As people of my generation (I was born in 1952) look back nostalgically now, we may observe a correlation between the strict mother and baby homes, the excessively punitive reformatories, corporal punishment in schools, and the very low crime rate that we had in Ireland in the black and white 1950’s and 1960’s when I was growing up.
While these practices appeared to solve problems quickly at that time, we had no idea what social, emotional and indeed financial problems we were creating for later generations.
An aspect of both solutions is that the all-powerful religious, medical, legal, educational, political, academic, community, media and I’d say even sporting institutions that ran our country (the Pillars of the time) thought that it was totally acceptable that the institution of the family was protected while the solutions, (that nowadays would probably be deemed to be unhelpful, if not wrong by most people), were implemented.
In fact, such were the forces supporting these courses of action that it would have been almost impossible for anyone to be critical. And anyone who did would have got short shrift from the Pillars. And to cap it all, it was both (short-term) cost-effective and convenient for successive Governments – saving money and avoiding confrontation with the Catholic Church at the same time.
To complicate it even further, it actually did work in some situations where young women’s suffering was eased by giving up their babies for adoption, children were happy and thrived with adoptive parents, and some young wayward boys’ behaviour was altered for the better, learning a trade and going on to be responsible autonomous adults.
I know – I’ve met them!
But I have also met women and men who, when young, did not display receptiveness and acceptance to one-way knowledge flow, who resisted every attempt to correct their behaviour, who yearned for someone to understand them, and who ended up in prison, mental asylums, powerless, and, in some cases, choosing suicide as an option to end the long years of suffering that first began at a very young age when they behaved in a way that was unacceptable to their parents, family members, teachers and other people of influence in their world.