Britain's Stolen Children

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]Over 130,000 children vanished from England, [music] but they weren't kidnapped by criminals.

[00:00:06]The dark truth, they were stolen by the British government. It was an official program called child migration. Between [music] 1869 and 1970, kids as young as three were packed onto ships and sent to Australia, [music] Canada, and New Zealand. The paperwork claimed it was for a better life. In reality, it was forced child labor disguised as charity.

[00:00:26][music] But, here is the most evil part.

[00:00:29]These children weren't all orphans. So, how did the government get away with taking [music] them? They lied. In some cases, parents were falsely told their children had died, and they told the kids their parents didn't want them.

[00:00:42]Upon arrival, >> [music] >> they were sent to farm schools and institutions, forced to work from sunrise to dark.

[00:00:48]>> [music] >> They grew up without birth certificates, without real names, and without any way to trace where they came from. But, decades later, a massive plot twist exposed the entire scam. In 1987, a woman in England received [music] a letter from a man in Australia. He thought she might be his mother. She had spent 40 years grieving a dead infant, but [music] there was nobody because there was no death. Her son had been shipped to Perth before her tears even dried. The government finally apologized in 2010, but the last ship sailed in 1970. Within the lifetime of people still alive today, poor, inconvenient children were shipped across the world like cargo.