1998; Adams 1995; Child 1998; Penglase 2007; Schmuhl and Winkler 2010) or underachievement in schools (Korzh 2015; Connelly and Furnivall 2016). It has been largely overlooked that the school might be an important site of support as well as discipline and physical punishment for children in care. Taking Zsolt’s experiences in state care as a starting point, this chapter first looks at children in care’s relations to teachers, who were the only people that stood out in the interviews. I consider how receiving personal support but also physical punishment by teachers could create a sense of belonging to the school. In the second section I explore the limited, non-­ emotional interaction between staff in residential homes and children in care that led to few personal relationships developing. In the third section I look at belonging to a geographical place and connections to local residents which was a blind spot in the narratives but revealed through participant observation. The fourth section explores how being in state care weakened ethnic classification as Roma during socialism. In the final section I show how care between peers was not recognised by staff and thus was devalued for children in care too. Peers appeared only marginally in the narratives, yet there are hints about the importance to Zsolt of his classmates in his pathway after state care and the fact that he is still in contact with them now. Relying on several recorded interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Délifalva, this chapter shows that relationships are produced through attention, engagement and emotions and could apparently be situationally highlighted or muted due to the strong prioritisation of biological family.

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Belonging Within the School Children in care had strong relationships to teachers and attachment to school. Teachers rather than staff in the children’s home were prominent in the memories of care leavers about their childhood experiences. There was confusion on both sides during my first interviews when I asked about carers, when I often received the reply ‘do you mean teachers?’ My interview questions about the children’s home generated answers about the school, which pointed to the need to explore relationships of children in care beyond the walls of the residential institution where the children lived. As discussed in Chapter Two, the school was usually local and not integrated into the residential homes. While school days were recalled in detail, I heard very little about daily experiences in the homes where children had lived. I asked Zsolt whether he remembered his last day at Dúzsy aware of the difficulties in the transition from care to ‘independence’ (Mendes et al. 2011; Stein and Munro 2008), but for Zsolt it was his last day at school that sprang to mind. He clarified ‘you mean when vacation was spelled out on the blackboard?’ School pupils in Hungary have the tradition that seven days before the end of the academic year, they start spelling the word vacation (vakáció) on the blackboard, one letter a day. It was in school that children in care seemed to receive the most personal attention. In Zsolt’s account, villagers would complain about the behaviour of children in care to teachers rather than to staff in the children’s home. Within the school, obedience within a group was important, but individual performance and ability also mattered and varying talents in the different subjects were noted. One of the first things that Zsolt told me was that he had made a mistake after compulsory education by not choosing to continue studying Russian. He had excelled in the subject and his Russian teacher offered that if he took Russian further after he left the children’s home he could come back at any time and he would assist him. In school Zsolt had not attended the semi-optional Russian study group— semi-optional as his teacher would only award top marks to those pupils who went. His teacher had encouraged him to attend, but he stuck with the rest of the Dúzsy boys and focussed instead on football. There were local championships that the boys played in. Once his Russian teacher hauled him from the football pitch to the study group to enter a language competition to go to Russia. Zsolt won the competition, but the children’s home would not cover the expenses, so the two runners-up took his place.

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It was for this teacher that the 14-year-old Zsolt bought a small bottle of vodka as a farewell gift upon leaving the village. He paid for the present with the pocket money that he received as a lump sum upon ending Dúzsy. During the last years in the residential home, his pocket money had been withheld due to children buying cigarettes. He took the 200 ml of vodka to his teacher’s house and they drank together. The teacher provided more of the same, ‘just better-quality vodka and szofi [sopianae] cigarettes,’ remembered Zsolt. Gifting is one element in constructing personal relations (Sherry 1983) and the reciprocity by his teacher indicates their strong relationship that went beyond formal state responsibilities in terms of a teacher-pupil relationship. Once Zsolt left the village, the school and the children’s home had no further commitments to him, but the teacher offered to continue their relationship through providing help with Zsolt’s Russian. It is difficult to express such important relationships without resorting to kin terms, which is not what either intended. The teacher as a state employee was not expected to spend time with Zsolt outside of school. He had invited Zsolt into his house once before, when Zsolt strayed to the teacher’s gate while collecting snails, but only after first admonishing him and checking that no one was around to see. Zsolt was not a son to this teacher, but neither did the teacher embrace the expected ethos of the aloof, neutral state providing basic care as opposed to the ideal of ‘warm’ family care. One-on-one individualised interaction was important to the strength and vividness of the teacher’s relationship with Zsolt. In the Dúzsy park on one Sunday, a teacher was walking with guests and saw Zsolt and a group of boys messing around with a small bone taken from the crypt. They had stolen candles and toilet paper from the cemetery to light the underground vault in order to hang out. The teacher remarked ‘nicely’ that they would see each other the next day in school: ‘We didn’t have to say which class we were in because she knew everyone.’ The boys were called up in front of the whole school and the teacher ‘thoroughly gave it to us, using every word from “bloody Gypsy” to [gestures]. It wasn’t that she thought a lot about which words she used. There it was possible to speak in such a way.’ As punishment the boys had to clean up the crypt. The teacher felt empowered to reprimand the boys inside the school premises even though it was for misbehaviour at the weekend outside of school. She was not the class tutor of the boys, but they were school pupils and had shown her up in front of her guests. Zsolt emphasised several times the element of public shaming in her

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punishments. In another incident she called him up to the front of the class and then came the ‘your-mother’ and ‘you-Gypsy’ insults. He described how a metre-long ruler appeared: ‘I got a wrap on the knuckles, three fails [in my grade book], a note to take to the residential home plus she had me doing star jumps for 45 minutes until the end of class.’ For Zsolt the issue was not just being called a ‘Gypsy,’ but that everyone heard this (more on ethnic ascription comes later in the chapter). Such punishment was ambivalent because it both destroyed and facilitated belonging. Zsolt disliked this teacher and her actions pushed him away by humiliating him, yet her opportunity to discipline him reflected a form of belonging to the school. Slaps were presented matter-of-factly by Zsolt as strict control, which a few teachers used: ‘There was such a teacher who if during class we did something stupid then “come out” [motions a thwack]!’ Publications and journals for teachers at this time discussed the right way to discipline children and for the most part condemned physical punishment in school. For instance, the Hungarian practitioner journal Köznevelés (Public Education) ran a two-page spread on discipline in 1980 (Vol. 37, No. 19) and the front cover lead article of Vol. 37, No. 20 was on rewards and punishment. The further training page in Köznevelés Vol. 40, No. 10 (1984) listed 45 recent texts on the topic. This frankness about the use and contestation of corporal punishment in school resonates with how slaps were remembered by my research participants. According to a teacher in an article in Köznevelés from 1979, contemporary child-raising was generating many unchecked pampered children and this was how she came to hit one of her pupils despite sincerely rejecting physical punishment in schools (Rácz 1979: 10). There was certainly support for stricter education of the growing number of youth who, as a special education teacher put it, ‘paint the town red and form gangs in the underground and housing estates, sometimes threatening public safety’ (Kulcsár 1980: 7). Yet, the general professional consensus was that teachers were not to instil discipline through slaps because this was the expected role of parents. A former teacher at a special children’s home in the 1980s in south-eastern Hungary remarked to me that the difference between teaching children in care and teaching other children was that where there was a family background one could write critical comments in the report card or send for the parents, knowing that once the child goes home he or she ‘would be in for a right scolding or maybe a slap or something.’ This highlights that what was considered reasonable punishment within

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parent-child relations was different to accepted punishment within state-­ child relations. None of my interviewees mentioned being smacked by carers. The children’s home seemingly positioned itself as the state, implying a professional distance and limited interaction with children, while the school had more room to manoeuvre because it took on the parental role of training children, of which one part was (physical) disciplining. Physical punishment can therefore be regarded as a boundary object— state officials should not smack children, while parents could. This is visible in how the director of a correctional home punished his son differently to a child in care for the same misbehaviour. The care leaver Mihály, who was in a correctional home in 1978 aged 15, recalls that he was made to wear pyjamas for a month after running away: ‘That’s how they punished those [runaways]. That you had to go for food – to breakfast, to lunch – in pyjamas.’ He had run away to the village together with the director’s son, who lived on-site in the correctional home. While Mihály was stigmatised by having to wear pyjamas, the director hit his son. This indicates a line between state care and parental care and the difference in what was permitted when the parental hat was worn. My research participant Éva, who we already met in the previous chapter, told me that children were not hit ‘or the like’ in the children’s home. The only act of force that she recalled was having her hair pulled by a teacher after running away from the teacher’s house. Éva had been invited to help in the teacher’s garden during the summer holidays. She was not with family members for the holidays like the rest of her year group because her divorced mother was an alcoholic and she was not permitted to stay with her. When the police found and accompanied Éva back to the children’s home, the disappointed teacher said that she had trusted Éva and pulled her hair. Such physical punishment was inappropriate by a state employee, but it sprang from her close relationship to the girl that negated the state component, pushing their relationship into the realm of kinship. In this case and also that of Zsolt, paying attention to such care practices and their evolving relationships offers opportunities to see unexpected outcomes such as the transformation of public relations into private ones (cf. Read and Thelen 2007).

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Narrating Out the Children’s Home The amount of stories Zsolt and my other interviewees told about teachers contrasts to the limited recollections and information about children’s homes and carers in the narratives of research participants, which I turn to now. In his narrative, Zsolt rarely referred to individual staff members at the Dúzsy children’s home, simply stating ‘they.’ The children’s home was housed in the nationalised baroque castle of the Dúzsy family. The castle had been used since 1945 as a school, the office of the agricultural co-­ operative and a doctor’s practice. In 1962 the children’s home opened there and catered for 160 boys from kindergarten age up to the end of compulsory education. In the 1980s, the Dúzsy home had a staff of roughly 50 people working as carers, supervisors, night-time supervisors, gardeners, cleaners, in the administration, kitchen and laundry and at the managerial level. Most of the staff were local residents. It was not just members of staff that were left out of Zsolt’s childhood memories, but experiences inside the children’s home. In what follows I briefly outline the pedagogy in children’s homes in late socialist Hungary and explore actual practices of care in the Dúzsy home and how these were interpreted by Zsolt. My material suggests that different professional approaches existed that stressed more individualised and emotional care in school compared to heavily regulated, group-level interaction with carers in the children’s home. These different approaches affected the nature of relationships that children in care developed with the staff members working with them. Strictness and Boredom as Limiting Relatedness The method of collective education developed by Soviet pedagogue Makarenko (1888–1939) offered an orientation to socialist Eastern Europe about how to implement socialist care (Weitz 1992: 106). Makarenko theorised education as highly collective. Collectives were communities defined by communal interests and ideology that linked individual interests and aspirations, making individual and group interests the same. What was useful for the community should thus become the authentic wish of all members of the collective. According to Makarenko, the ‘collective provides the individual with nothing less than a character and a role to play in life’ (Zilberman 1988: 41). He believed that peer influence within the collective was the easiest way to shape children’s behaviour.

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Makarenko’s ideas were already criticised in the Soviet Union during his lifetime for potentially representing a type of army barracks pedagogy (Kamp 2006: 519), but were nevertheless still heavily pushed in the Eastern Bloc. For example, collective education was declared the pedagogical concept for all East German children’s homes at the First Central Conference for Carers in 1951 and used (as the brief examples below show) to maintain order.1 Makarenko’s complete pedagogical works were published in the Hungarian language in 1948. A Hungarian education series existed to disseminate Soviet publications on pedagogy. Of the first 50 volumes in this series, 43 were translations from Russian (Géczi 2009: 118). However, despite frequent assumptions that the satellite countries were a carbon copy of the Soviet model, practices evolved around a distinctive combination of historical, cultural and economic factors (cf. Read and Thelen 2007). The introduction to an edited volume on residential care in state socialist countries published in the GDR in the 1970s was reluctant to acknowledge divergences in state care across the bloc, stating merely that ‘a few aspects of the contents and methods [of raising children in institutions] are emphasised in some countries more than in others’ (Krebs 1976: 6). The chapter on Hungary defined collective education as ‘limits, order, rules and traditions that must always serve the child and take into account the interests of society and the individual’ (László 1976: 29). Sachse (2016: 30) observes that thus defined, the text suggests that societal interests and the wellbeing of the child were assigned equal weight in Hungary, while he argues that the interests of society were always prioritised in the GDR. This indicates some diversity between state socialist countries (cf. Hering 2009). While not the focus of my research, my findings suggest that Hungarian state care practices were predominantly Hungarian rather than state socialist, which is similar to what Bunzel (2007) argues about rehabilitation policies for disabled adults in East Germany. My interviews with care leavers did not contain any hints of peer group relations deliberately being made hierarchical or group punishments for the non-compliance of a single child. This contrasts to research on the 1  Dreier and Laudien (2012: 44) argue that collective education was established as the method of care in the GDR due to its political utility. Society was conceptualised as being made up of collectives and if the individual did not identify with a collective it put him or her outside of societal pressure to put the collective first. As such, socialist care had the aim of making children collectively minded. Makarenko simply provided the justification for this step.

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GDR that shows children in care formally judging the behaviour of each member in their group2 or the organisation of cleaning being put in the hands of one child ‘as a practice ground for domination and subordination—so read the entry in a logbook at a GDR child protection institute in 1983 (Fricke 2012: 525). Cleaning was not a field remembered by my interviewees as an activity related to bullying, as most homes had a cleaning rota that prevented such fights. At Dúzsy the children cleaned their room in pairs. The supervisor organised who had to clean and inspected all the rooms in the evening together with two children. Zsolt mentioned that the motivation to do a good job, or to scupper the chances of a different group by throwing paper scraps between the beds and then ‘discovering’ them there, was an outing at the end of the year for the class that had tidied their room the best. It was beyond the scope of my research to explore the content of carer training in late state socialist Hungary, but the carers I interviewed struggled to articulate concrete (socialist) aims and methods of care. A clearly defined routine structured the interaction between staff and children. Insofar as 60 per cent of the children entering state care in 1977  in Hungary was under three (Siklós 1983: 174), most of the children were weaned on obedience and a regimented day. Zsolt still remembered his schedule at Dúzsy: wake up at 7:00, breakfast 7:30, school from 8:00 until 13:00, lunch 13:30, free time from 14:00 until 16:00, study time from 16:00 to 18:00, take a bath, dinnertime, tidying up, room inspection, TV, and lights out. Zsolt’s favourite school teacher, who had also been a carer at Dúzsy before Zsolt’s time, told me when we met him in the village in 2012 (see Fig. 5.1) that there were very strict rules in the children’s home due to the state’s responsibility of care for the children. Looking after the safety and physical integrity of the children was thus paramount, which we saw in the previous chapter when carers had to decide whether to allow a child to visit their parents. The teacher felt that the responsibility had been so 2  In some GDR children’s homes, the children formally judged the behaviour of each member of their group in the evening. Within a framework of critique and self-critique, the children wrote down their own misdoings and asked for punishment or for the punishment of others. According to Fricke (2012: 526) the content of these written confessions did not change much over the years or across the different children’s homes. The children always emphasised that they had violated the trust placed in them by the carer and must now do everything to win it back. Such practices were not mentioned in the interviews or professional literature from late socialist Hungary.

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Fig. 5.1  Zsolt encountering his favourite teacher after decades. (Délifalva, 7 November 2012. This teacher felt that the strictness in care was helpful to the employability of care leavers because they were already used to following rules. He shaped Zsolt’s evaluation of state care that somehow he benefited from the strict discipline in the children’s home. I am the other person in the photo with a recording device in my hand.)

much that he practically already saw himself in prison, while Zsolt felt the long list of rules in the children’s home made the institution stricter than a prison: ‘The worst was the strictness, their attitude to us. That was terrible. Constant terror, strictness. Truly one was not allowed to step with the left foot if they said to step with the right.’ Rules subsumed the whole atmosphere and seemingly made it difficult for Zsolt to enjoy anything in the children’s home. During our conversations in Délifalva, Zsolt’s teacher added a second thought on the strictness, namely care for the future employability of the children. He said ‘but there were advantages too [of the strict rules]. One of them was that they got used to order because they were forced to. In a lot of them it formed in the end such a– whatever– it led to such an attitude to life that they came up to scratch at their workplace.’

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In the interviews Zsolt oscillated between two interpretations of strictness. He stated that the discipline benefited him, but ‘They didn’t have to. I don’t think they had to use such hard discipline to keep us on the straight and narrow because the opportunities were unlimited.’ By opportunities Zsolt is likely referring to options on the labour market. He finished compulsory education at Dúzsy in 1988. Although the Hungarian state’s commitment to full employment had not been realised in practice with district employment offices established in 1983 to assist those without work, the official unemployment rate in Hungary was negligible until the early 1990s (Haney 2002: 181–182). None of my research participants mentioned difficulties finding work directly upon leaving state care (finding accommodation was a different matter). For most it was a seamless transition to a job on the factory floor at the same place where they completed their vocational training. Zsolt thus questioned why they had to be raised with such strictness, stating that unlike today there had been semi-­ skilled jobs available for them. The strictness in the children’s homes took different forms during holidays. Zsolt recalled having to walk two by two at Lake Balaton (a major tourism centre for Hungary and indeed much of state socialist Central Europe)—something he found embarrassing—and that the children from the whole children’s home had to be in the same place. These strategies made supervision of the children easier for the staff. In the mornings the children had to stay in the holiday camp, while in the afternoons the gates to the holiday camp were locked and all children went to the beach. The older year groups asked to swim or at least be allowed to go to the lakeside in the morning, but this was not permitted. The routine did not vary between differently aged children. Zsolt was weaned on such supervision, but told me that children who came into care aged 12 or 13 ‘couldn’t accept the time restrictions which they were put under.’ The case files also highlight the difficulty of teenagers to adjust to state care. For instance, an assessment in 1979 of a boy who came into care in the last year of school stated that after one month ‘he finds it difficult to put up with the discipline. It is currently a big pressure on him to comply with the house rules of the institution.’3

3  Gyámhatóság case file 3355/1979 Minutes of a committee meeting at GYIVI about the continued care of a teenage boy, 2 March 1979.

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The strictness in the children’s home was paired with boredom. There was little that stuck out to Zsolt in the monotony of the days at Dúzsy, which is reflected in how little he referred to the children’s home in his account of his childhood. He recalled that they damaged a few glass panes in the formal gardens of the Dúzsy grounds by kicking a football around: ‘That was the problem. We had to find something to do with ourselves. There was nothing else for us to do, only football.’ Goffman (1961: 69) noted how institutional life can be described as ‘little islands of vivid, encapturing activity’ in an otherwise dead sea. For Zsolt the ‘islands’ were holidays to Lake Balaton (despite his complaints about the ongoing strictness), forest day where they could play tag in the trees and cook outdoors, or receiving a present upon becoming an úttörő—a member of the socialist youth organisation for pupils in school years five to eight. Zsolt did not have a recipient for the claim ‘I’m bored’ (on how the concept of boredom migrated from a childish fault to a claim that children could make upon adults, see Stearns 2010), showing again a lack of meaningful contact with staff. Zsolt spent nine years at the Dúzsy children’s home, but his narrative gave little sense of the passing of time. He did not say how old he was in the few stories that he told of the children’s home. The routine was the same for all age groups and therefore every year was similar: ‘when we were a little bit bigger in the sixth/seventh class, one realised just that, that there is still the same iron strictness and no improvement. When one sees no kind of improvement then it just doesn’t have a point.’ Khlinovskaya Rockhill (2010: 229) in her work on state care in the Russian Far North during Soviet times and beyond identifies a weakening grip, though not will or tone, of carers as children’s increased size and maturity gave them greater scope not to follow orders and directions too closely. As a teenager Zsolt had more agency than as a young child in the children’s home, for example deciding not to go to the Russian study group or appearing at his Russian teacher’s house, but nonetheless was constantly confronted with a strict routine. The strictness meant that little interaction between carers and children was required, as the children knew what they had to do next without being told, which limited the development of personal relationships between the children and staff in the home.

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Not Intended to Lead to Personal Relationships The non-emotional, group-level care provided in children’s homes led to few personal relationships developing between children in care and carers. My data shows how management practices in the children’s homes produced boundaries between state and family with very real consequences for my research participants. A bond between Katalin and a carer was stopped, she recalled, because ‘it is possible that someone said it was favouritism.’ The carer had taken her out many times for the weekend and bought her clothes. Staff building a close relationship with individual children put the director of the children’s home in a difficult position because carers had to ‘be even’ among all children in care. It was seen as unjust that Katalin got special attention and therefore the carer was excluded from her circle of belonging. Lambek (2013: 247) highlights that the state system legalises specific acts of kinship and excludes alternative candidates from being kin—in this case the carer. I am not suggesting that Katalin was looking for a mother in this carer, but this relationship nevertheless showed a different mode of interacting than distanced professionalism. The elements of affection in the carer’s activities were seen by the director as misplaced and wrong for a state employee. This reinforced the dichotomy between state and family, particularly the bias observed by Thelen (2015: 498) that ‘warm’ care is thought to be provided by relatives while paid institutional care is ‘cold’ (cf. Hochschild 1995). This lack of personal relationships in the children’s home made Zsolt feel vulnerable to teachers and staff because if something were to happen he had no one to talk to (Rasell 2015). The few stories he told of the children’s home were not unpleasant—in fact they were fun stories of adventures with peers—and yet he said it ‘was really for many, for many, as if it was a panic room. The whole institution a panic room. Daily dread, anxiety.’ Linde (1993: 22) analysed the form of biographical interviews and argues that for a story to be told it must either be unusual in some way or run counter to expectations. Not mentioning staff or indoor life in the children’s home in the interviews could actually represent a ‘given,’ that the routinised interaction with carers was dependable and boring. The narrating out of the children’s home and feelings of vulnerability in recollections thus seems to be the result of the modality of state care that emphasised rules over personal relationships and the consequence of management practices in the children’s home that aimed to stop the creation of personal relationships between staff and children.

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Village Life and Belonging to a Place Zsolt’s account of his childhood also pointed to a lack of relationships in his near surroundings, but this impression changed after visiting the village where his care home had been located. Until I went to Délifalva with Zsolt in November 2012, his narrative of state care seemed to be devoid of people, meaning that I was surprised when in the village he was recognised by everyone we encountered and from his comments he had kept abreast of at least some of the events in the village. The ornate metal fence around the castle grounds that cut off the children’s home from the village turned out to be more permeable than Goffman’s (1961) concept of total institutions would suggest. I consider next a sense of belonging to the grounds of the children’s home and a geographical area that emerged from the interviews, as well as the existence of personal relationships to villagers revealed through participant observation. In the interviews, Zsolt’s first thoughts when remembering the Dúzsy children’s home had been of the strictness and monotony. Yet in the same breath he talked of the beauty of the area and longing to walk again in the vast wooded park of the castle: It was possible to do really a lot, everything, there in the park. It was such a good hiding place, for example for what we stole from the gardener. We could easily cook what we grew there [in the vegetable plot of the children’s home]. We grew lettuce or carrots or some vegetable. You stole a hen from the farmer, threw a stone at its neck and ‘so long’! So there was meat. There were vegetables. You found a pot under every bush, water was everywhere. We easily cooked.

The change in personal pronoun in the above quote from the first person plural (we) to second person singular (you) hints to the strong imaginative possibilities of the park. In the children’s homes, the organisation of all activities by class meant that it was what a group did, not what an individual did. In using the second person singular, Zsolt could also be trying to depersonalise the story of illegal activity (stealing the chicken), so that he is not involved in bad behaviour at the level of language. In the last sentence he switched back to the first personal plural. By framing the story with ‘we’ he seems to identify himself with the park of the children’s home. He contrasted an indoor world of rules and boredom against an outdoor world marked by the potential for adventure.

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When we were in Délifalva, builders were working on one wing of the now derelict Dúzsy Castle and we could enter the building. Zsolt felt constrained during our visit, expressing frustration that ‘We were not allowed to look everywhere, only to go where he [the trustee of the castle4] allowed.’ Zsolt did not say what he would have liked to see. He is rather quiet and restrained by nature, but he showed no visible signs of positive or negative emotion about being back in the children’s home. Inside the castle he spent most of the time looking out the window at the park (see Fig. 5.2). My eyes were turned inwards imagining how the walls had functioned as a children’s home and how the rooms were connected, while Zsolt was seemingly looking outward to the park and the imaginative freedom it had offered. Zsolt contrasted unending periods of confinement in the children’s home with really liking the castle: ‘I don’t know, one could build up such a heartfelt relationship to the place. The castle and the surrounding plants or park or whatever. It was often– a lot– really– that I tried to imagine, tried to think how it would have been like to live in that time [when the baron was at Dúzsy].’ This use of place as a metaphor of kinship and belonging has been observed by scholars in other contexts. Frances Pine (2007) argued that personal or family memories in the Polish Highlands rarely centre on the house (as a physical building or grouping of people reproduced over time) or even on things and possessions. She found that kinship memories in the region attach rather to rituals, songs and dances and more than anything else to the land itself—‘the named fields, pastures, and forests of the village and the slopes and peaks of the mountains beyond’ (Pine 2007: 106). It is through these memories of place that people make and remake kinship. With care leavers, place offers a sense of belonging but often not kinship because the memories are rarely of people on the land and being in the children’s home was only a temporary status. Zsolt’s daydreaming about the baron’s life is interesting because he was creating memories of the place and inserting his time at the Dúzsy Castle into this longer history in an attempt to connect to the people in Délifalva. Katalin, who did not have the same placement stability as Zsolt, described her belonging in terms of a region: ‘I am from Szabolcs.’ She was born in Szabolcs-Szatmár county and her first seven placements were

4  The castle continues to be state owned, but Mr. Dúzsy was granted a 60-year trusteeship over his family’s former castle to engage in entrepreneurial activities.

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Fig. 5.2  Zsolt in the derelict children’s home looking out the window. (Délifalva, 7 November 2012. The castle closed as a children’s home in the early 1990s. In 2012 renovation started on one wing. This photo is of the festivity room where celebrations were held like at Christmas and where children could receive their parents. Zsolt had told me earlier that this was his favourite place at Dúzsy, yet it is the view of the park that held his attention and not the crest on the wall or the highly ornate ceiling.)

there.5 In her early teens she was transferred to Újháza in Szolnok county to finish compulsory education, setting her on a trajectory where she was to remain outside her home county. Early on at the new children’s home she ran away: ‘How should I put it? The change from where I had come from. I wanted to go back. It came down to that. I didn’t know the situation in Újháza. It is in Szolnok and it [her previous children’s home] was in Szabolcs.’ Újháza was a town with a population of some 12,000 people. 5  Szatmár county was merged with Szabolcs county after the border changes following the Second World War. Most of Szatmár territory became part of north-western Romania and you do not hear Hungarians saying ‘I am from Szatmár.’

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Katalin’s prior placements in Szabolcs had been in villages of less than 2000 residents. She had stayed the longest in the children’s home in Héldy Castle in Bakod. Similarly to Zsolt, she longed for the castle. She said she would like to visit it or ‘at least visit where I grew up.’ This suggests that she identifies with the county as an important place of belonging for her. I did not go with Katalin back to Bakod and I wonder if I had whether I would have observed relationships to villagers. As it is, she mentioned in her interview only one villager—a priest in Bakod who let the children in care eat the gooseberries in the church garden. With few personal relationships to make her feel she belonged in a specific place, Katalin seemingly developed a sense of belonging to a geographical area. Zsolt’s interviews also did not hint to connections to the village. For example, he dismissed a question about running away with ‘to where? We couldn’t run away to the village because there was no one to run to.’ Ethnography in the village somewhat revised this impression. It had been 24 years since Zsolt left care where he had been one of 160 boys at Dúzsy Castle and he had previously visited Délifalva in 1993, yet during our trip he pointed out who had lived in the houses we passed and wherever we went he fell into conversation with villagers who remembered him. He enquired about several former staff members, teachers and village children (now adults). We were peering into the porch of what had been the aftercare home for care leavers in Zsolt’s time when the former finance administrator of Dúzsy came out and asked Zsolt who he was. He stated his full name to which she replied ‘I know!!!! I know you. I’m gobsmacked!! Zsolti, how time flies’ (see Fig. 5.3). They talked about happenings in the village and it became clear that Zsolt must have been part of the fabric of the village to understand the tales she recounted of who had children, who had moved away, who had died and who worked where. Neither I nor my Hungarian assistant who was with me on the trip could follow their conversation because the necessary explanations in the dialogue were missing. It is part of being from the village to know who lives where and their health, which in their conversation was condensed to a nod of the head in a certain direction or a name and ‘you know.’ Being an adult, Zsolt was now in a position to be a villager and the delighted former finance administrator said she would tell her daughter (who like Zsolt is now living in Budapest) that he had been in Délifalva and that he should look Krisztina up on the social media website Facebook. She urged him to say hello to a woman in the village with whom Zsolt had gone to school—something that would have been unthinkable as a child

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Fig. 5.3  Zsolt exchanging news with a local resident. (Délifalva, 7 November 2012. Zsolt is standing with a villager in front of what used to be the aftercare home swapping stories about village life and the former residents of the Dúzsy children’s home. I was surprised that wherever we went in the village Zsolt was known despite having left at the age of 14 (he is now in his late thirties) when he was one of 160 boys in the children’s home.)

in care when ‘If we were outside on the street or somewhere, we were not allowed to be friends with them [village children].’ Zsolt recalled only one invitation to the house of a village child for a birthday party where his entire school class was invited. At the time of my fieldwork in 2012 Délifalva was in economic decline compared to the 1980s. It had been 1000 strong with some 300 people working at the agricultural co-­operative and more than 50 staff at Dúzsy. It was now a village of 700 with the former finance administrator not able to find a buyer for her home and few local employment opportunities. We had to cut the chatting short as our bus back to Budapest was leaving and Zsolt regretted that we had not

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arrived earlier, particularly once he found out that a particular person (to us it was unclear who) still lived in the village. Zsolt mentioned how nice it felt when the villagers invited the children in care to pick cherries in summer or beans in autumn: ‘There are those nice memories because somehow they treated us differently.’ This work was paid, but it is not the financial aspect that Zsolt emphasised. By taking part in the harvest he could move more freely around the village. It is a memory of being a part of the village that is subsumed otherwise by a dominant picture of Délifalva as boring and stifling. Zsolt says ‘thinking back, perhaps then I felt that it would have been better if the pawn house [children’s home] was in a city and not in some small, hidden village. I really missed the city, particularly at the weekends when it rained.’ Zsolt was envious of his two sisters in state care in the city of Kaposvár who had the excitement of cinema trips and who were more anonymous in their surroundings. During our visit to Délifalva we ran into one of Zsolt’s former carers in the village shop. Although said in jest, the fact that he asked why Zsolt did not live in Délifalva suggested some type of belonging that I had not expected from Zsolt’s feelings of isolation and vulnerability about life at Dúzsy expressed in his interview. The carer rolled his eyes on hearing that Zsolt lives in Budapest. Zsolt countered ‘what should I do here? At least I can go for walks there.’ The beautiful surroundings of Délifalva would seem the more obvious choice for a walk, but Zsolt was clear that ‘here it is not good because it is too quiet. There at least– there at least there is a din.’ My audio files from Délifalva are ironically difficult to make out because of background noise, namely dogs barking and jumping up at the gate at each house we passed, but this is precisely part of what Zsolt found to be the oppressive sociality in the village: ‘They knew who are the pawned [children in care], who are the villagers. Everyone knew everyone and if there was someone else they asked “What are you doing hanging around here?”’ Rather than a lack of relationships to villagers, it seems that the multiple relationships within a bounded community generated control and—related to this—boredom. Zsolt belonged to the village, but he could not escape his low place in its hierarchy. It was only through participant observation in the village that clues were provided about Zsolt’s relationships to villagers. Gallinat (2009) has shown in her research with GDR former political prisoners how ethnographic methods can shed important light on the discourses underpinning interview narratives that influence what kinds of stories are told. It is not

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just in the highly complex settings of dictatorships and narrating as Zeitzeugen (historical witnesses) that such an approach is needed. Like the East German pensioners systematically underestimating the value of neighbours and friends in their daily lives described by Thelen (2010: 236), Zsolt did not recognise relationships to villagers as important, or at least not in his account to me as an adult. The primacy accorded by carers and the child protection system to parent-child relations seemingly devalued other possible relationships for him. In this way state policies and the everyday practices of officials determined not just the legal recognition of a particular relationship (cf. Borneman 2001; Lambek 2013), but also its social recognition. Ethnography in the village helped me gain greater insights into the context of the narratives and also what was left out. One care leaver who managed to become ‘a villager’ is Ádám, who lived for 22 years at a therapeutic children’s home (gyógypedagógiai intézet) for children with learning disabilities in a village in the southern great plain region. He came to the therapeutic home when he was three—this was 1986—and left when he was twenty-five.6 He lived inside the castle grounds of the children’s home until the closure of the large institution when he was 17, after which he moved to the village centre where houses had been bought for use as small group homes for children in care. Two years after leaving the village he returned on an employment programme. Ádám said he would have liked to put down roots (magam befészkelni— literally ‘make a nest’) in the places to which he had moved for work, but he never secured a long-term employment contract. It was seemingly his connections to the villagers that assisted his return and employment opportunities. It was his former teacher who arranged for him to be on the employment programme for a year. With his salary, Ádám enrolled in college and gained a child supervisor qualification. He said he had always wanted to be a child supervisor, but that staff in the children’s home were not supportive and ‘whatever, I learnt painting-decorating’—one of the standard vocational pathways facilitated for care leavers. When I met him in 2013 he was in the village covering for a colleague in a small group home. Several of his former carers are his work colleagues. Indeed, it was two long-serving members of 6  Usually after-care services went until the age of 24, but Ádám enrolled in evening school after his painter-decorator course and thus could stay for another year. He said he did not want to study but he was ‘scared of life with a capital S and wished to be kept by the state for an extra year.’

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the therapeutic home who introduced us. To them Ádám had ‘done good’ and he said that he got on well with the older staff. He struggled in explaining that there was one person who makes him feel unwelcome due to his past, but he implied that this person is difficult with everyone. I asked Ádám why he decided to return to the village and he answered ‘It would have been possible to go elsewhere, but I liked it here. I grew up here. I could have gone elsewhere, but here in the village I know everyone.’ This points to his sense of belonging to both the physical landscape and to the community as there were villagers who were willing to assist him. This belonging was more explicitly felt and articulated by Ádám compared to Zsolt—although inevitably affected by the fact that Ádám continued to live in the village by choice. Yet both accounts show the development of ties to local residents and landscapes near the children’s home. The castle grounds of the children’s homes featured prominently in interviews, suggesting a feeling of belonging to a place through memories of the area. A contrast was made between the strictness and drabness of inside and the possible adventures that the outside offered. These contrasts blurred when care leavers talked about the village. Instead of having no contact with villagers, it seemed that the village was a place of tight social control. Villagers knew many children in care from working in the children’s home or school or else from knowing their fellow villagers, so could identify who was a child in care and not permitted to be unsupervised in the village. Children in care’s low position in the village hierarchy limited their belonging, but did not fully undo it and belonging could be renegotiated upon returning to the village.

From Child in Care to ‘Gypsy’ Adult: The Ascription of Ethnic Belonging Another dimension of belonging and relationships shaped by being in state care concerned ethnicity. In recounting his life, Zsolt made no allusion to originating from a Roma family, nor any reference to being classified as this at any point in the little he said about the children’s home. It was only in the school where this happened—as described above, ‘you Gypsy’ and ‘bloody Gypsy’ were the words one teacher used when she lost her temper with Zsolt. Now as an adult the first piece of information I received by the staff member at the homeless shelter who organised the

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interviews with Zsolt was that he is Roma. We see a spatial dividing line in the ascription of ethnic belonging between the children’s home and the school and a temporal dividing line between Zsolt as a child in care and Zsolt as a Roma man. My research on children in care in Hungary was assumed to be about Roma in everyday conversations as well as scholarly discussions and yet neither the care leavers nor former carers I interviewed remember being classified or classifying children as ‘Gypsy’ in the children’s home.7 My interest here is on the care practices in children’s homes that contributed to this shaping of ethnic belonging in state care. The downplaying of ethnic differences or outright denial that there were Roma children in care under socialism speaks to the intention under János Kádár’s rule (1956–88) to dissolve differences between Roma and Hungarians. Roma were highly discriminated in nineteenth- and twentieth-­ century Hungarian history, seen as non-Hungarian, criminal, ‘work shy’ and having lower intelligence and a ‘backward’ culture. The official policy on Roma into the 1980s was still anchored in the first party decree on the situation of the ‘Gypsy’ community from 1961. ‘Gypsies’ were not seen to form a national minority, but policy claimed to address their ‘specific social situation’ (Mezey 1986: 242  in Stewart 2001: 83). Consequently, the Hungarian state socialist government set itself the task of changing the ‘Gypsy’ way of life through the discipline of regular work, decent housing and educational achievement. Stewart (2001: 83) underlines the mechanical logic to Party theory by formulating it as an equation: Gypsy x socialist wage labour + housing + education = Hungarian worker + Gypsy folklore. Zsolt was born in 1974 and grew up under this assimilationist policy towards Roma in Hungary. It is therefore rather typical that explicit classification as Roma was not made within the children’s home. It is from the lips of villagers in Délifalva that he was more likely to hear the word ‘Gypsy’ in reference to himself or, as we heard above, from teachers in the school. Zsolt recalled that if a romance between children in school developed, it was the girl’s mother who objected first and ‘if it was with a pawn [child in care], to say nothing of if he was Gypsy or ethnic, that only added fuel to the flames.’ It seems in this case it mattered to the mother whether 7  Using the term ‘Gypsy’ here is to ‘highlight that there is a difference between those persons authorities identified as “Gypsies” and those who identify themselves as Roma’ (Varsa 2017: 264). Although in Hungary Roma also self-identify as ‘Gypsy,’ I use the term Roma whenever I refer to members of this ethnic group. I retained the term ‘Gypsy’ when used in the primary sources such as in interviews or discussions in education journals.

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the child in care was Roma, but Zsolt was clear that in school no difference was made (as he put it) between the ‘ethnics’ and the ‘light skinned’ from the children’s home. He stated ‘We were in one boat. We were the lowest of the low from our village.’ Here we see that state care worked to homogenise children within the institution, as all children were integrated under the single criterion of being from the ‘pawn house.’ This de-­ prioritisation of social differences was present in other socialist countries. Borneman suggests for the GDR that theoretically anyone was allowed to become a citizen of the socialist republic in order to assure labour stability, particularly before the Berlin Wall was erected. The state ‘sought to integrate all its members in the single criterion of being socialist’ (Borneman 1992: 80). Katalin’s account also reflected the dual experience of assimilationist policy in state care and the categorising gaze of the outside community. She said she will never forget how the little girls starting in the first year at the children’s home in Újháza were called Tirpák by the townspeople. Tirpák is a minority group of Slovakian origin who settled in the eighteenth century in Szabolcs county and Hungarian slang for someone who is uncultured, rude and loutish. At this part of the interview Katalin coughed and said very quietly that the girls were actually ‘Gypsy’ girls. By stating immediately afterwards that she is from Szabolcs too might hint at her having also been classified as Roma. The other more explicit episode of classification was when she ran away from the children’s home. The truck driver who picked up the hitchhiking girls called her ‘the little blackie.’ This was the only reference to her slightly darker skin complexion, which she might have taken at the time as an indication of being Roma. Ethnic description thus came from outside the care system, showing how it shaped identity. Being regarded as ‘Gypsy’ by outsiders was a clear part of Krisztián’s narrative, who is now a Roma artist. He recalled, ‘It was odd for me that they saw me like that.’ He was around six years old and starting to interact more with the community outside the children’s home when he realised that he was perceived as ‘Gypsy,’ which at first was not an identity that he willingly embraced. He did not know this Roma kinship to which he was taken as belonging, having been in care since birth with no contact with his family. At a panel on state care arranged in 1983 by the newspaper Népszabadság, a retired children’s home director said that children of Roma origin in state care who did not know their parents became bitter at a young age because they were ethnicised by outsiders on the basis of a

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family that was not part of their life (Népszabadság 1983: 9). In the interview with care leaver Róbert—also now a Roma artist—he clarified that they heard the word ‘Gypsy’ while growing up, but ‘For a long time I didn’t know that I am Gypsy.’ For Zsolt and Katalin there were few external incentives to adopt a minority identity in the face of discrimination. Those care leavers who did later take on this label tend to be activists who use a rights-based discourse. The following quotation from the director of the Tiszadob children’s town from 1983 shows clearly the assimilationist policy in action: At ours there is not one Gypsy child. Dark skinned, that is different. But these are already not Gypsy children. Our children do not know Gypsyness. Who is here lives the same, breathes, thinks, talks with the same intelligence as a Hungarian child. Here in the children’s home when one child wishes to insult another, then the brown-skinned child says that the white-skinned child is a Gypsy. Particularly he insults that his mum is a Gypsy. A certain way of life is associated with the expression Gypsy. We do not recommend that these children return to the Gypsy settlement. (Diósi 1988: 290)

In this account, ‘Gypsyness’ refers to a mode of living that could be ‘cured’ by removing children from social and family situations deemed ‘undesirable.’ This premise fits into a much longer history of the institutionalisation of Roma children under the Austro-Hungarian empire.8 Defining ‘Gypsyness’ as an issue of socialisation carried with it the promise that the supposed differences could be abolished with effort (Horváth 2012: 122). This view could be found in Hungarian education textbooks from the time. For instance, the teacher training manual Pedagogy II from 1980 stated: Gypsyness comes from its own subculture. As a result we need to cultivate it towards the Hungarian culture, so that their way of life up to now will change to a socialist way of living, working and thinking. (Szántó 1980, quoted in Pik 1981: 6)

This textbook was critically discussed in the education journal Köznevelés. The geneticist Endre Czeizel challenged passages that 8  In 1780 over 8000 Roma children were taken from their families within the Habsburg empire for ‘re-education’ as wards of the state and another 9436 children were placed in foster homes (Jenne 2000: 196).

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attributed purportedly negative characteristics of Roma to genetics and hereditary traits. Czeizel argued that while ‘generally Gypsies more frequently steal, [this] is about adoptive patterns or possibly socio-cultural inheritance’ and not a genotype (Czeizel 1981: 9). In either case, certain professionals held strong and deeply stigmatising beliefs about Roma children. A married couple who had both worked for several decades at the therapeutic children’s home where Ádám grew up said ‘Gypsy’ children in care was a current problem.9 They denied that there had been any ‘Gypsy’ children there during late socialism, despite taking us to talk with Ádám, who being dark haired and dark skinned could easily be classified as Roma. A teacher who had worked at the same institution in the 1980s also did not mention any Roma children in an interview about her professional life. Upon being directly asked, she said that in her class there has been some ‘Gypsy’ children, but not many. She stated ‘It was possible to know on the basis of their surname because not all had such dark skin.’10 The ‘obviousness’ of darker skin as a distinguishing marker in Hungary was highlighted each time I showed researchers or acquaintances old photos of children in care. Invariably who was Roma was pointed out to me based on hair colour and skin tone. Although this suggests a racialised understanding of Roma, in social practice the boundaries are still porous. As I described above, in telling off pupils, a teacher at Zsolt’s school in Délifalva used indiscriminately ‘every word from bloody Gypsy to [gestures].’ While clearly not acting professionally, her use of the word ‘Gypsy’ points to it being a comment upon behaviour. The Hungarian word elcigányosodott— literally ‘someone has become a Gypsy’—indicates how a person can slip into the category of being Roma. Associated with such a transformation in adults is living in dire circumstances, drinking too much alcohol, ‘poor’ parenting style and having unclear family relations. Horváth (2012: 118) argues that under state socialism the ‘Gypsy’Magyar distinction defined the relationship between people in any given situation, but that this was never explicitly articulated. As long as ‘the 9  A study in 2005 commissioned by two state ministries found that Roma children accounted for 38% of children in care in Hungary (their categorisation as Roma was based on classification by their carer), whereas the proportion of Roma children among the overall child population in Hungary was estimated at 13% (Herczog and Neményi 2007:5). 10  Some surnames are associated in Hungary with Roma communities such as Horváth (although this name is also very common in ethnic Hungarian families), Bogdán, Csonka, Farkas, Kalányos, Lakatos and Orsós.

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Gypsy’ remained unnamed, the assumptions underlying the distinction were kept silent (e.g. that ‘Gypsy’ children should attend school but be in the remedial class or that ‘Gypsies’ could be cleaners, day labourers or rubbish collectors, but not doctors, lawyers or teachers). This exerted a pressure to adapt to dominant patterns and to ‘not behave in such a way as would force someone to call them a Gypsy’ (Stewart 2013: 424). The advent of Roma housing projects and minority education programmes in the 1990s undermined this mechanism as it openly acknowledged a Roma identity. It is hard to tell how far staff in children’s homes were aware of these higher-level discussions or unspoken social agreements, but it seems that being a Roma child was negated by the mass care in children’s homes. Care relations in the children’s homes were mainly at a group-level, so there was less space for a ‘Gypsy’-Magyar distinction to drive the interaction. The discussion of ‘Gypsyness’ in this section shows that care needs to be seen as ‘a process with an open outcome’ (Thelen 2015: 508). Practices and discourses in children’s homes led to stable relations and identities— especially around links to biological parents—but they also could lead to the dissolution of ethnic belonging. It is therefore valuable to investigate a lack of ties and kinship because such absences are also the product of care practices and wider state policy influence.

Just a Friend: Not Recognising Care Relationships Beyond Kin In the previous chapter I demonstrated how the emphasis on parent-child relations by the child protection system and state officials seemed to limit relations to siblings. The same argument applies to relations with friends and peers. In the interviews, care leavers focussed on their parents and there were only implicit hints to the importance of peer relations. Siblingship seemingly had its partner and opposite in friendship—both could imply emotional intimacy, mutual help and a horizontal relation or friends could be closer to the ideal of siblings that brothers and sisters did not live up to. The only explicit references to friends in the interviews with care leavers was about friendships ending. For instance, at the start of the interview with Katalin I asked how life was in the children’s home and was somewhat surprised that the first thing she told me was that her friendship to

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two girls had been interrupted when they left the institution to return to their family of origin. She recalled: ‘I had two small, dear friends. It was a problem. Not for them, but for me. They were ripped away from me because their mother [the two girls were sisters] took them out. For a very long time it was too much for me. We missed each other because we had been together since we were young.’ This hints that the re-kinning of the mother and children led to the de-kinning of Katalin when their friendship ended. Kinship is often used as a powerful idiom through which to express other relations. Van der Geest (2013: 69) points out the somewhat paradoxical nature of people choosing ‘kinship terms to express love and affection [for non-kin], apparently assuming that the truest love is found in kinship, [and yet] … at the same time, they recognise that a voluntarily chosen relationship is more precious.’ Katalin’s experience of her own two sisters described in Chapter Four was of rejection (lack of interest) and physical pain (being smacked to make her go away), yet that Katalin still longed for siblings suggests her image of siblingship was something closer to what she had with these two friends. I directly asked the care leaver Éva about friends in state care and after a short pause she mentioned that she did have one friend in the children’s home, but that the girl loved swimming and had run away and drowned in a river. Éva had not been invited to attend the funeral. Indeed, it was only months later that she even learned that her friend had died. The girl was simply gone from the children’s home. Her emotional connection to the girl was seemingly not acknowledged by carers. In Chapter Four I described how Éva’s relationship with her half-brother had also not been supported by staff at the children’s home, who said she did not have a brother. It seems that for carers the family was conceptualised as biological parents and children, thus including (full) siblings in a second step. A child’s entitlement to information about other children in care was thus derived from shared parentage and not from actual friendships or emotional attachments. Relations to peers in the children’s home were not given much importance in the accounts by care leavers. I asked Zsolt who he liked the best in the children’s home and he named a supervisor. I was expecting him to tell me about a boy at Dúzsy. He might have been thinking of the children’s home only in terms of its running and staff or none of his peers stood out because everything was done together with his class. There were 18 boys in Zsolt’s group in his last year at Dúzsy in 1988, most of them having been there since kindergarten. In the few stories that Zsolt told of

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his time in Délifalva, I did not learn the names or personalities of any of them. It was only when I asked whether he was still in touch with someone from his childhood that he listed four men from his Dúzsy days with whom he occasionally telephones. That other children in care remain anonymous in the recollections of care leavers accords with the many accounts of care that Joanna Penglase—co-founder of CLAN, an Australian support and advocacy organisation for older care leavers—heard. Her impression is that ‘each child, individually, hoped for rescue, and that family, whether within the home or without, was more important than other children’ (Penglase 2007: 293). We also see this in the interviews with Zsolt. Upon deciding what trade to learn, Zsolt wished to be near his brother, so he asked to train as a butcher like István despite it not suiting his physique: ‘I wanted to be closer. I don’t know, perhaps I had some affection for him. When I left the institution, I wanted to have someone near to me.’ Zsolt’s account shows how children in care were guided by norms and discourses within the care system to focus on their family. Friendships did form, but their importance was muted in the interviews. It is only through indirect comments that clues were provided about the importance to Zsolt of relationships outside of the family. Zsolt’s classmates at Dúzsy encouraged him and offered advice—notably that he should try the leather trade in Budapest (where they had enrolled the year before) after he abandoned his training as a locksmith in Kaposvár. Another hint was that after completing military service in 1993, Zsolt visited Délifalva for two days to celebrate with former classmates living in the aftercare home. He told me this when we walked past the home together. He said that the boys were glad to see him as he had kept in touch during the four years that had since passed. I was surprised by this given that I had not heard about any specific boys in the institution in his stories. A third instance is that Zsolt told me that it had been sad when a lot of his friends with whom he had started at the children’s home were moved into a different class because there were some problems with them on the corridor. The fact that Zsolt only talked about his brother in the interviews could suggest that the primacy accorded to family devalued other possible bonds and led him to underestimate the value of friends. Thus, we see that even spending considerable time together might not promote strong ties.

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Undervaluing Personal Relations Overall, a strong ‘ideal’ of relations to biological parents combined with formal, group-level interaction with carers in children’s homes contributed to care leavers perceiving few personal relations in their childhood. Caring relations did exist to carers, teachers, local residents and peers, but could apparently be situationally highlighted or muted. I looked in this chapter at care practices outside the ‘private’ sphere of family, revealing that these other possible relations tended to be undervalued and relatively unnoticed and unremembered due to the primacy accorded to biological parenting by Hungarian social policies, the child protection system and state employees. Most of the narratives from my care leavers did not mention local residents and peer relations. It is striking that friendships were often only mentioned in relation to their curtailment or end. Exploring the dissolution of personal relations (an under-researched topic in anthropology) can shed light on how relations are created and maintained. The care leaver Zsolt narrated fun stories of stealing a chicken or playing in the crypt but without mentioning who was involved in the adventures. It seems that the constant presence of the other boys in his year group at the children’s home made it superfluous for him to add this information. Also affecting his narration, I suggest, was the emphasis on parent-child relations that devalued other relations, so they were not articulated in the interviews. It was only indirect comments, participant observation and targeted questions that hinted at the support provided by peers and local residents. Similar to Thelen’s (2010: 236) observation that the care of neighbours and work colleagues (sometimes which far exceeded kin care) was not explicitly discussed in her interviews with (East) German pensioners, most non-kin relations were not emphasised in the narratives of care leavers because of the strong focus on parent-child relations. One deliberate alteration of wider circles of belonging was in relation to ethnicity. My interviewees grew up under an assimilationist policy that aimed to dissolve the differences between Roma and Hungarians and in the children’s home this took the form of the de-differentiation of the children. They were all children in care—homogenised into ‘the lowest of the low’ from the village, as Zsolt put it. In their childhood they were only ‘Gypsy’ if they acted ‘like one.’ This attempt of carers to shape the personal relations of children in care by de-kinning and in turn de-ethnicising children born into families labelled as ‘Gypsy’ (as set out in wider state

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policies) was however challenged outside the children’s home and later in life—frequently not by the care leaver, but by people in their surroundings. Care leavers could thus be re-ethnicised in the eyes of others without having contact with Roma kin. My research shows that a family-state boundary was erected by the effort to treat the children in the children’s home in the same way and kin-like relations were not regarded as an appropriate dimension of state care practices. It seems that in the school a different professional approach existed that emphasised more individualised and emotional care compared to the children’s home. It was teachers who were mentioned most frequently in the narratives of care leavers and I suggest this is because it was in school that children in care received the most personalised attention for their ability in different school subjects, their behaviour and planning for future life. One part of this was (physical) punishment, which limited a sense of belonging to the school when it was humiliating, but at the same time facilitated belonging by signifying that the child was part of the school and in a relationship with teachers where disciplining was authorised. For children in care this meant teachers were often significant figures, whereas the group-based interaction with carers rarely led to opportunities for personal relationships to develop, erasing them from the narratives. By focussing on care practices and their evolving relationships, I showed that simple co-presence in the children’s home did not create personal relationships to other children or to carers. Personal attention and meeting emotional needs was required, which could lead to significant ties developing that overcame constructed boundaries of ‘family’ and ‘state.’ Thus, it is important to discuss care in relations beyond kinship to enhance our understanding of links and overlaps between relationships that are usually analysed as ‘public’ or ‘private.’ With these observations on how state policies and care practices shaped particular relationships—building or alternatively discouraging certain connections—as well as the fact that these were sometimes challenged, we have arrived at the end of the empirical section of this book. In the concluding chapter I draw together my main research findings around four themes: (1) the connections between care practices and kinship; (2) reconsidering state practices through images of the family; (3) the devaluation of specific relations; and (4) the blurring of boundaries between family and the state.

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CHAPTER 6

Conclusions: The Processes of Producing Kinship and the State in Residential Care

Care of the State came to be the title of this book because the various relationships of children in care were shaped by the policies, institutions and the everyday practices of state actors. I sought to give a bottom-up perspective on how being in state care created, maintained, devalued and/or interrupted the personal relationships of children through oral history interviews with care leavers who had grown up in residential care in Hungary in the late 1970s and early 1980s and by analysing child protection case files from that time. The focus on relationships drove my investigation of experiences in children’s homes, family settings and negotiations between welfare workers and parents on how and where to raise children. State care is an interesting site to explore the co-production of family and the state precisely because employees of state organisations took over the tasks of raising and caring for children from parents. My entry point of relationships lets us see the diversity of experiences among children in care as well as the heterogeneous nature of the state. In these conclusions, I consider four themes that cut across my empirical chapters about the different influences on the relationships of children in care in late socialist Hungary. These themes contribute to anthropological understandings about the formation and evolution of kinship and caring connections and offer insights into the workings of the state. I start by looking at the importance of care practices in shaping personal relationships. Secondly, I widen out from care practices to highlight the importance of images about ‘ideal’ family and parenting norms that shaped state © The Author(s) 2020 J. Rasell, Care of the State, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49484-1_6

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regulations and interventions for children in care. In the third section, I discuss how these images and care practices could devalue other relationships for children in care through an emphasis on parent-child relations. Fourthly, I look at the blurring of boundaries between the state and family and—despite such blurring—at the moments when the boundaries were experienced as clear and impassable. Ultimately, the book affirms the constructed and negotiated nature of caring and family relationships and their interconnection with state norms and practices.

Care Practices and Kinship The setting of state care lends itself to thinking about the relationship between kinship and care practices because family members have a reduced or curtailed role in bringing up children who live in children’s homes. As I discussed in Chap. 1, anthropological studies challenge the assumption that kinship creates care obligations by highlighting that kinship is created through activities and processes of caring (Carsten 1995; Weismantel 1995). Following Thelen’s (2014, 2015) suggestion to use care as the starting point of analysis, I looked at care practices within and outside kinship relations to see where personal relationships developed and where they were limited. This focus on care practices reveals that kinship is constructed and variable. The stories of my interviewees show that kinship was not automatic. Kinship needed to be supported by care practices in order to feel meaningful, be they from staff in care homes, friends, biological parents or other relatives. As I described in Chap. 4, some reunions with families of origin were experienced as difficult or bewildering because there had been no process of caring to produce kinship. Older children in care might avoid younger siblings to whom they were introduced by care home staff because they had not grown up together and did not feel related (cf. Pauli 2013). My interviewees highlighted the responsibility and obligations that came from sibling relations while children and increasingly as adults. However, they were often reluctant to accept such commitments if they did not have shared experiences. This reflects the temporal dimension of care: the lack of past care experiences combined with future expectations of requests for care to dissolve kinship bonds. Chapter 4 showed that the term ‘parent’ could be an empty category and that, when children had been in care since birth or an early age, their parents had to ‘kin’ them for the relationship to become of any

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significance to them. ‘Kinning’ was coined by Howell (2006) to explain how international adoption processes work, but in my case the children and their parents were already in a relationship that could be expressed in a conventional kin idiom. The care practices by which someone is brought into a personal relationship were missing here. We saw that welfare workers seemed to treat parents who wished to take their very young children out of care as potential adoptive parents by keeping note of how many visits they made to their children’s home. The parents had to form and maintain a relationship with the child whilst in care in order to have state care permanently ended. This suggests that while law constructed kinship on the basis of shared genes, state officials also required evidence of care practices to accept the validity of family relations. Care and, more generally, kinship are often presented as something positive in anthropological literature, meaning that little attention is paid to the dissolution of significant ties or incidences when care is not supportive or beneficial. The research in this book suggests that ‘it is important to acknowledge negative feelings and outcomes of care’ in order to make de-kinning visible (Thelen 2015: 504). Family care was characterised by aversion, neglect or abuse for many of my research participants and these factors led to their placement in state care. It is more obvious with paid care activities that not all care practices lead to a relationship or are infused with ‘good feelings,’ but this is an insight that can be applied to the care provided by relatives. Across the empirical chapters, we saw that emotional aspects shaped the potential development of care practices into relationships. Within state care, interaction between staff and children in children’s homes was expected to be professional rather than emotional. The care processes were en masse and required little personal interaction between carers and children. Few staff members were named in the recollections of care leavers and different job roles in children’s homes simply flattened into ‘they.’ I heard instead about daily routines, strictness and boredom. My research participants seemingly received material rather than emotional support in children’s homes in terms of shelter, clothing and food. Read and Thelen (2007) show how emotional needs can transform public relations into private relations and vice versa, but this emotional dimension of care was rarely present in the interaction between carers in residential institutions and children that could have led to significant ties developing. The narratives of care leavers highlighted that interaction and individual attention were important elements of care practices for children in

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residential homes because they provided a space for emotional ties to develop. Teachers were therefore the most recalled professionals in my interviews with care leavers about their childhood. It was in school that children in care seemingly received the most personal attention—remembered both positively and negatively. A child could excel in a particular subject and teachers were variously recalled as encouraging pupils or reprimanding them for poor performance or bad behaviour. Punishment formed part of the relations and interaction with schoolteachers. In Chap. 5 I showed that physical punishment was remembered as the purview of teachers rather than children’s home staff. While unpleasant, being punished by teachers could reinforce a feeling of belonging to the school and it was the teacher’s role in training and disciplining children that contributed to personal relationships developing. Compared to the limited interaction between carers and children in children’s homes, there was some opportunity in school to develop individual and personalised relations to teachers. The data suggests that simple co-presence was insufficient for building relations: the nature and quality of interaction was crucial. Overall, my focus on care practices and their evolving relationships showed that relationships are produced through attention, engagement and emotions. Paying attention to care practices both within and outside kin relations is therefore important in order to include diverse experiences and understand how personal relations are established, maintained and ended.

Images of the Family in State Practices The material in this book shows that a range of images about ‘ideal’ family relations and ‘proper’ parenting circulated within the child protection and state care systems in socialist Hungary, explaining why experiences of interacting with state agencies were very varied. One strong image was that parents should secure employment, generate income and ensure acceptable material conditions for the family, especially given the pressures of housing provision and low-paid work in the country during the 1970s and 1980s. However, there were competing ideas that valued care and time spent by parents (mostly understood as mothers) with their children. Supervising children’s behaviour was a third image of parenting and family life, as long as discipline did not lead to violent actions and harm that were regarded as unacceptable at the time.

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These different images had implications for the family relations of children in care because they shaped the assessments, advice and interventions of child protection officials and other professionals working with families, for example teachers or local government officials. The degree to which parents were held responsible for meeting the relevant ‘ideal’ of parenting varied by case, although a focus on financial struggles or alcohol consumption often tended to de-emphasise the impact of structural social problems. One reasonably consistent message was an ideal of a two-parent nuclear family, which was seen in central policies, statistical returns and decisions by welfare workers discussed in Chap. 3 that were sceptical about parenting by single mothers or excluded grandparents and other relatives from the ‘core’ family. Whilst not all children in care maintained relationships with their biological parents, there was nonetheless a strong ideal and prioritisation of parent-child bonds within care homes. The strength of this ‘ideal’ of parent-­child relationships seemed related to the fact that this bond had the most potential to shape the personal experiences and life trajectories of children in comparison to the largely similar group experiences of being in care. The idea of connections to parents had concrete impact on children’s identities, lived experiences and later recollections of being in care, for example through visits, holidays spent with biological family members and the possibility of moving in with families as a way of leaving residential care. These dynamics highlight the importance of considering images of care and kinship even in contexts where actual relationships and practices of them could be absent or infrequent. I suggest that analysing competing images of the family is a way to grasp the diverse and at times contradictory interactions between parents and different state actors, including the room to manoeuvre that parents and officials had. My book should be read as part of the growing literature that understands states as ‘institutional settings that are structured by social relations in interactions characterized by different state images’ (Thelen et al. 2018: 7). This research widened out from a focus on images of the state to show how images of the family also shaped state interventions and relationships with families. The range of images of the family held by state actors demonstrates that ‘the state’ is far from solid or coherent. It is therefore helpful to think about the state through the analogy of a Rubik’s cube, an idea that I proposed in Chap. 1, to direct attention to the state as a process that is highly (though not randomly) variable through rotations of its micro-cubes.

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Studying the diverse images and practices of the different micro-cubes complicates singular and homogenising descriptions of welfare interventions. As discussed in Chap. 3, my data implies that reforms to central policies of ‘the state’ needed to be met by agreement from different actors (the micro-cubes) and took time to be implemented. There was not a single ‘state’ approach to family and childhood, but rather a variety of norms, images and approaches whose specific application had great impact on children’s relationships.

Devaluing Specific Relations The data collected for this book suggests that care practices can both create personal relationships as well as interrupt or devalue them when interaction is limited, impersonal or sporadic. It is therefore important for research to look at the reasons for weak relationships because they also illuminate processes of kinship formation. The empirical chapters showed that mediating ties (cf. Edwards and Strathern 2000) were needed to make relationships active for children in care and this was a role that care homes often did not take on. The emphasis placed on parent-child relationships by both care staff and the legal framework around children in state care seemed to affect the relationships that children perceived as important, which filtered through in what they left out of their narratives—relations to siblings, friends and neighbours. This ‘ideal’ of having relations with biological parents was very strong and seemed to devalue other possible bonds to the effect that children did not pursue them, or at least did not recognise these relationships as important in accounts given later as adults. Sibling relations were strongly affected by being in state care, where practices were not oriented to supporting the regular contact and interaction that build relations. Chapters 2 and 4 outlined how siblings in care were usually separated unless their ages coincided with the age brackets of a children’s home, which were mainly single sex, but even then this book includes examples of same-sex siblings close in age who were not placed together. Staff in care homes might point out unknown siblings to each other, but information on the whereabouts of brothers or sisters after leaving a children’s home was not always shared. Sibling relations appeared to have been less defined in law and care home practices compared to parent-­ child relations, so expectations were more open and being in care did not instil a sense that related children were siblings. Connections between

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siblings in state care were further de-emphasised by child protection workers focussing on individual parent-child relationships and not wider family dynamics in their assessments. Friendships of children in care were similarly undervalued by state care practices. It is striking that the only times that friendships were mentioned by my research participants related to the emotional pain when they ended. In the few stories that were told of adventures in state care, other children remained a single mass—simply ‘they.’ The individual personality or traits of friends were not described. Care leavers were still in contact with some of their class mates from children’s homes years after leaving, but my interviewees did not reflect on or verbalise such relationships seemingly because their focus was on parents regardless of whether they knew them. The analysis suggested that connections outside families and the care system were also relevant to understanding children’s relationships. The participant observation described in Chap. 5 pointed to relationships between children in care and local residents living near children’s homes that had not appeared in the interviews. Care leavers had nostalgically recalled the grounds of their particular children’s home and longed to visit the castle again, but did not seem to have strong feelings towards the people who lived in the village. Other scholars have shown that people make and remake kinship and belonging through memories of place (Pine 2007), but it was not until I visited the village of one children’s home together with Zsolt who grew up there that I saw how people also mattered to care leavers’ sense of belonging to a place. Relationships with local residents had not been mentioned in the interviews and suggests that growing up in a state care environment oriented around parent-child relations meant that other relationships were not assigned such importance and therefore were not talked about. The emphasis on parent-child relations revealed in the data was often figurative and did not translate into staff in care homes supporting children to see their parents. This lack of parental contact devalued another type of kinship tie: a sense of ethnic identity for children from Roma families. As I discussed in Chap. 5, most interaction with staff in residential care was on a group basis, so there was little space for a Roma-Magyar distinction to be emphasised (cf. Horváth 2012). Such de-kinning from ethnic belonging took place in children’s homes, but less so in schools and the wider community where children were more exposed to the discriminatory attitudes that were prevalent in Hungarian society and where

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education textbooks treated Roma children as a special education problem. It is important to ask from whose perspective the de-kinning took place. Being in state care weakened ethnic classification, but care leavers as adults became re-ethnicised in the eyes of people in their surroundings. Such ethnic belonging or re-kinning was externally ascribed without the need for personal relationships to a Roma family or community. Overall, my findings show how state care exalted parent-child relations and thereby devalued other kin ties and also connections in the wider community. Such results highlight that research on the lack and dissolution of ties can be very revealing about processes of kinship formation.

The Blurred Boundaries Between State and Family The final analytical point arising from this research is that the categories of state and family were formed in interactions between state officials, parents and children in care. The boundaries between state and family therefore need to be considered together and as the outcomes of negotiations about areas in which ‘the state’ could legitimately intervene. The boundaries between the ‘private’ life of families and the ‘public’ sphere of the child welfare system were blurred in the case files examined in this research. In the examples in Chap. 3, I showed that families opened themselves up to scrutiny, support and control by requesting financial help or a state care placement. To be successful in their interactions with state officials, parents had to demonstrate that they conformed to state images of ‘good’ parents, for example by meeting with the teachers of their children and accepting the advice received. Yet, the delineation of ‘good’ parental practices from ‘bad’ ones by state policies, institutions and the everyday practices of state officials should not mask the extent to which parents tended to agree with social workers and held the same social values about child well-being (cf. Stack 1974; Van Krieken 1992). For instance, the case files clearly reflect parental concerns for the education of children. At times, parents requested state care to ensure the education of their child and argued against ending a placement when it would be detrimental to the child’s studies. While the underachievement of children in state care is a topic in social work literature (Korzh 2015), better educational opportunities was precisely a reason for families to use state care in late socialist Hungary. The findings thus indicate the interweaving of state and family spheres in ‘a process characterized less by coercion and more by a mutual

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co-optation of values in which care recipients reframe state-funded support in terms that are acceptable to them’ (Thelen et al. 2018: 13). Inside children’s homes, however, my data shows that there was intense investment to separate the worlds of ‘family’ and state’ by reducing the possible emotional and relational dimensions of the latter. As discussed earlier in the section on ‘Care practices and kinship,’ there were few emotional connections between children and the staff of care homes. In Chap. 5 I described how the director of a children’s home ended a friendship between a carer and a child because emotional connections were not seen as appropriate in state care. Such approaches to care established a dichotomy that projected emotional closeness as a dimension of private households as opposed to relations within the state sphere. The boundary between the state and the more intimate, private world of relationships became blurred when relationships between staff and children were seen as positive. Such caring relationships certainly existed, but were not encouraged. Children’s homes were thus not regarded as legitimate sites for kinship and family-like relationships. Negotiations over the boundaries of the state and its involvement in family life were not just relevant to families, but also different layers of the state. As discussed in Chap. 3, policy attempts to enlist schools and parents’ workplaces to monitor and scrutinise families for child protection purposes were largely unsuccessful. Staff at these state institutions seemingly did not see themselves as ‘the state’—or at least holding state responsibility—on the issue of child welfare. Such examples are important for our understanding of the state because they illustrate that the boundaries of the state are flexible and contested in concrete situations, again highlighting the value of a relational approach when studying the state.

Final Reflections on the Value of Studying Relationships This book set out to explore the relationships of children in care in late socialist Hungary as a way of understanding the mutual influence of kinship, care and the state. The experiences of my research participants indicate that their relationships were shaped by the competing images of family and state contained in child protection policies and wider society. The strong focus on parent-child relations devalued other possible connections and care practices in children’s homes, leading to impersonal

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experiences and limited social or emotional ties. Children’s homes were not made to be home-like and attention was paid to rules as opposed to relationships. These findings are valuable for social policy development and social work practitioners aiming to nurture relationships and human connections within children’s homes. State care might seem an unlikely place to study kinship because children in Hungary’s residential homes were separated from their family and because most theorising on kinship almost ritually reproduces a view of kinship as warm and positive. However, it is in such an unlikely setting that new perspectives on creating, maintaining, devaluing and/or interrupting significant relations can emerge. Anthropology with its ethnographic methods is well placed to explore the hard-to-study processes by which relationships develop. This bottom-up approach could be fruitfully used to research other aspects of relationships in state care that my research participants did not openly discuss and which I therefore could not cover in this book, for example bullying, romantic relationships and violence. My research participants’ experiences in state care and after leaving it show that relationship building and the state’s role in it matter for people’s lives.

References Carsten, J. (1995). The Substance of Kinship and the Heat of the Hearth: Feeding, Personhood and Relatedness among Malays of Pulau Langkawi. American Ethnologist, 22(2), 223–241. Edwards, J., & Strathern, M. (2000). Including Our Own. In J. Carsten (Ed.), Cultures of Relatedness. New Approaches to the Study of Kinship (pp. 149–166). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horváth, K. (2012). Silencing and Naming the Difference: Changes in the Way Gypsiness is Constructed in the Social Life of a North Hungarian Village. In M.  Stewart (Ed.), The Gypsy ‘Menace.’ Populism and the New Anti-Romany Politics (pp. 117–135). London: Hurst. Howell, S. (2006). The Kinning of Foreigners. Transnational Adoption in a Global Perspective. New York: Berghahn Books. Korzh, A. (2015). Education in Ukrainian Orphanages: Hidden Curriculum for Social Reproduction or Transformation? In E.  L. Brown, P.  C. Gorski, & G.  Lazaridis (Eds.), Poverty, Class, and Schooling: Global Perspectives on Economic Justice and Educational Equity (pp. 281–302). Charlotte: Information Age Publishing. Pauli, J. (2013). “Sharing Made Us Sisters”. Sisterhood, Migration, and Household Dynamics in Mexico and Namibia. In E. Alber, C. Coe, & T. Thelen (Eds.),

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The Anthropology of Sibling Relations. Shared Parentage, Experience, and Exchange. New York: Palgrave. Pine, F. (2007). Memories of Movement and the Stillness of Place: Kinship Memory in the Polish Highlands. In J. Carsten (Ed.), Ghosts of Memory. Essays on Remembrance and Relatedness (pp. 104–125). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Read, R., & Thelen, T. (2007). Introduction: Social Security and Care After Socialism: Reconfigurations of Public and Private. Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology, 50, 3–18. Stack, C. (1974). All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. New York: Basic Books. Thelen, T. (2014). Care/Sorge. Konstruktion, Reproduktion und Auflösung bedeutsamer Bindungen [Care/Sorge. The Construction, Reproduction and Dissolution of Significant Relations]. Bielefeld: Transcript. Thelen, T. (2015). Care as Social Organization: Creating, Maintaining and Dissolving Significant Relations. Anthropological Theory, 15(4), 497–515. Thelen, T., Vetters, L., & von Benda-Beckmann, K. (2018). Stategraphy: Relational Modes, Boundary Work, and Embeddedness. In T.  Thelen, L. Vetters, & K. von Benda-Beckmann (Eds.), Stategraphy: Toward a Relational Anthropology of the State (pp.  1–19). New  York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. (republished from Social Analysis, 58(3), 1–19). Van Krieken, R. (1992). Children and the State. Social Control and the Formation of Australian Child Welfare. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Weismantel, M. (1995). Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions. American Ethnologist, 22(4), 685–704.



Appendix A: Main Characters

Ádám (b. 1983) entered a therapeutic children’s home for children with a low IQ at the age of three when his single mother received a long-term prison sentence. He lived in state care in the same village until he was 25 (at first in the castle and then in 2000 when the large children’s home closed he was transferred to a ‘family-model’ home in the village). He did vocational training as a painter-decorator and after a string of jobs he returned to the village on a labour measure organised by a former teacher. From his salary he put himself through a child supervisor course and is now working in a family-model home in the next village where he has bought a farmhouse. He features in Chap. 5 on relations to local residents and categorisation as Roma. Ágnes (b. 1961) was taken into care in May 1977 for ‘moral’ reasons according to her case file. Her mother agreed that Ágnes should go in care because she had not been able to ‘make her good’ at home. On 3 July she went to visit her daughter in the children’s home, but found her unsupervised in town so brought her home. State care was not officially ended—as Ágnes’ behaviour was unchanged—but she refused to return to the children’s home. Her transfer to a correctional institution was arranged, but not carried out as no place was free. Living at home throughout, Ágnes was deleted from the state care register when she turned 18. She features in Chap. 3 on the financial aspects of childcare as part of parent-child relations.

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Ákos (b. 1965) came into voluntary care for the last three years of compulsory education, as he had failed two years at his school and was mixed up in trouble. He recalls crying when the state care fees were raised and it looked like his single mother of six would not be able to afford for him to stay in state care. Ákos ran his own building company for 21 years that employed between six and eight people full time. It folded during the economic crisis. He links his success up to that point in part to being able to attend a better school in state care than that on the housing estate for large families where his mother lived. He features in Chap. 2 on increased state care fees and in Chap. 4 on the coexistence of state and parental care. Mr Csonka received sole custody of his three children (b. 1960, 1962 and 1970) when their mother left the family in 1971. The children were registered as endangered in 1974. In summer 1975 their mother alleged that they were neglected and they were provisionally taken into care. Mr Csonka appealed the decision and his children were allowed home in December 1975 because he had stopped drinking and did not go ‘too far’ over the accepted level of physical punishment. In February 1976 their mother requested again that the children be taken into care. Her appeal was dismissed on the grounds of their ‘higher emotional and moral level’ than other Roma families in the village, but by the end of the year all three were in state care. Mr Csonka wished that his oldest two children be placed in a correctional institution (which happened) but that his youngest child should stay with him (which did not). In August 1978 the youngest was allowed home, but was taken to GYIVI by his brother—now an adult—in July 1979 as their father drank and was violent. I discuss Mr Csonka and his family in detail in Chap. 3 in relation to parental discipline and negotiations between families and caseworkers. Éva (b. 1967) entered care in 1979 when her maternal grandma died, who had been caring for her and her younger half-brother since their parents divorced. Éva’s step-father took in his son, but not her. She was not allowed to live with her mother, who was an alcoholic. She recounts how homesick she was in state care and that she frequently ran home to her mother, which led to Éva being placed in a closed correctional institution. She married when she was 17 and has four children. I discuss her running home to re-kin in Chap. 4 and being slapped by a teacher for running away in Chap. 5. József (b. 1970) lived at his maternal grandparents until his fifth birthday when his mother collected him. In 1976 he was transferred directly from a sanatorium to a children’s home due to his parents’ abuse. His

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grandparents tried to take him out of care, but this was not permitted because they were not his parents. With their consent the grandparents formally adopted József, but the adoption was soon dissolved due to the death of his adoptive father, who was the main breadwinner in the family. In 1980 József returned to his biological parents and four siblings. Chapter 1 starts with an account of József’s case and further details come in Chap. 3. Károly (b. 1963) was the youngest of four brothers at home with three younger siblings in care from birth. When he was eight, he and his older siblings also went into care. His parents were alcoholics, his father confined to bed due to illness. His mother did not visit him in care and his father died two years later. Károly detailed the drama of exiting care when he was 19—he had work but no registered address, so could not get a bed in a workers’ hostel. A turbulent three years of sleeping rough, drug abuse and prison followed. Today he is married with three children and owns a store where he employs his younger brother László (b.1964). Chapter 2 ends with a short biography and timeline of Károly’s life (Fig. 2.5) and I discuss his relations to his siblings in Chap. 4. Katalin (b. 1968) was the youngest of ten children, the youngest four of whom were in care since birth. A carer pointed out her two sisters, but any attachment was rejected on their side. Katalin moved eight times while in state care between five different children’s homes and one foster care placement that ended due to violence. After completing compulsory schooling she did vocational training in a shoe factory. She has four children born in 1988, 1993, 1995 and 2007. Her current financial situation is precarious and she juxtaposed her strong wish not to have her children taken from her with the summer holidays, new clothes each year and the palatial buildings from her own childhood in care. Chapter 2 ends with a short biography and timeline of Katalin’s life (Fig. 2.4) and she features in Chap. 4 on expecting her mother to visit and Chap. 5 on categorisation as Roma. Lajos (b. 1964) came into state care in 1979 due to behavioural problems. In his mother’s appeal to have state care ended after a year, she said she had agreed to his placement because there were problems at home and in school, and he had attempted suicide three times, but now he had spent the summer at home and there was no trouble. The director of the children’s home advised against ending state care because while Lajos’

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behaviour had improved and he had successfully finished compulsory education there were still deficits and he had just started a welding course in care which ran until the end of the year. I discuss Lajos’ case in relation to use of physical punishment in parent-child relations in Chap. 3 and on emotional closeness as part of the criteria to have children returned in Chap. 4. Mária (b. 1966) was taken into care in 1980 at her parents’ request due to their daughter skipping school. In April 1981 the director of the child protection services recommended ending state care because Mária kept running away from the children’s home and there was no available space for her in a closed institution. State care was ended in May 1981 as a home assessment found that the last time Mária ran away it was not to casual acquaintances but to her parents (who welcomed her back) and a positive change in her behaviour was observed. She features in Chap. 2 on the prioritisation of state care for looking after children who had not yet finished compulsory education. Péter (b. 1965) went into state care at his own request for the last two years of compulsory education because his mother had mental health problems. He had asked to be taken into care after becoming friends in school with András (b. 1967), who came into care aged 12 after his mother committed suicide. Péter asked to stay at András’ children’s home but was placed elsewhere. Péter was a child actor and his mother accompanied him while in care to his TV shoots. He features in Chap. 4 on state care supporting parent-child relations. Róbert (b. 1975) was abandoned in front of a food store when he was three months old. He grew up in five children’s homes in north-eastern Hungary. After finishing compulsory education, he trained as a painter-­ decorator followed by a three-year welding course. At an art camp he met an art patron with whose support he moved to Budapest and studied at university. As an adult he met an older half-brother and his mother once, which I discuss in Chap. 4. Krisztián (b. 1974), who is part of the same Roma art circle, was in the same children’s homes as Róbert for the last years in state care. Krisztián recalls how unsettling it was when he started to be outside the children’s home more and was seen by strangers as Roma. The two artists feature in Chap. 5 on ethnic belonging. Zsolt (b. 1974), the youngest of ten children, was in care since birth, as were his three siblings closest in age to him. The four of them were first at the same foster parents’, but when the couple retired his two sisters

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went to a girl’s home in the city and he and his brother István (b. 1973) came to the Dúzsy home in the village of Délifalva. He was there from age 5 until the end of compulsory education aged 14. Zsolt left the children’s home in 1988 and after quitting a locksmith course trained for three years as a tanner with friends from Dúzsy. In 1993 he completed military service and from 1995–2001 worked at a military base. Since splitting up with his former partner in 2004 he has been living in a homeless shelter in Budapest and has no contact to his two sons born in 2000 and 2003. Chapter 2 includes a short biography and timeline of Zsolt’s life (Fig. 2.3) and he is a central figure in Chap. 5.

Appendix B: Overview of Recorded Interviews

Interviews with Care Leavers Name (anonymised)

Date

Location

Béla (with his legal guardian Mr Németh) Károly Zsolt, Norbert and Gyula András Group interview with homeless care leavers including Mihály Péter András Zsolt Krisztián Ákos Róbert Zsolt Krisztián Katalin Éva Ádám

20.02.2012

Budapest

24.02.2012 28.02.2012 05.03.2012 08.03.2012

Budapest Budapest Budapest Budapest

09.03.2012 12.03.2012 01.06.2012 03.10.2012 04.10.2012 06.11.2012 07.11.2012 08.11.2012 22.02.2013 24.02.2013 24.02.2013

Budapest Budapest Budapest Budapest Budapest Budapest Délifalva Budapest Village in Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok county Village in Békés county Village in Békés county

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Appendix B: Overview of Recorded Interviews

Interviews with Experts Name (anonymised) Date

Location

Mr and Mrs Szabó

14.02.2012

Budapest

Mr Németh

16.02.2012

Mr Nagy Mrs Kovács

07.11.2012 23.02.2013

Mr and Mrs Varga (with Mrs Kovács)

24.02.2013

Profession

Director of a receiving home, Director of a young offender institute Budapest Former director of a children’s home Délifalva Teacher, former carer Village in Jász-Nagykun- Former teacher at a Szolnok county special children’s home Village in Békés county Carers at a special children’s home

List of Archives Somogy Megyei Levéltára (Somogy County Archives), Kaposvár, Hungary Budapest Főváros Levéltára (Budapest City Archives), Budapest, Hungary

Glossary

Családi pótlék  Family allowance Családsegíto ̋ Központ  Family Support Centre Gyámhatóság  Child Protection Services Gyermek és Ifjúságvédo ̋Intézet (GYIVI)  Child Protection Institution Gyermekgondozási Díj (GYES)  Maternity leave grant Intézeti elhelyezés  Voluntary placement in state care with the guardianship rights remaining with the parents Köznevelés  Public Education—a pedagogical journal for practitioners Nevelési Tanácsadó Központ  Child Guidance Centre Országos Gyermekvédelmi Tanács (OGYIT)  National Child Protection Council, 1957–1961 Pártfogó  Local community volunteer providing advice and monitoring in families with problems or paid support worker provided by local council Rendszeres nevelési segély (RNS)  Regular financial assistance for very low income families

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Index1

A Ádám case, 130–131, 135 Ágnes case, 45, 86–87 Ákos case, 40, 50, 95–96 Alcohol abuse by mothers, 74, 116 reason for state care, 145 B Boundaries object, 116 over inclusion in child protection, 67–68 state-family, 3, 9, 23, 123, 152–153 C Child Guidance Centre (Nevelési Tanácsadó Központ) following a mother-at-home approach, 70

tasks of, 37 view of Gyámhatóság workers, 64 Child Protection Services, see Gyámhatóság Children’s home external schooling, 48, 50 installation in castles, 35, 95 numbers of, 1950–1957, 1987, 35, 48, 49 Családi pótlék (family allowance), as attached to father’s wage, 68–72 Csonka case, 47, 64, 74, 79, 80, 85–86 D Deservingness, 69, 76, 86 Discipline of children, 16–17, 21, 111, 112, 115, 117–122 See also Physical punishment of children Donzelot, Jacques on tutelary complex, 9, 82

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

E Éva case, 97–99, 106–107, 116, 137 Embeddedness, of state actors, 9, 70 F Family ideal of two-parent nuclear, 14, 71, 149 image of, as a financial unit, 69–70 image of, as about child development, 70 image of, as supervising children’s behaviour, 82 Family Law of 1952, 81 of 1974, 37, 39, 40, 66, 81 G Gift, 114 Goffman, Erving, on total institutions, 14, 124 Grandparents, role in childcare, 1–2, 71–72 Gyámhatóság child guidance workers on, 64 different levels of, 63–65 different relational modalities of, 65 establishment of, 34 focus of on family income, 69 Gypsies, see Roma H Housing conditions, 75 number of people per flat, 71, 75 waiting list for council, 75 Howell, Signe, on kinning, 5

I Institutionalisation preference to institutionalise infants, 44–45 rate of, 1946–1983, 12, 40, 42–44, 46, 47 J József case, 1–2, 77, 79 K Károly case, 19–20, 44, 51, 56–58, 60, 104–106 Katalin case, 44–45, 51, 54–56, 94–95, 103–104, 123, 125–127, 133, 136–137, 161 Krisztián case, 133 L Lajos case, 80–81, 83–84, 96–97 M Mária case, 45–46 Methodology of this study archival research, 1, 17–18 ethnographic research, 17, 20, 129–130 interviews, 18–22 O OGYIT (Országos Gyermekvédelmi Tanács), 36, 37 P Pártfogó (family support worker), 63, 64 Péter case, 87, 96

 INDEX 

Physical punishment of children in the children’s home, 118, 119n2, 148 by parents, 78–81 in school, 16–17, 112, 114–116, 148 See also Boundaries, object; Discipline of children Poverty average pension in 1974, 38 reason for placing children in state care, 73, 93 R Relational modality, 8–9, 63, 65, 68, 123 RNS (rendszeres nevelési segély, regular financial assistance for needy families) eligibility, 37–38, 48, 76 introduction of, 38, 43 Róbert case, 100–101, 104, 134 Roma, 132n7 assimilationist policy toward, 132, 134 categorisation as, 131–133, 135 numbers in state care, 135n9 re-ethnicising, 133–134, 140 S State definition of, 8 images of, 10, 11, 64, 67

169

Rubik’s cube analogy, 11, 66, 149 See also Boundaries; Embeddedness, of state actors; Relational modality State care grounds for state care, 63, 72–75 historical abuse in, 16, 22, 112 numbers in state care, 42–47 organisational structure of, 48–49 use of for improved educational chances, 40, 85, 104 youngest in a family entering, 44 See also Children’s home T Thelen, Tatjana on conceptualisation of care, 7 on kinning the state, 10 V Voluntary state care (intézeti elhelyezés), 40 Z Zsolt case, 19, 21–22, 29, 50–52, 55, 58, 95, 99–101, 107, 111–115, 117, 119–133, 137–138