From Child Rescue to Child Welfare: The Save the Children International Union Facing World Warfare (1939–1947)

Abstract

From Child Rescue to Child Welfare: The Save the Children International Union Facing World Warfare (1939–1947)

The SCIU was created in 1919 to assist children victims of war. As the first organisation dedicated to childhood, this agency is an already well known case-study for the historians of international humanitarian aid. Yet its later evolution is much less studied, even though the SCIU persisted until the 1980s. This article shows to what extent the Second World War played a fundamental role in the reconfiguration of the SCIU towards a role of expertise regarding child welfare by disrupting the internal rules and modes of collaborations which had been set up within the federation since its creation. During the war, the organisation gave itself new tasks and a new way of functioning, in order to regain some kind of leeway within the intergovernmental organisations that the Great Powers were setting up across the Atlantic. This reconfiguration yielded mixed results: While the SCIU succeeded in surviving wartime, preserving and even expanding its affiliates and helping them reorient their actions towards child welfare expertise, it remained nonetheless a European-based agency, and in this respect only a minor partner of the intergovernmental organisations during the post-war era.