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Care of the State
Relationships, Kinship and the State
in Children’s Homes
in Late Socialist Hungary

Jennifer Rasell
Care of the State
 Jennifer Rasell

Care of the State

Relationships, Kinship and the State in Children’s
Homes in Late Socialist Hungary
Jennifer Rasell

ISBN 978-3-030-49483-4    ISBN 978-3-030-49484-1 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49484-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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 Acknowledgments

A mixture of choice and opportunity led me to this topic and I would like
to thank the great number of individuals and institutions from several
countries who cared for me and my research. This project would have
turned out very differently without the willingness of care leavers and
child protection staff to discuss their memories with me and show me
around. My research participants remain anonymous, but one of my big-
gest debts is to them. I truly appreciate their time, openness and trust.
I wrote the thesis on which this book is based within the framework of
the project ‘Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late State Socialism’
based at the Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam,
Germany. It was a great privilege to have my ideas nurtured by this net-
work of historians and by friends and colleagues at ZZF. In particular, I
thank Jan Behrends, Ulf Brunnbauer, Jens Gieseke and Pavel Kolář for the
numerous insightful comments and conference invitations. I am especially
grateful to the international supervision triangle formed by my PhD
supervisors: to Wolfgang Kaschuba for welcoming me to the Institute for
European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, to Thomas
Lindenberger for embracing an interdisciplinary project and guiding my
historical imagination and to Tatjana Thelen for inspiring my anthropo-
logical theorisation, for practical help in the field and for overall guidance
far beyond the doctoral years.
It was Eszter Tarsoly’s language teaching at the UCL School of Slavonic
and East European Studies in 2007–2009 that laid the groundwork for
my research with Hungarian sources. I have Erika Jakab to thank for get-
ting my Hungarian skills to a level that I was ready for fieldwork and she

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

meticulously transcribed my interviews. The translation help and infec-

tious enthusiasm of Anikó Boros and Stephanie Karmann kept me moti-
vated when analysing my data. A special thank-you also goes to Orsolya
Nagy-Szabó, who since 2003 has looked out for me in Hungary and made
my research stays a delight.
In Hungary I was assisted by oral historian Eszter Zsófia Tóth, whose
energy, ideas and contacts greatly helped my work. I would like to thank
Csaba Csóti for his help in finding material in the Somogy County
Archives. I am grateful to Eszter Varsa who generously shared with me her
experiences of researching child protection in early socialist Hungary and
her contacts. Friederike Kind-Kovács regularly took the time to advise me
on my oral history experiences.
My PhD research was generously funded by a scholarship from the
Leibniz Association, which was extended by the ZZF, and from the DAAD
to spend four months at the University of Vienna. My time at the then
Departments of Methods (ethnography) in Vienna, Austria, was crucial
for developing the conceptual frame of my work and I particularly thank
Tatjana Thelen, Evangelos Karagiannis and Christof Lammer for integrat-
ing me into Viennese life.
I found the space to turn my thesis into a book in Bielefeld, Germany.
While starting to revise the text I was part of the research group ‘Kinship
and Politics: Rethinking a Conceptual Split and Its Epistemic Implications
in the Social Sciences’ at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at
Bielefeld University, which was an inspiring group of anthropologists and
social historians who have left an imprint on my thinking. The timely sub-
mission of this manuscript was made possible by the support of the man-
agement of the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences who granted me
two leaves of absence from work. I would also like to thank the two anon-
ymous readers of my manuscript for their valuable suggestions, which tre-
mendously benefitted this final version, and the editors and production
team at Palgrave Macmillan for their help.
This research saw me leave the UK for Germany and frequent moves to
and from Hungary and Vienna. It is my family who ensured I never lost
myself, that I kept my work-life balance in check and constantly encour-
aged me. My deepest gratitude goes to my brother Michael who started
me on this journey and was there with advice and moral support when I
needed it most, who read and commented on all chapters and who pushed
me to sharpen my analysis. Finally, I would like to thank Oliver Claas for
understanding my heavy work schedule, for his humour and for ensuring
my overall well-being.
 Contents

1 Care as a Frame for Understanding the Mutual

Constitution of State and Kinship  1
Care to Kin Me   4
Taking a Relational Approach to the State   8
Understanding the Context of State Care in Socialist Hungary  11
Methodology and Analysis  17
Outline of Chapters  23
References  25

2 Not a Fading Problem: Child Protection from the 1950s

to the 1980s 33
Supporting Children Through Family Policies and Regulations  34
Changing Policies and Ideals of Parenting Reflected in State
Care Numbers  42
The System of Residential Care  47
Care Leaver Biographies  50
The Quality Control of Parenthood  59
References  59

3 Negotiating Care Between Parents and State Officials 61

Multiple Layers, Images and Modalities of the State  63
State Images of the Family and Assessments of Parenting  69

vii
viii Contents

Tactical Collusion, Alliances and Compromises Over Raising

Children  81
‘Proper’ Parenting and the State  88
References  90

4 The Continuing Family Relations of Children in Care 93

Ongoing Parent Relations Within State Care  94
Sibling Power or a Discarded Relation? 103
Expectations from a Birth Certificate 107
References 109

5 Care in the Children’s Home and Wider Circles of Belonging111

Belonging Within the School 113
Narrating Out the Children’s Home 117
Village Life and Belonging to a Place 124
From Child in Care to ‘Gypsy’ Adult: The Ascription of Ethnic
Belonging 131
Just a Friend: Not Recognising Care Relationships Beyond Kin 136
Undervaluing Personal Relations 139
References 141

6 Conclusions: The Processes of Producing Kinship and the

State in Residential Care145
Care Practices and Kinship 146
Images of the Family in State Practices 148
Devaluing Specific Relations 150
The Blurred Boundaries Between State and Family 152
Final Reflections on the Value of Studying Relationships 153
References 154

Appendix A: Main Characters157

Appendix B: Overview of Recorded Interviews163

Glossary165

Index167
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Organisational structure of the children’s home network, 1987 49

Fig. 2.2 Zsolt timeline 52
Fig. 2.3 Katalin timeline 55
Fig. 2.4 Károly timeline 57
Fig. 5.1 Zsolt encountering his favourite teacher after decades 120
Fig. 5.2 Zsolt in the derelict children’s home looking out the window 126
Fig. 5.3 Zsolt exchanging news with a local resident 128

ix
 List of Tables

Table 2.1 Inflow into care by age range in Hungary, 1977 44

Table 2.2 Number of children in care in Hungary, 1946–1983 46
Table 3.1 Grounds for being placed into care in Budapest, 1974 73

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Care as a Frame for Understanding

the Mutual Constitution of State and Kinship

The mother as well as the father of the minor can get angry very quickly and
they have made it clear that they will take their child out of the children’s home
if the fees are not reduced. Of course, a child who has left the family under such
circumstances [due to rough treatment by his parents] cannot go back there. We
recommend that the fees be lowered so that József can remain in state care
because in our opinion the parents do not treat the other three children [siblings
living at home] in the nicest way.

This recommendation was written by a social worker in 1977 in her assess-

ment of a family living in a village in southwestern Hungary. I read the
case file in the Somogy County Archives in 2013, as part of my fieldwork
on the relationships of children living in state care in late socialist Hungary.
I had spent the previous six months carrying out oral history interviews
with care leavers who had grown up in children’s homes in Hungary in
the late 1970s and early 1980s and was now looking for further data on
the connections between parents, caseworkers and children in care. This
book studies the nature and range of relationships and kinship ties for
children living in Hungary’s residential childcare system as a means of
analysing how care, kinship and state practices are mutually constituted
and interrelated.
Until he was five, József lived with his maternal grandparents and their
children (József’s uncle and aunts—four of whom were still minors). After
his fifth birthday his parents collected him, but his stay with them was
short and he was taken cut and bruised into residential care, prompting
the negotiations over state care fees mentioned above. His grandparents

© The Author(s) 2020 1

J. Rasell, Care of the State,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49484-1_1
2 J. RASELL

wished to take József out of care, but were not permitted because they
were not his parents. They thus decided to legally adopt him in 1978.
When his adoptive father died a year later, the adoption was dissolved and
József returned to his biological parents. This time around caseworkers
deemed József’s parents to be ‘calmer’ and praised the ‘orderly financial
circumstances’ and that they had solved their housing problems. The vil-
lage school teacher was asked her opinion and she saw hope that József
would develop with his family, but added that as both parents work during
the day their oldest daughter, József’s eleven-year-old sister Ildikó, missed
school to do housework and look after the younger children. The case was
closed soon thereafter. József was allowed to stay with his parents and
there was no record of a follow-up of the teacher’s impression that Ildikó
was endangered.
József’s views are not included at any point in the thick case file, so it is
not clear how he felt about being circulated among his (extended) family
and state care. We do not know what he thought about being collected by
his mother, thus separating him from his grandparents and young aunts
and uncles. There is also no information on his feelings about being
adopted and then un-adopted. There were two further children when he
returned to his parents’ house—his new siblings born in his absence. It is
such constellations of relatedness and the personal views of people who
lived in state care about their relationships to parents and siblings as well
as care received outside of kinship relations that I explore in this book. I
look at the varied nature of kin relations, their sometimes absent or cruel
nature and processes leading to their possible dissolution.
József’s case hints at the competing images of ‘proper’ parenting and
the ideal family that different professionals working with children held in
late socialist Hungary. While the social worker focused on the household
budget and approved that the mother of five children was in paid employ-
ment, the teacher prioritised the education of the children and thus advo-
cated a mother-at-home policy. The case also illustrates how norms of
‘appropriate’ family units that seemingly excluded grandparents from the
upbringing of children became enacted on the ground through the refusal
to let József’s grandparents care for him. Finally, the case provides an
example of the room of manoeuvre that families could have to get state
officials to act in their interest. Not only did the parents negotiate lower
fees, but the grandparents adopted József, so that they officially fitted the
nuclear family ideal promoted in most central family policies.
 1 CARE AS A FRAME 3

In this book, I argue that the various relationships of children in care

were shaped by images of the family, childhood and the state held by dif-
ferent actors. I will show how images of ‘proper’ kinship focussed on
parent-­child relations, thereby systematically undervaluing the relation-
ships of children in care to institutional carers, teachers and local residents,
along with connections to classmates and siblings. The nature of these
multiple relationships provides the topic for this book. I ask how being in
state care interrupted, ended, maintained or created personal relationships
for children in care in late socialist Hungary. Rather than assuming that
biological parents are the key point in figuring out kinship relations, I look
at the importance of care for establishing personal relations spanning the
‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres (Thelen 2015).
The starting premise of this book is that the child protection system
and state care provide an entry point to explore the mutual constituency
of state and family in children’s relationships. State care settings are par-
ticularly suited to observe the negotiation of boundaries between the state
and family because state-paid staff take on tasks of raising and caring for
children, which is usually seen as the ‘private’ realm of parents. I will
explore how the concepts of ‘state’ and ‘family’ were constructed in inter-
actions between parents, state officials and children in care and the impli-
cations of such classificatory practices in characterising certain kinship or
state practices as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (cf. Thelen and Alber 2017). My research
focuses on Hungary in the 1970s and early 1980s and will show how chil-
dren’s relationships were shaped by increased ‘expert’ scrutiny of parent-
ing and a policy shift to holding parents responsible for social ills.
Conceiving of parents as incompetent and thus in need of expert advice on
how to raise children was not a reserve of socialist policy and demonstrates
the wider implications of this book for understanding the increased state
activity in regards to parent-child relations beyond the immediate
Hungarian context.
In this introduction I present the conceptual frame for my book. My
work is at the intersection of the anthropology of the state and the anthro-
pology of kinship. I first draw on recent theorisations of care and kinship
that look at the processes through which relatedness is formed and reverse
processes of de-kinning. I next discuss the relational approach to the state
that characterises my research. I pursue this approach in order to empha-
sise the various relational modes in which officials interacted with children
in care and the significance of concrete relations in negotiating and pro-
ducing state-kin boundaries. The third part focuses on understanding
4 J. RASELL

state care and the context of late socialist Hungary. This is followed by a
discussion of my mixed-method qualitative research strategy. Finally, I
outline the structure of my book, summarising the main arguments of
each chapter about the diverse relations of children in care and the co-­
production of kinship and state through care practices. As the book will
ultimately show, child protection policies, caseworkers and state carers did
not diminish, and actually reinforced, an ‘ideal’ of relationships to biologi-
cal parents for children in care, thereby devaluing other possible kinship
connections.

Care to Kin Me
This study is framed by anthropological understandings of kinship as
‘produced through social practices rather than determined by the physi-
cal act of birth’ (Thelen et al. 2013: 1). Although anthropological stud-
ies of kinship were heavily criticised for rigid and ethnocentric schemas
in the 1970s and 1980s (Needham 1971; Schneider 1984), the new
kinship studies ‘taught us to study relations’ rather than presupposing
relational classifications (Howell 2006: 38). Interest in the making of
kinship relations around issues such as gay/lesbian kinship (Weston
1991) or reproductive technologies (Franklin and Ragoné 1998) fitted
into the social constructivist turn in social anthropology and its neigh-
bouring. By focussing on practices, processes and meanings, anthropolo-
gists raise questions of how kinship is negotiated and confirmed in daily
actions and changed through an ever-evolving policy and legal system.
This also entails exploration of what is known and passed on about kin-
ship relations by different actors (see Astuti 2000 on who saves and
produces knowledge about kinship in the context of Madagascar). My
data will show that children in care since birth with no contact with their
parents nonetheless received information about their relatives based on
information in their case file and birth record that was relayed by social
workers and staff in care homes.
Anthropological research highlights that there is a tension between the
fluid notion of kinship in anthropological debates as constructed by pro-
cesses of ‘kinning,’ relating, nurturing or belonging that can create kin
with friends, colleagues (Fischer 2010), places and even the nation state
(Carsten 1995) and the ways in which kinship can be fixed into legal or
religious frameworks and restricted by state practices. Howell (2006: 40)
points out that anthropologists argue that kinship relations are constructed
 1 CARE AS A FRAME 5

whilst a different view is expressed in family law. In my research we will

clearly see that biology and not relations mattered to the formal right of
parents to take their children out of state care. Lambek (2013: 242) sug-
gests that kinship should be understood as constituted through certain
kinds of performative acts, which are recognised, regulated and even con-
stituted by the law, and then as the histories produced by such acts.
Registering a birth, for example, is intended to produce responsibilities
and informs people of their commitments to one another. A birth certifi-
cate does not of course produce behaviour, but rather criteria for judging
what is right and wrong with respect to specific relationships. Such state-­
produced or state-authorised acts of kinship can exclude other candidates
such as the staff in state-run residential homes, local community or friends
that feature in my research. There is no legal recognition in such cases of
the actual relationships in which people experience the need to care and be
cared for (Borneman 2001).
The focus of a large segment of new kinship studies on the processes
that produce kinship gives kinship by default a positive overtone. Research
on surrogacy (Goodwin 2010; Pande 2014) or gamete donation (Edwards
2015; Kahn 2006; Klotz 2014) presents kinship as created through inten-
tion, choice and love. It is often overlooked that hierarchy, exclusion,
dominance and subordination are just as much part of kinship as amity or
solidarity (Franklin and McKinnon 2001: 18). Thelen (2015: 507) high-
lights that care is also ‘still overwhelmingly seen as something positive’
despite the stress in disability studies on power and hierarchies within car-
ing relationships. My study will show that not all care is good nor is care
always intended to produce lasting relationships. The emphasis on kinship
as a form of connection means there are few studies about disconnection,
rupture or ‘de-kinning,’ to use Howell’s concept developed to understand
transnational adoption practices. Howell (2006: 63) defines kinning,
which is her focus, as ‘the process by which a foetus or newborn child (or
a previously unconnected person) is brought into a significant and perma-
nent relationship with a group of people that is expressed in a kin idiom.’
It is de-kinning, she argues, that makes adoption possible—creating the
‘socially naked child’ (Howell 2007: 26–27). It is important to ask from
whose perspective the de-kinning takes place and whether it was success-
ful. My book deals with this flip side of kinship: how the personal relation-
ships of children in care were interrupted though not necessarily ended.
The hard work of making and maintaining relations is not something
anthropologists have frequently studied (Carsten 2000: 26) because
6 J. RASELL

permanence is often assumed to be an inherent quality of kinship (cf.

Bloch 1973; Fortes 1969). In an important corrective to such thinking,
Edwards and Strathern (2000) show how inhabitants of a town in north-
ern England supplement and truncate their interconnections by bringing
different kinds of link into play—belonging to a family, or to a place, vari-
ous kinds of ownership, names or biological ties—and that mediators are
required to make these links. Such results drive research to consider the
multiple influences on the formation and maintenance of relationships.
My analysis shows how the parental and sibling relations of children in
care changed when living in residential care (see Chap. 4) as did the con-
nections to friends, peers and different professionals (see Chap. 5).
The ‘new’ kinship literature of the mid-1990s that emerged from
mainly non-Western field sites (Weismantel 1995; Carsten 1995) stressed
that kinship results from care and not the other way around. It moved
anthropological discussions beyond the theoretical stalemate of kinship as
biological, instant and permanent. Carsten (1995), for example, presented
kinship as mutable and fluid for Malays living in rural Langkawi, who
become kin through living and eating together in houses. In local Malay
perception, the core substance of kinship—that which makes people
related to each other—was blood, which was thought to be produced and
replenished over time by the food one ate, thus creating relatedness to the
people one shared food with. In Chap. 4 I take up the theme of the sub-
stance of kinship and how state officials attributed kinship based on shared
genes whereas many siblings needed such biological ties to be substanti-
ated by shared experiences and perspectives (cf. Pauli 2013). Thelen
(2010, 2014, 2015) is one of the few authors to apply these insights on
the importance to kinship of shared experiences and interaction back to
the West. Her work focuses in particular on connections between care and
kinship, for example in studies about how kinship in old age in (East)
Germany is confirmed by taking meals together and different forms of
mutual help.
Care is a central concept for the research presented in this book. In the
past ten to fifteen years, anthropological literature on care has developed
with studies focused on care and kinship (Alber and Drotbohm 2015), the
migration of care workers (Deneva 2012; Ticktin 2011; Yeates 2009) and
neo-liberal restructuring of care (Han 2012; Mol 2008; Read and Thelen
2007). Buch’s understanding of care as ‘simultaneously resource and rela-
tional practice’ (2015: 279) makes clear that care involves affective states,
moral economies and is often scarce. ‘Care’ in the English language
 1 CARE AS A FRAME 7

transports both emotional attachment (caring about) and practical doing

(caring for). This duality reinforces expectations that caring actions come
from caring feelings (Tronto 1994; Ungerson 1990). The expansion of
paid care (home help, nursing homes, children’s homes) raises concerns
about the commodification of intimacy (Hochschild 2003), but also of
falsely placed emotions. I will show in Chap. 5 that there could be ele-
ments of love and affection in the interactions between care staff and chil-
dren, but also that not all care practices in the institution were infused
with ‘good feelings’ or intended to produce lasting relationships. The
cases I discuss in Chap. 4 demonstrate that care provided by relatives
could be abusive. My emphasis is on the creative power of care to generate
and sustain social ties, but also to end relations where care was ‘bad’ or
absent. Instead of assuming the salience or meaning of particular kinship
connections, such a conceptualisation of care means openly looking at the
relations and ties that children in care could have, including relationships
that might have been devalued by state practices because they were not kin.
Crucially, Thelen’s work also looks at the importance of strong emo-
tional support and mutual care outside of kinship circles such as between
work colleagues or neighbours, which are often underestimated. Such a
focus on care is productive for social analysis by looking at what is made
invisible by division along kinship lines. Four points are central to Thelen’s
conceptualisation of care (2015: 508). First, care should highlight the
connections between giving and receiving care and not focus solely on the
carer as constructing need and responsibility. Secondly, care needs to be
contextualised within state and economic structures as well as within dif-
ferent temporalities. Third, discussions of care should not be limited to
what is perceived as the realm of the family. Fourth, it has to be recognised
that care can be negative and is thus an open process that might lead to the
dissolution of significant ties. Following Thelen, I therefore pay attention
to care practices and their evolving relationships and do not presuppose a
relational classification. This requires an open research approach to trace
the various relationships that may have arisen and analyse the different
actors and dynamics shaping their changing nature over time. Thus, I will
consider in Chap. 5 the presence or absence of care beyond kinship rela-
tions—inside children’s homes, schools and local areas where residential
institutions were located—to see the breadth of personal relationships that
children in care had.
8 J. RASELL

Taking a Relational Approach to the State

A research project on the experiences and relationships of children in state
care requires an understanding of ‘the state’ in order to analyse how deci-
sions in the child welfare system are made and more generally to explore
how relationships are shaped by images of ‘proper’ parenting that become
enacted in policies and regulations and in the everyday practices of state
officials. Recent anthropological literature highlights that ‘the state’ is
comprised of a diverse and often divergent range of institutions, people,
practices and places (Kay 2018: 58). It was no coincidence that the new
wave of interest in the state among anthropologists, who historically had
concentrated more on understanding non-state contexts and stateless
societies, happened in the 1990s ‘at a time when other were already ago-
nizing about the apparent withering away of the state’ (Thelen et al.
2018b: 3). The strong focus on how states are constructed in everyday
practices and the imagination of ordinary people (Yang 2005: 489) fitted
into the broader cultural turn of the social sciences.
Thelen et al. (2018b) argue that this emphasis on culturally constructed
images and discourses of the state (for instance the image of an orderly and
effective state or of an irresponsible and indifferent state) within recent
anthropological studies has created an imbalance with insufficient work on
the everyday practices of local bureaucracies and also difficulties in identi-
fying the ties between how the state is ‘seen’ and ‘done’ (cf. Migdal and
Schlichte 2005). The missing link between ideas about the state (seeing
the state) and concrete state practices (doing the state) makes it difficult to
understand how specific state constellations and boundaries of the state
emerge and are reproduced or contested. Thelen et al. (2018b: 7) suggest
understanding the state as ‘ever-changing political formations with institu-
tional settings that are structured by social relations in interactions charac-
terised by different state images.’ This view of the state makes relations the
starting point of analysis and they propose three axes to implement such a
relational approach to the state: relational modalities, boundary work and
embeddedness. I apply these three interrelated areas of analysis, particu-
larly the first two, to my data to generate insights into the workings of the
Hungarian socialist state in shaping the kinship, relationships and lives of
children in state care.
The first avenue of analysis, relational modalities, refers to the different
ways in which state officials interact with clients. Such modalities draw on
different normative concepts of what a state should be and how it should
 1 CARE AS A FRAME 9

act. I describe two distinct relational modalities employed by state employ-

ees in Chaps. 3 and 5. One was based on fostering a certain distance, seen
as professionalism, and having to ‘be even’ and not show favouritism. The
other mode of interacting with parents and children in care was more per-
sonal and rested on the close proximity of staff employed in state organisa-
tions in a village or the children’s home. State action emerged through
such relational modalities and the modes employed by state officials
depended on the social and institutional settings in which they are person-
ally embedded. For instance, Chap. 3 demonstrates the different norms
and interests of caseworkers and family experts that contributed to contra-
dictory decisions over whether mothers should soon return to paid
employment or the role of grandparents in childcare. With my set of
sources, it was not possible to explore what other ties these state officials
had within the local community, but it is important to recognise individual
embeddings that might involve different sets of personal and profes-
sional norms.
The second axis of a relational understanding of statehood relates to
understanding how the state coexists and is co-determined with other
spheres. The perimeters of the state and what could be called kinship, fam-
ily or even civil society are fuzzy, which requires focusing on boundary
work. As Mitchell (1991: 90) observes, there is no ‘intrinsic entity [of the
state], which can be thought of as a free-standing object or actor’ and thus
we must look at the distinction as well as the blurring of boundaries to
other entities—in my case to the family. A good example of the blurring of
boundaries between the state and family is what Donzelot (1979) terms
the ‘tutelary complex’ of French state officials that turned the supposedly
private family sphere into a series of meetings with caseworkers, support
officers, doctors and education counsellors about how to ‘properly’ look
after children. Donzelot described a change at the end of the nineteenth
century from direct state intervention to a more subtle but pervasive
intrusion of expert knowledge into the daily lives of parents and their chil-
dren. It is with these ideas in mind that I will look in Chap. 3 at tactical
collusion, alliances and compromises between caseworkers (representing
‘the state’) and parents (representing ‘family’) in Hungary in the late
1970s, thereby showing the mutual constitution of the state and family.
Boundary work—looking at how people enact boundaries in areas that
encompass both private and public domains—is not just a theoretical exer-
cise. It is about how people arrange particular practices and reflects how
the state can be differently constructed depending on the situation. Thelen
10 J. RASELL

et al. (2018a) show this in their work on two elder care projects in Serbia
where state carers came to be seen as kin by investing far more time and
emotions into their job than they were expected to or paid for, thus eras-
ing the officialdom of the state from these relationships and keeping the
boundaries between kinship and the state intact. The caring, affectionate
nature of these relations between state-paid carers and their elderly clients
stood in stark contrast to the widespread image of the Serbian state as
unresponsive and distant. This contradiction between practices and images
of the state was overcome by a process of ‘state kinning’ and ‘kinning the
state’—an expansion of Howell’s (2006) concept of ‘kinning’ discussed
earlier to describe situations in which state carers came to be counted as
kin while working with clients and vice versa. References to kinship are
used in this case by clients and care staff as a means of authenticating paid
care and explaining its emotional content. The assumed separation
between kinship and the state is thus interpreted by these actors as stable.
Indeed, as Thelen and Alber (2017: 1) observe, the idea that kinship and
the state are mutually exclusive is ‘so deeply ingrained in the Western
worldview and in processes of knowledge production that decoding their
co-production poses a considerable challenge.’
Given the mutual constitution of kinship and state, the everyday bound-
ary making of what is understood to be the state is an interesting question
for anthropologists because it leads to diverse forms of inclusion and
exclusion. In Chap. 5 we will see the close, affectionate relationship of a
state-paid carer to a child in care that went far beyond the call of duty
being curtailed by the children’s home director because such actions were
not expected or seen as appropriate for state officials. Inclusion and exclu-
sion in the sphere of the state also relates to teachers, schools and even
factories that employed parents—as discussed in Chap. 3—and whether
they considered (or could be made to consider) themselves as arms of the
state on child protection issues. In these latter relations it is ambiguous
whether or not a state-sector individual or organisation actually repre-
sented the state, thus contributing to the blurring of the state’s boundaries.
Through their relational approach to the state, Thelen et al. (2018b)
demonstrate how images of the state held by citizens and state officials are
at once reaffirmed and transformed within concrete state practices. The
state could variously be envisioned as a paternalistic figure that cares for
deserving citizens (Vetters 2018), as corrupt (Gupta 1995) or disinter-
ested and uncaring (Thelen et al. 2018a) and will affect how people act
and relate to the state structures. I extend these discussions of the linkages
 1 CARE AS A FRAME 11

between images and practices of the state by demonstrating in Chap. 3

that images of ‘appropriate’ family forms and ‘proper’ parenting are
important parts of central state policies on child protection and become
enacted on the ground. The interactions between different state officials
and parents that I describe are characterised by contradictory images of
the ideal family as well as a variety of relational modalities. Reconsidering
state practices through specific images of parents (who as we will see are
increasingly conceived as incapable and in need of expert interventions)
complements other work on the linkages between state and kinship instead
of the predominant focus by scholars on how families are affected by the
state (Thelen and Alber 2017: 13).
The different relational modes of state actors and the contradictory
moments that I highlight in this book do not imply that the organisational
entity called ‘state’ is incoherent or unstable. I suggest thinking of the
state as a Rubik’s cube to understand the multidimensionality and contra-
dictory processual nature of the state. On the one hand a Rubik’s cube
appears solid when looked at, which mirrors what we know about societal
images of the state that are often monolithic. On the other hand, the
cube’s structure is highly (though not randomly) variable though rota-
tions of the micro-cubes. With each turn of the cube, the different micro-­
cubes (representing actors like caseworkers, education counsellors, parents
and teachers) held in place by intersecting axes (e.g. the local child protec-
tion office, the children’s home, the child guidance centre) interact and it
is possible for an edge to be in the right place but misoriented (flipped or
twisted) without the whole system falling apart. Rather than studying the
(macro-cubic) images of the state, I propose to look at the highly diverse
practices and influences of the state (the micro-cubes and the axes) in
order to explore the state’s concrete and complex nature. The research
therefore seeks to understand how ‘the state’ features as images, practices
and ultimately relationships in the experiences of children who were sub-
ject to child protection procedures and placement in state care.

Understanding the Context of State Care

in Socialist Hungary

State care refers to both the wide range of child protection services for
children and more narrowly to just residential childcare. In this book, by
state care I mean specifically children growing up in children’s homes and
12 J. RASELL

not those in foster care because living in residential institutions was the
main form of state care for children outside the care of families in state
socialist Hungary. Over 33,000 children were in a children’s home in any
year in my research period (see Table 2.2). It is a common misconception
that most institutionalised children are orphans (cf. Brandes 2016;
Murdoch 2006). It is true that after the Second World War, 80% of the
22,000 residents in Hungarian state care were motherless or fatherless.
Fast forward to 1983 and out of the 33,000 children in care only 5 per
cent had lost their parents, 25 per cent were not orphans but had been
‘abandoned,’ while 70 per cent were in (loose) contact with their parents
(Szenes 1983: 20). To make family connections more visible I refer to the
state-run homes where my interviewees grew up as children’s homes and
not orphanages. I use the term children in care, but recognise that the
word ‘child’ is ambiguous and must be qualified with further adjectives
such as young, nursery or school (cf. Brockliss and Montgomery 2010: 4).
The research in this book focuses on the relationships of children in care
in the age range six to thirteen where memories are largely accessible and
children were in a residential home as opposed to a workers’ hostel or
dormitory for further education where older children were usually placed.
Residential childcare under state socialism tends to be associated with
the infamous images of Romanian orphanages that surfaced in the 1990s.
Asked what I research, the invariable response to me saying children in
care in state socialist Hungary was: ‘It must have been terrible.’ However,
the coercive pro-natalist policies in Romania after 1966 that contributed
to unwanted births1 and institutionalised children totally without kin is
not what caseworkers and health officials in Hungary were implementing.
State socialism is often imagined as monolithic across the populations and
countries of Central and Eastern Europe—as if it was ‘fundamentally
instructed by “Moscow” and … performed in a totally standardized way’
(Hering 2009: 11). Yet, my book will show that there was considerable
diversity in socialist care and emphasise the room for manoeuvre that
existed for families and state professionals (cf. Karge et al. 2017).

1
In 1966, Romanian socialist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu issued Decree 770 criminalising
abortion and later women were subjected to regular gynaecological testing in an attempt to
increase the birth rate. Abortions had become the most widely practised method of fertility
control in Romania. For all practical purposes, modern contraceptives were unavailable at
the time.
 1 CARE AS A FRAME 13

The economic conditions in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s were,

moreover, far better than neighbouring Romania where the population
‘shivered in dimly lit homes or stood endlessly in lines in the hope of mini-
mally providing for themselves and their families’ (Kligman 1998: 206).
After the 1956 uprising in Hungary the authorities systematically concen-
trated on raising the standard of living as a guarantee for political stability.
The new trajectory became ‘the archetype of a kind of “consumption-­
oriented” socialism, maximising disposable income and everyday con-
sumption’ (Benczes 2016: 150). The real wages more than doubled
between 1957 and 1978 and more than ten times as many durables (e.g.
furniture, electrical household appliances, a washing machine, a telephone,
a refrigerator, a motorbike, a car) were purchased (Valuch 1998/99: 143).
In 1964, the Hungarian political and social weekly Magyarország pro-
jected an optimistic future by advertising a ‘television to every house’
(Nyyssönen 2006: 162). In a report by the Ministry of Health, the falling
Hungarian birth rate was related to the rising consumption aspirations of
the population (Melegh 2011: 274–275). The slogan kicsi vagy kocsi, the
choice between a baby or a car, characterises the deliberations of families
at that time (Nyyssönen 2006: 162). The reforms launched in 1968 under
the name of the New Economic Mechanism (NEM), which introduced
market incentives, made the country one of the most economically suc-
cessful in the Eastern Bloc, with consumption rising by an annual average
of 5.3% until 1975 (Kornai 1997: 172).
However, by the time of the two oil crises (in 1973 and 1979) Hungary
had become ‘an open and highly vulnerable economy’ dependant on for-
eign capital to finance current consumption levels, which meant an increase
in external debt (Benczes 2016: 150). By the late 1970s the global econ-
omy in which Hungary found itself was marked by international debt,
deteriorating terms of trade and sharply rising energy prices (Melegh
2011: 280). In Hungary in the summer of 1979 there were radical price
increases of around 9% to bring domestic prices in line with international
ones. The national newspaper Népszabadság published on 26 September
1979 a pledge by political leader János Kádár to ‘defend the already
achieved [high] level of living standard’ in the country (Benczes 2016:
150), but living standards deteriorated and the significance of social ben-
efits dramatically increased. For instance, the share of social benefits in
total income reached 32% in 1980 (Flakierski 1986: 125). In the next
chapter I discuss the extensive welfare payments to compensate the losers
14 J. RASELL

of (micro-)economic and political reforms, such as the introduction of

regular financial assistance for needy families (RNS) in 1974.
To date there has been no comprehensive study of the experiences of
children in care in state socialist Hungary. Haney (2002) explored the
transformations in the state policies and institutional practices towards
mothers from 1948 to 1996 identifying three distinct regimes of social
policy. She argues that by the 1970s caseworkers armed with domesticity
tests focused on the nuclear family, so when they encountered ‘problem-
atic’ nuclear families they turned less to extended families and more to
state institutions with the number of children in care almost doubling
from 1965 to 1985 (Haney 2002: 116). This is complemented by a small
number of articles or doctoral work that focus on the regulation of pre-
school education and child protection in early state socialism as the inter-
section between the productive and reproductive roles of women (Bicskei
2006; Varsa 2011). Varsa (2011: 72ff) demonstrates a shift in child pro-
tection regulations around 1953 that meant poor mothers ‘able to work’
were no longer entitled to have their children placed free of charge into
state care. The preconditions for placement into care on material grounds
shifted from a postwar understanding of need to inability to work.
Historical research has looked at poverty and child protection in Budapest
and Vienna before the First World War (Zimmerman 2007) and the prac-
tices and (visual) narratives of international humanitarian aid for starving
children in Hungary after the First World War (Kind-Kovács 2016). Kind-­
Kovács highlights how images of American relief for suffering children
generated ‘social sympathy,’ but also served political goals to associate
America with making the world a better place. Even Hungarian-language
publications in this area are sparse and focus mainly on the history of child
protection (Gergely 1997) and not a ‘child-centred perspective’ of the
experiences of children in care. Horváth (2009) offers a brief discussion of
care leavers as part of youth gangs in Hungary in the 1970s, but overall
the children who grew up in care in late socialist Hungary have little pres-
ence in research by local and overseas academics. More broadly, with the
notable exception of Kelly (2007) and Harwin (1996)—both on the
USSR—childhood in the late socialist period is also understudied.
Classically theorised as ‘total institutions’ by Goffman (1961), much
research on children’s homes continues to use this framing to highlight
the loss of individuality and vulnerability of children in care (Berndt 2011;
Khlinovskaya Rockhill 2010). Goffman (1961: xiii) defined total institu-
tions as ‘a place of residence and work where a large number of
 1 CARE AS A FRAME 15

like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable
period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of
life.’ As will be shown, these encompassing tendencies are less prominent
in the institutions I studied because the children in care attended local
schools and some regularly spent the weekends at home. My research find-
ings highlight that there can be continuities between life within and
beyond children’s homes. This chimes with nursing home ethnographies
that show how personal histories, temporality, the incorporation of resi-
dents’ families and the forging of new human connections within the nurs-
ing home affect the extent to which nursing homes rupture social relations
and personhood (Robbins 2013; Shield 2003). Following Read and
Thelen’s (2007) work on practices of care giving and receiving outside of
kin relations that nevertheless invoke notions of ‘privateness’ and intimacy,
in this book I will look at how care practices could blur the boundaries
between group life in an institution and family life.
Shield points out that we tend to think of only positive qualities when
thinking about the idea of home with its ‘balm of domesticity,’ yet the
reality is often harsher than the idealised construct (Shield 2003: 228).
The qualities we think of as home include ‘a sense of being known and
accepted, a feeling of comfort, a measure of sensory satisfaction, and con-
tinuity with caring people in a familiar and safe setting’ (Shield 2003:
229). I will explore in Chap. 5 the basic tone of the children’s home of
one of my research participants, Zsolt, where attention was paid more to
rules than relationships. The children’s home had no aspiration to be
home-like, but nevertheless, as I discuss in Chap. 4, some children in care
felt better in the children’s home than on home visits to their parents.
An increasing body of social work literature from several Western coun-
tries has started to look at the impact of growing up in care (CLAN 2008;
Stein and Munro 2008; Dixon 2008). These works focus mainly on the
care experience itself or how care leavers fare (largely negatively) in the
first five years after leaving state care. Knowledge about what happened to
former children in care largely ceases when they reach their early twenties
(Murray and Goddard 2014). A notable exception is Duncalf’s Listen Up
report (2010) that reveals many care leavers return to education much
later in life. In the following chapters I offer experiences from my research
participants’ lives—who are now in their forties—long after state care. I
draw attention in Chaps. 2 and 4 to the educational and lifestyle differ-
ences between siblings that state care could establish, citing examples
where state care meant an advantage by providing access to better schools.
16 J. RASELL

Indeed, the difficult life circumstances my interviewees find themselves in

at the time of research—long-term homeless, on social benefits, loss of
their business, unemployed—they often attribute more to the economic
reforms of the early 1990s than to their state care experiences. The voice
of those who have largely positive memories of state care is very under-
represented in research and not surprisingly in government and other
inquiries that usually stem from abuse investigations (see Commission to
Inquire into Child Abuse and Ryan 2009; Law Commission of Canada
2000; Mullighan 2008). While the cases I cite are few, they nevertheless
complicate a view of children in care as victims of an oppressing socialist
state (Laudien and Dreier-Horning 2016).
At the same time, it is empirically and ethnically important to be aware
of potential violence and harsh treatment in state care. Major scandals of
historic abuse such as claims of organised prostitution in the
Wilhelminenberg children’s home in Vienna (Helige et al. 2013) or ‘black
pedagogy’ in the Torgau Youth Work Camp in East Germany (Gatzemann
2008) have contributed to a perception of children’s homes as dangerous
and uncaring environments that offer only negative experiences to young
people. Indeed, the new surge of academic interest on the lives of children
in care in the twentieth century (Abrams 1998; Adams 1995; Child 1998;
Hil and Branigan 2010; Penglase 2007) has been fuelled by current public
debates on the abuses they suffered. This colours the way that we approach
the topic of state care. My research has its roots in this assumption being
part of a historical research network on physical violence in late socialism.
Punishment and discipline were aspects of relationship creation that I
explore in Chap. 3 (on parents) and Chap. 5 (on care staff and teachers).
The boundaries by which punishment may be defined as violence are
moveable, both in time and space. I look at punishment administered
while my interviewees were children that is recalled after a significant
period has elapsed. Accepted everyday practice might retrospectively be
viewed as violent although it was ‘not directly and consciously experienced
as such at the time’ (Hacking 1992: 229). The social acceptance of acts of
force against children also depends on the setting and who does the pun-
ishing. Ferguson (2007: 129–130) argues that children in Irish industrial
schools were regarded as ‘moral dirt’ and that the community may have
accepted their harsh treatment because they were viewed as ‘socially dan-
gerous.’ Former teachers in interviews with me and in the pages at the
time of the Hungarian practitioner journal Köznevelés (Public Education)
said that they relied on parents to discipline children. In their professional
 1 CARE AS A FRAME 17

capacity they could not slap a child, but some expected parents to do just
that when a child came home with a negative comment in their homework
book. A theme that I will consider in Chap. 5 is the parental role that
teachers seemingly took on alone for children in care—one part of which
was (physical) disciplining—and punishment as both limiting and facilitat-
ing relationships and feelings of belonging.

Methodology and Analysis

This book analyses how being in state care shaped children’s relationships
by combining a range of qualitative data. The main body of data stems
from two three-month stays in Hungary from January to March and
October to December 2012 and an intensive two-week period in February
2013. Through biographical interviews with care leavers I examine rela-
tions of children in care to parents, siblings, peers, care staff, teachers and
local residents. In addition, I draw on observations from visits to former
sites of children’s homes, in one case with a care leaver, to reveal unex-
pected friendships that were muted in the interviews. I use case files to
illuminate images of ‘proper’ families and parenting, to show the some-
times contradictory decisions of diverse state layers and to demonstrate
the room to manoeuvre that this gave parents. Drawing on semi-­structured
interviews with former care staff I explore management practices regard-
ing the atmosphere of children’s homes and ‘appropriate’ care practices
for state carers. I also draw on articles in the Hungarian journal Köznevelés
(Public Education) to show the use and contestation of corporal punish-
ment in schools and the assimilationist policy toward Roma children. Such
mixed methods are especially important when researching past experi-
ences because the opportunity to do ethnographic fieldwork is limited.
The interaction between caseworkers and parents that I present is based
on analysis of case files from the child protection services (the Gyámhatóság)
in Somogy county, southwestern Hungary, that stop in 1979, 1980 or
1981. I worked mainly with three categories of files: state care, endanger-
ment/financial assistance cases and adoption. The documents in the
thicker files stretch back over several years and contain elaborate notes of
home visits, official decisions, statements by kindergarten tutors and
teachers, records of conversations that took place in the state offices, com-
ments of caseworkers and letters from parents. I had authorisation from
the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to access files with personal data and
permission to use a digital camera, which helped me offer a very rich
18 J. RASELL

account, particularly as my analysis was not restricted to notes made in the

archive. I am greatly indebted to the families whose files I read and have
vigorously changed all names and other identifying information.
I began my fieldwork with life stories and in total was in contact with
17 care leavers and 6 former carers. In order to safeguard their anonymity,
I gave each research participant a pseudonym and used fictional names for
the children’s homes and villages that I discuss in detail. I chose to work
with oral history to be able to study the subjective points of view of chil-
dren in care whose voice and agency is underrepresented in the archival
material, as illustrated in the opening case of József. I carried out 25 full-­
length taped interviews ranging from one-and-a-half to three hours. The
interviews were all in Hungarian and took place in the home or workplace
of my research participants, in the group room of a homeless shelter or in
cafes depending on my interviewees’ preferences. As the months passed, I
deepened my knowledge of relationships, processes and dynamics in state
care by visiting three functioning and two former children’s homes at the
invite of former staff of these institutions.
Decisive to the initial success of my fieldwork was the interviews organ-
ised for me by a retired children’s home director who still had links to
several care leavers and to his former institution. Although I was initially
concerned that his selection process would create a bias in that these care
leavers would have more positive experiences of relationships in state care,
the opinions I heard were in fact very mixed and for one interview the care
leaver did not turn up so his brother stood in, whom the director knew
less well (see the biography of Károly in Chap. 2). My second entry point
to the field was through a popular staff member at a homeless shelter who
arranged several interviews with residents, knowing who had been in state
care. My third access to interview partners was mediated and facilitated by
the longstanding research connections in Eastern Hungary of my PhD
supervisor Tatjana Thelen.
Other scholars working in my area have noted the difficulty of ‘snow-
balling’ from respondents to gain further interview partners because care
leavers often do not stay in touch with each other (Varsa 2011: 45).
However, the social media platform iWiW (a Hungarian version of
Facebook) proved a lucky break for me. A short message over iWiW
explaining from whom I had their name and that I would like to meet to
talk about growing up in care secured a positive answer in the three cases
where an interviewee remembered a boy from the children’s home, but
where contact had long since ceased.
 1 CARE AS A FRAME 19

The oldest care leaver to take part in an interview was 50 and the
youngest 28 at the time of the interview, sharing memories of experiences
in state care across the 1970s and 1980s. In 1977 60% of the children
entering state care in Hungary were under three (Siklós 1983: 174) and
this reflects itself in my eclectic sample. I introduced myself as a British
PhD student researching what it was like to grow up in state care in late
socialist Hungary. None of my interviewees were particularly curious
about me, which is not very surprising. Such narrative approaches to
research are ‘postulated to allow silenced voices to be heard’ and the focus
is on the chance to speak and to be listened to (Smith 2010: 306). Zsolt,
a long-term homeless care leaver in his late thirties who we will hear more
from in each chapter, melancholically said that it was really good that he
could talk to me about his care experiences, but a shame that interest was
only coming from abroad.
I started interviews with care leavers by asking how old they were when
they came into care. The interviews were designed to have a life history
quality to them, but this generally produced disappointing accounts. In
fact, it seems the biographical interview method (Rosenthal 2004) can
inhibit memory just as much as a highly structured interview, because
respondents may be unsure of what to say and therefore leave out seem-
ingly inessential personal details. Stories and conversations started to flow
much more freely once I began to ask questions, which were directed
mainly to their childhood due to my interest in state care and relations. I
raised general themes about everyday life in the children’s home (food,
leisure activities, school work, bedtime, etc.) in the first part of an inter-
view and tried to draw out details in the second part by asking the inter-
viewee to say more about what they had already mentioned. In the third
part, once at ease, the interviewee often freely narrated their experiences.
If the participant became upset I would check if we should continue with
the interview and we would pause to have a cigarette or get another cof-
fee. Overall, however, the interviews lacked strong emotions. Other
researchers have had similar experiences. Hanák (1978: 130) argued that
due to the charmless institutional environment all the events in the long
years spent in care fit into a few short sentences.
The interviews were bemusing at times for my research participants, as
we see in the following quotation by Károly: ‘In truth there is nothing to
say because one was just there [in the children’s home]. And this “how
was a day?”– or well– it–…’ It seemed so obvious to my interviewee Károly
to not be worth telling. What he felt should be told was his exit story from
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