The Village Never Went Away

Keir Starmer’s apology for historic forced adoption was framed, inevitably, as an apology by the state. That was proper as far as it went. Between 1949 and 1976, around 185,000 babies of unmarried mothers were adopted in England and Wales, in many cases after women had been shamed, pressured or coerced into surrendering their children. The Joint Committee on Human Rights had already concluded that government bore ultimate responsibility for the harm caused by public institutions and state employees involved in those adoptions, and Starmer’s statement acknowledged the state’s role in a system that caused lifelong damage. Yet the phrase “the state” also risks making the story too simple. The state apologised because modern politics requires a formal subject to apologise. But the force that many women actually met was more intimate than the state. It was the village.

By “the village” I do not mean a picturesque rural community. I mean the informal moral system by which a society measures behaviour, converts it into reputation, and then administers belonging or exclusion. The village is not merely a place. It is a social machine. It reads signs: who is respectable, who is shameful, who is safe, who is embarrassing, who has violated the boundary. It then produces consequences: warmth, silence, gossip, pity, avoidance, protection, expulsion. In its older form, this system was visible in the family, the church, the maternity home, the hospital ward, the adoption agency and the street. In its modern form it appears in professional networks, school-parent WhatsApp groups, online platforms, campaign circles, HR language and reputational pile-ons. The mechanism persists even when the moral content changes.

The forced-adoption scandal is a particularly stark example because the immediate pressure on unmarried mothers was often not experienced as a letter from Whitehall or an order from a minister. It was experienced as shame. A young woman became pregnant outside marriage and suddenly discovered that her condition had been socially reclassified. She was no longer simply a daughter, neighbour, patient or mother-to-be. She had become a problem to be managed. The baby was not merely a child; the baby was evidence. The family’s standing, the mother’s respectability, the household’s story about itself and the community’s sense of order were all threatened by a visible breach of the code.

The code did not require much explicit theory. It did not need to be written down as doctrine every time it operated. It was enough that people knew. A girl who had “got herself into trouble” had done something that could not be left in public view. She might be sent away, concealed, spoken of in lowered voices, treated coldly by those who should have protected her, and then encouraged or pressured to give up the baby so that normal life could resume. The cruelty lay partly in this ordinariness. The actors often did not experience themselves as monsters. They experienced themselves as maintaining standards, avoiding scandal, doing what was best, preserving the family, keeping order.

Women were central to this process. That is the uncomfortable part that often disappears when the story is retold only as institutional failure. Men held much formal authority in mid-20th-century Britain: law, church hierarchy, medicine, property, employment, household power. But the day-to-day enforcement of respectability, especially around pregnancy, birth, childcare and domestic shame, frequently passed through women. Mothers, matrons, midwives, nurses, nuns, neighbours and female social workers were often the people closest to the young woman at the moment when belonging was withdrawn. They could be the ones who looked away, applied pressure, spoke the moral language of disgrace, or made return to ordinary life seem conditional on the child’s disappearance.

This is not an argument that women uniquely caused the harm, or that men were absent from it. It is an argument about the division of social labour. Men often controlled the outer architecture of authority. Women often controlled the inner climate of legitimacy. In many communities, they were the keepers of the threshold: who was respectable enough to be included, who had made herself impossible, who could be forgiven, who must be made an example. Their power was not always formal, but it was real. It worked through sympathy and its withdrawal. It worked through the distribution of warmth, shame and reputation.

The 1960s case shows the village operating under a sexual-respectability regime. The decisive signal was unmarried pregnancy. The interpretation was shame, disorder, contamination and threat to the family’s standing. The output was concealment, pressure, adoption, silence and restoration of the social surface. Once the child was removed, the village could repair its story. The girl might be damaged for life; the baby might grow up without origins, records or medical history; but the visible disturbance had been converted back into order. That was the function of the system.

The modern village operates differently because the old sexual code has largely lost legitimacy. In most mainstream British settings, it is no longer acceptable to treat an unmarried mother as morally ruined simply because she has a child. The status penalty has weakened. A pregnant teenager may still face difficulty, class judgement or family conflict, but she is not normally subjected to the same coherent regime of social disgrace. The old target has become unavailable. Yet the village has not disappeared. The energy of informal enforcement has migrated.

One contemporary example is the conflict over transgender women entering women’s spaces. This is not the same issue as unmarried motherhood, and it should not be collapsed into it. The point is structural, not substantive. The question is how a community treats women who violate the locally dominant moral script. In many progressive, institutional or professional settings, a woman who objects to male-born people entering female spaces is not merely treated as someone making a policy argument about prisons, changing rooms, refuges, sport, language or safeguarding. She can be recoded as unsafe, cruel, hateful, exclusionary or morally contaminated. Once that recoding occurs, social punishment follows naturally. She may be frozen out, labelled, reported, disciplined, removed from platforms, or made to understand that continued membership depends on recantation.

The similarity is not that the old norm and the new norm are morally identical. They are not. The similarity is the method of enforcement. In both cases, a woman crosses a boundary and is then subjected to reputational discipline. In the older case, the boundary concerned sexual respectability. In the newer case, it concerns inclusion, identity, compassion and harm. In the older case, the punishing label was “fallen”. In the newer case, it may be “bigot”, “unsafe” or “phobic”. The vocabulary changes because the moral order changes. But the village still performs its essential act: it identifies a woman as outside the circle and then makes exclusion feel like virtue.

This is why the modern case is so revealing. It shows that informal coercion does not require conservatism. It can be progressive, therapeutic, humanitarian or bureaucratic. A community can punish in the name of kindness just as earlier communities punished in the name of respectability. The emotional structure is often the same. There is an approved story about what a good woman says, believes and tolerates. There is a boundary that cannot be questioned without moral suspicion. There is a social incentive to join the condemnation because refusal to condemn may itself become suspicious. There is a language of care that licenses cruelty towards the dissenter.

The village is therefore best understood as a portable social function. It is not tied to one ideology. It is a means of maintaining cohesion by converting behavioural signals into reputational consequences. In a settled moral order, this function can be stabilising. It tells people what conduct will be protected and what conduct will be punished. No society can function without some version of it. The question is not whether norms are enforced. They always are. The question is which norms, by whom, against whom, and with what safeguards against runaway cruelty.

That last question is where the forced-adoption apology still matters. The apology is not only about one historical wrong. It is a warning about how a society can mistake its own moral consensus for truth. The people who shamed unmarried mothers were not necessarily acting outside the civilisation of their time. They were often acting from within it. That is precisely why the episode is disturbing. It was not a breakdown of the village. It was the village working. It measured a woman against the prevailing code, produced a judgement, and then applied pressure until the visible breach was removed.

The same analytic caution should be applied to the present. A society that congratulates itself on having escaped old prejudices may still be highly skilled at exclusion. It may simply have changed the grounds on which exclusion is justified. Yesterday’s village protected respectability. Today’s village may protect safety, inclusion, authenticity or moral purity. Some of these aims are good in themselves. That does not make every enforcement act good. A humane society must be able to distinguish between defending a vulnerable person and destroying a dissenting one.

The most difficult lesson is that cruelty often travels through people who believe they are preserving decency. In the adoption scandal, the young mother’s suffering was treated as the necessary price of restoring order. In current disputes over women’s spaces, some women who raise boundary concerns are treated as acceptable casualties in the defence of a newer moral order. In both cases, the village can tell itself that exclusion is not aggression but hygiene: the removal of shame, danger, contamination or harm.

The village never went away. It changed its symbols, its institutions and its vocabulary. The unmarried mother is no longer its central target. The midwife’s ward and the mother-and-baby home no longer occupy the same role. But the underlying process remains visible wherever reputation is converted into control and belonging is made conditional on moral compliance. Starmer’s apology was necessary because the state had to acknowledge the institutional layer of a great wrong. But the deeper social lesson lies beneath the formal apology. The state may apologise decades later. The village rarely does. It simply moves on to the next boundary.