Where Do the Children Go?

SWANK Black Paper Series

“Where Do the Children Go?”

An Analysis of Post-Removal Trajectories, Hidden Economies, and the Institutional Disappearance of Vulnerable Youth

Author: Noelle Bonnee Annee Simlett

Filed Under: Dispossession Architecture / Bureaucratic Extraction / Trafficking Infrastructure

I. Introduction: The Quiet Vanishing

Once a child is removed by social services, the question almost no one dares to ask is:

Where do they go?

Not in terms of paperwork. Not in court summaries or “placement” charts.

But in actual, physical, emotional, legal, and spiritual terms.

Where do they go—and who profits?

II. Destinations Disguised as Protection

1. 

Privately-Owned Children’s Homes

1. For-profit companies receive state money to house children at thousands of pounds per week
2. These homes are frequently located hundreds of miles from the child’s family or community
3. Staff are underpaid, poorly trained, and the oversight is minimal

2. 

Foster Placements Without Scrutiny

1. Agencies profit per placement
2. Background checks are often fast-tracked or ignored
3. Children are treated as behavioural test cases—medicated, restrained, labelled

3. 

Forced Adoptions

1. Mothers with no criminal history or violence are stripped of parental rights through vague thresholds of “emotional harm”
2. Once adopted, the child is legally severed from their family and cannot access their own story
3. These adoptions are permanent, closed, and almost never reversed

4. 

Psychiatric Systems & Special Education Pipelines

1. Children with trauma responses are labelled with behavioural disorders
2. They are institutionalised, medicated, or segregated
3. Funding flows—but healing does not

III. The Economic Engine Behind the Dispossession

Let’s be clear: this is not just moral failure.

This is economic orchestration.

1. Each intervention generates paperwork, funding, and salaries
2. Each “child in care” increases agency revenue
3. The more broken a family becomes, the more valuable its case file becomes to the system

Broken families fund bureaucracies.

IV. Emotional and Cultural Erasure

Children removed are:

1. Cut off from their cultural identity
2. Disconnected from siblings and extended family
3. Raised with narratives written by strangers
4. Often told their parents were unsafe, unstable, or unworthy—with no right to challenge the record

This is intergenerational erasure.

This is identity laundering.

And no one is held accountable.

V. Patterns That Match Historical Trafficking

This is not new.

It echoes:

1. Indigenous child removals
2. “Orphan trains”
3. Magdalene laundries
4. State-run institutions in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the U.S.

The difference now is the branding:

“Safeguarding.”

“Best interest of the child.”

“Early intervention.”

Extraction with a smile.

VI. Conclusion: Institutional Disappearance is Still Disappearance

These children do not just “go into care.”

They go into systems that:

1. Profit from their trauma
2. Medicate their grief
3. Erase their lineage
4. Silence their families
5. And claim moral authority in the process

This is not protection.

This is state-sanctioned redistribution of human lives.

And it is happening behind closed doors, sealed files, and therapeutic language that obscures the machinery underneath.