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Actors Marilyn Monroe (actor) ​ ​ Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), was an American actress, model, and singer who was famous for playing comedic "blonde bombshell" characters. She grew up in foster care, orphanages and kinship care. By the time she was 7, she'd been moved 7 times. Between the ages of 8 & 12, she had been moved 6 times. Monroe was born Norma Jeane Mortensen and went into care initially as a baby because Gladys, her mother, had postpartum depression (nothing is known of the father). At the age of 8 she returned to live with her mother for a while. Gladys’ friend, Grace McKee, took an interest in Norma Jeane’s welfare. When Gladys was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, Grace became her legal guardian. Both women worked in the movie industry but it was Grace who was particularly keen on the charismatic young Norma Jeane becoming a movie star, thinking she could be the next Jean Harlow. Norma Jeane did her best to fit in, to be a ‘good girl’ in her foster homes because she knew the alternative was an orphanage. But being a ‘good girl’ didn’t protect her. She was raped at the age of 8 by her foster father, sexually assaulted by Grace’s new husband when she was 11 and her 14 year old cousin attempted to rape her when she was 12. Grace eventually placed Norma in the Los Angeles Orphans Home. The orphanage was "a model institution" and was described in positive terms by her peers, but Monroe felt abandoned. Monroe was a top-billed actress for only a decade, but her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $2 billion in 2019) by the time of her death. More than half a century later, she continues to be a major popular culture icon. On August 4, 1962, she died at age 36 from an overdose of barbiturates at her home in Los Angeles. Her death was ruled a probable suicide, although several conspiracy theories have been proposed in the decades following her death. External Website

Academic Articles As a former foster kid, I'm giving Tracy Beaker a second chance Sophia Alexandra Hall 2021 Sophia Alexandra Hall went into foster care as a teenager and was cared for by her local authority until leaving at 18 to attend the University of Oxford. Here she writes about the new Tracy Beaker TV series, 'My Mum Tracy Beaker'. The original series is often cited as inadvertently paving the way for negative stereotypes and labels to be attached to children in care. Hall explains: "Tracy Beaker and I have a complicated relationship. When I told my friends growing up that I was in foster care, I’d often be compared to the fictional character. At first, I didn’t understand the comparison. Tracy was a pre-teen living in a children’s home, while I was living in a foster placement and revising for secondary school exams. But it was easier to shrug off my care experience as ‘like Tracy Beaker’ than to explain the complexities of the system to my peers." External Website

Academic Articles What "The Mandalorian" Teaches Us About Foster Care Sophia Alexandra Hall 2021 Sophia Alexandra Hall went into foster care as a teenager and was cared for by her local authority until leaving at 18 to attend the University of Oxford. Here she writes about the 'The Madalorianan' an American space Western television series created by Jon Favreau beginning five years after the events of Return of the Jedi (1983). It stars Pedro Pascal as the title character, a lone bounty hunter who goes on the run after being hired to retrieve "The Child". Hall writes: "Finally, a story that portrays family as something that can be chosen, made up of those that care for you and not just the blood running through your veins. In the final scene of Season 2 of The Mandalorian, Mando reassures Grogu (AKA Baby Yoda) that it is okay to leave with his new guardian. As a former foster care kid, this was an all-too familiar scene. Having had multiple foster homes in the space of a few years, I had to deal with the introduction of new guardians on a regular basis. Forming personal bonds with my carers, ultimately only to have to leave, was a crushing reality I faced repeatedly throughout my childhood." External Website

Academic Articles Care leavers in the ivory tower Kirsty Capes 2019 Interrogating the care experience in creative-academic research. What is it like to be a care experienced person in higher education – particularly in doctoral study? As a writer and researcher, Kirsty Capes' work deals with the care experience through intersecting dimensions of reflective creative work and practice-based research. Being care experienced in higher education comes with its own unique set of problems and opportunities. Higher education continues to be a privilege afforded to those who are well-supported – with money, a supportive family and other strong support networks, and access to the educational resources they need. External Website

Authors V Adoption, Memory, and Cold War Greece: Kid pro quo? ➝ Back to Top

Academic Books & Book Chapters Imagined Orphans: Poor Families, Child Welfare, And Contested Citizenship in London Lydia Murdoch 2006 With his dirty, tattered clothes and hollowed-out face, Oliver Twist is the enduring symbol of the young indigent spilling out of orphanages and haunting the streets of late-nineteenth-century London. Although poor children were often portrayed as real-life Oliver Twists—either orphaned or abandoned by unworthy parents—they in fact frequently maintained contact and were eventually reunited with their families. In Imagined Orphans, Lydia Murdoch focuses on this discrepancy between the representation and the reality of children’s experiences within welfare institutions—a discrepancy that she argues stems from conflicts over middle- and working-class notions of citizenship that arose in the 1870s and persisted until the First World War. Reformers’ efforts to depict poor children as either orphaned or endangered by abusive or “no-good” parents fed upon the poor’s increasing exclusion from the Victorian social body. Reformers used the public’s growing distrust and pitiless attitude toward poor adults to increase charity and state aid to the children.With a critical eye to social issues of the period, Murdoch urges readers to reconsider the complex situations of families living in poverty. While reformers’ motivations seem well intentioned, she shows how their methods solidified the public’s antipoor sentiment and justified a minimalist welfare state that engendered a cycle of poverty. As they worked to fashion model citizens, reformers’ efforts to protect and care for children took on an increasingly imperial cast that would continue into the twentieth century. External Website

Authors F Abandoned Children in Literature: The Orphans in J.K. Rowling’s ➝ Back to Top

Authors C Orphans and Class Anxiety in Nineteenth-century English Novels ➝ Back to Top

Academic theses Abandoned Children in Literature: The Orphans in J.K. Rowling’s Cecilia Friis 2013 Orphans and abandoned children have been a prominent motif in literature for centuries. In modern times, one of the most famous orphan stories is J.K. Rowling’s book series about Harry Potter, who is an orphaned wizard. The aim of the following essay is to show how three orphan characters are characterized in Rowling’s book Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, namely Harry Potter, Voldemort and Neville Longbottom. The focal center of interest of this essay is how these three different characters’ personal developments vary as a consequence from their respective situation in infancy. External Website

Academic Articles Fremantle: Reflections of a child migrant Michael McCarthy 2016 Michael McCarthy is a former child migrant. In this paper he reflects on his journey as six year old Michael May to Australia, of his time in St Vincent's Foundling Home in Western Australian and of being fostered to Tom and Irene Gollop. Many years later, he met with the woman who left him in a home because her husband was ill and when she returned to fetch him, was told he had been sent to Australia. External Website

Academic Articles "One of Us": Orphaned Selves and Legitimacy in Australian Autobiography Jack Bowers 2015 One of Us": Orphaned Selves and Legitimacy in Australian Autobiography (2015) by Jack Bowers explores 4 Australian autobiographies - Robert Dessaix, A Mother's Disgrace; Sharyn Killens, The Inconvenient Child; Gordon Matthews, An Australian Son; Kate Shayler, The Long Way Home & A Tuesday Thing - where the authors have been displaced by birth families. The paper examines what Jack Bowers calls, ““orphaned” selves in which the autobiographer is both orphaned in the sense of not knowing one or both birth parents, and orphaned in the sense of being estranged from a fully formed and completed self.” External Website

Authors B "One of Us": Orphaned Selves and Legitimacy in Australian Autobiography ➝ Back to Top

Academic Articles Children Without Childhood: The Emotionality of Orphaned Children and Images of Their Rescuers in Selected Works of English and Canadian Literature Irena Avsenik Nabergoj 2017 This article deals with literary depictions of social, political, cultural and religious circumstances in which children who have lost one or both parents at birth or at a later age have found themselves. The weakest members of society, the children looked at here are exposed to dangers, exploitation and violence, but are fortunate enough to be rescued by a relative or other sympathetic person acting out of benevolence. External Website

Actors Ingrid Bergman ​ ​ Ingrid Bergman (29 August 1915 – 29 August 1982) was a Swedish actress who starred in a variety of European and American films, television movies, and plays. She was in kinship care as a teenager. Ingrid was only 3 years old when her mother died. Justus raised his daughter for the next 9 years with the help of his sister Ellen—whom Ingrid called Mama—and, being a photographer—he also owned and ran a camera shop—took many photos and home movies of his daughter. “During her childhood” writes David Smith, “Bergman may have been the most photographed person in Sweden.” Ingrid was 12 when her father died of stomach cancer. When her father died, Ingrid was left in the care of Aunt Ellen for a few months, until her aunt’s death 9 months later. The teenager then went to live with an uncle. She won many accolades, including three Academy Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, four Golden Globe Awards, and a BAFTA Award. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Bergman as the fourth-greatest female screen legend of Classic Hollywood Cinema. External Website

Academic Articles Blood Doesn't Define Evotypical Families: Eleanor Spence's Stories of Informal and Formal Foster Care in Australia Dee Michell 2021 Because of their non-normative nature, Australian foster families are not always treated “as families in their own right” according to Riggs, Delfabbro and Augoustinos (2009, p. 792, emphasis in the original). And until recently a variety of sibling bonds—between birth siblings, between biological and foster children, and between foster children in the one foster family—have, as Adam McCormick (2010) and colleagues at CREATE Foundation (2013) and the Australian Catholic University have pointed out (2014), received little attention in research. Yet the close family bonds between the blood unrelated are a central theme in The Switherby Pilgrims (1967), Jamberoo Road (1969) and The Left Overs (1982) – all written by award-winning and internationally recognised Australian children’s writer, Eleanor Spence (1928-2008). By calling on the contemporary conception of ‘evotypical’ family, in this paper, Dee Michell argues that Spence created evotypical families in these three novels and well in advance of Australian society accepting a diversity of families as the ‘norm’. External Website

Academic Articles Investigating ‘care leaver’ identity: A narrative analysis of personal experience stories Craig Evans 2019 People who spent time in public care as children are often represented as ‘care leavers’. This paper investigates how ‘care leaver’ is discursively constructed as a group identity, by analyzing 18 written personal experience stories from several charity websites by people identified or who self-identify as care leavers. Several approaches to narrative analysis are used: a clause-level analysis based on Labovʼs code scheme; the identification of turning points; an analysis of ‘identity work’; and an analysis of subject positions relative to ‘master narratives’. The findings from each of the methods are then combined to reveal how intertextual, narrative-structural, and contextual factors combine to constitute a common care leaver discourse. This forms the basis for a characterization of ‘care leaver’ group identity as ‘survivors of the system’. The findings also reveal how ‘care leaver’ as type, including stereotype, influences how identity is constructed in the personal experience narratives. External Website

Academic Articles Healthy Depictions? Depicting Adoption and Adoption News Events on Broadcast News Kline, Susan L.; Chatterjee, Karishma; Karel, Amanda I. 2009 Given that the public uses the media to learn about adoption as a family form, this study analyzes U.S. television news coverage of adoption between 2001 and 2005 (N = 309 stories), to identify the types of news events covered about adoption. A majority of news stories covered fraud, crime, legal disputes, and negative international adoption cases. Adoptees as defective or unhealthy were depicted more in negative news event stories, birth parents appeared less overall, and adoptive parents were most likely to have healthy depictions in positively oriented adoption experience, big family, and reunion stories. Although three quarters of the stories used primary adoption participants as news sources, one-third of the negative event stories did not contain healthy depictions of adoption participants. The authors discuss ways journalists and researchers might improve adoption news coverage. External Website

Academic Articles Reflexivity and Lived Experience of Out-of-Home Care: Positionality as an Early Parenthood Researcher Amy Gill 2021 Amy Gill's first sole-authored publication in press, examining her positionality based as a former care leaver #cep and new mother in relation to her PhD research exploring early parenthood within the context of Out of Home Care (OOHC). External Website

Academic Articles "Let's Go to the Movies": Filmic Representations of Gay Foster and Adoptive Parents Damien Riggs 2011 As a growing body of research evidence demonstrates, increasing numbers of gay men across the world are choosing to become foster or adoptive parents. Most important, the families that these men form are continually found to be supportive and positive environments in which to raise children. Yet despite these positive findings, other empirical evidence from examinations of popular media representations of gay parents highlights the negative assumptions that continue to be perpetuated against gay men who are parents. More specifically, these findings suggest that print and popular media promote an account of gay parents that is often either normalising or pathologising. The findings presented in this article extend this latter body of research by exploring filmic portrayals of gay men variously engaged in fostering and adoptive arrangements. External Website

Academic Articles 45 Care Leaver Friendly Ways Care Leavers Association 2017 The CLA has produced a short guide on how to work with adolescent looked after children and care leavers. This booklet has been created by care leavers who were involved in our health project. It is in their own words wherever possible. They share what would have made a difference to them now and when they were in care as a child. It is also punctuated by statistics on outcomes for care leavers so that you understand how growing up in care can affect an individual for their entire life. External Website