Their only “sin” was being born on the wrong side of a marriage contract, but it would be held over their heads for the rest of their lives and be the justification for horrible abuse that has been compared to that of Nazi concentration camps.Īs such atrocities usually are, the Duplessis Orphans scandal was closely linked with politics, which was in turn intertwined with money and religion – in this case, the all-powerful Catholic Church. Most of these children – who were in no way mentally ill – were actually not orphans at all, but abandoned by unwed mothers who could not take care of them. In the 1950s and 1960s, more than 20,000 orphans at multiple orphanages were falsely labeled as mentally ill when their orphanages were turned into psychiatric hospitals at the behest of the Canadian government. The historical backdrop of Joanna Goodman’s bitingly realistic novel The Home of Unwanted Girls is one of Quebec’s darkest scandals.
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