"Reasons that we may never know or fully understand"

The McAleese Report on the Magdalen Laundries hadn't come to my attention till someone in Mark Shea's combox (wish I could find the comment again, but he gets so many) mentioned it. I found it and think I could easily end up reading it all, though it's over a thousand pages. As always, I'm still both fascinated and horrified by the knowledge that I shared a country, for however short a time, with these places. 

Bad as they were, however, they weren't quite what we've been told.

For one thing, the majority of the girls spent less than a year there. For the ones who'd come from orphanages or reform schools, the laundries were halfway houses/probation, and the girls were let out when they seemed ready. Only nobody told them that was going to happen. All they knew was that some older women had been there for years and apparently weren't going, ever -- though this was usually because these women had decided to stay,  or just didn't have anywhere else to go.

By the way, it sounds as if the older, voluntary residents were way rougher on the young girls than the nuns were. 

The introduction notes that many girls were placed in the laundries by their own families "for reasons that we may never know or fully understand" including "familial abuse". Later the report tells about one of them who refused to go home with her father when he came for her, and another who wrote asking her mother to get her out, only to get a reply that her mother hoped they'd keep her there for 20 years. Those are the stories that stick in my mind.

When I gave my annual talk on family law in Canada for immigrant parents, I told them that, yes, it seems as if parents don't have much authority left under the law -- but there was a time not long ago when they had too much. I told the story (one more thing I wish I had a link for) of the old lady who got an apology from one of the provincial governments or other because, back around 1943, the police had obliged her father by arresting her to get her away from the Chinese man she was living with. It seems any woman under 25 who was doing things her parents disapproved could be legally dragged home by the cops. The risk that this might be misused by unfit parents was apparently discounted by whoever made that law -- or they figured the few girls who got wrongly caught in it would just have to make the sacrifice for the good of society.