‘What Frightful Children!’: The Disobedient and the Unruly in British Overseas Child Migration, 1939–45
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the movement of British evacuee children and adolescents to Dominion countries during the Second World War. While these evacuees were spared from exposure to the violence of war, such as the bombing of major British cities, their move to safety came with certain demands on their behaviour. These young evacuees were expected to act with ‘ambassadorial dignity’ in all ways; they were to be polite, courteous, chaste, law-abiding and, above all, grateful to their host family and the country that took them in. But acting with ambassadorial dignity was a task beyond what many evacuees were willing or able to carry out. Their failure – or refusal – to act as expected was often interpreted as a form of disobedience. This article uses case studies of evacuee children and adolescents to illuminate the many ways that disobedience was conceptualized by adults in charge of these evacuees. Specifically, this article focusses on sexual disobedience, evacuees who rejected the standards of chaste heterosexuality expected of them, and bodily disobedience, where overweight bodies of pubescent girls were seen to pose a threat to the future of the ‘British race’ as envisioned by adult administrators of this evacuation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".