Forced Removal Of Children Research Articles

Rail relations: Aboriginal storywork and remaking Australia’s settler‐colonial infrastructure

AbstractAustralian railway histories are dominated by narratives of engineering triumphs, colonial expansion into empty land, and bringing civilisation and development through railway infrastructure. These settler‐colonial stories can be read back on themselves as histories and geographies of Aboriginal dispossession and colonial possession. Indeed, Aboriginal people, lands, waterways, and cultures have always been implicated in railway infrastructures, willingly or not. Aboriginal people’s entanglements with the New South Wales railways, to which we refer as “rail relations,” have involved dispossession, removal, employment, mobility, and travel, including the forced removal of children known as the Stolen Generations. These are relations of harm, loss, and grief but also of pride, connectivity, and survival. We argue in this paper that when Aboriginal communities engage in storying the New South Wales railways as Aboriginal they reassemble this infrastructure otherwise: not just as a tool of dispossession but also as life affirming. Indigenous storytelling can therefore overcome settler colonial erasure and the oversimplification of railway infrastructure hi/stories. Research about how Aboriginal lives have been interconnected with railways expansion and development is limited. While Aboriginal railway stories are continuously told within communities, they remain almost entirely silenced elsewhere. Overcoming the invisibility of Aboriginal rail relations is crucial as both truth‐telling of the past and to ensure more just infrastructural outcomes now and in the future.

Self-Determination, Public Accountability, and Rituals of Reform in First Peoples Child Welfare

First Peoples continue to face intergenerational harms as a result of settler systems of intervention in the lives of their families, including the forced removal of children. First Peoples resistance includes advocacy for systemic change, in particular, focused on foundations of greater accountability in child welfare systems, and recognition of First Peoples’ right to self-determination. However, achieving these necessary structural changes remains a pressing challenge. Using the example of the recent Aboriginal-led review of child welfare in New South Wales (NSW), Australia, ‘Family is Culture’, this paper explores the cycle of inquiry and response, and the repeated failures to enable self-determination or strengthen public accountability and oversight. Drawing on concepts including legitimacy and the rule of law, we conceptualise this pattern of reviews as a ritual of redemption by settler child – welfare systems, distancing themselves from ‘past’ wrongs while refusing to address the harmful foundations of these systems, thereby perpetuating the violence imposed on First Peoples children, families and communities. This contrasts with First Peoples’ frameworks for child welfare reform, which must be urgently realised in order to establish such systems on more just and effective foundations.

The gendered violence of injecting-related stigma among relatively affluent, suburban women who inject drugs.

In honouring the legacy of Jude Byrne's life-long advocacy for women and mothers who use drugs, this paper presents a case study of a group of women about whom we know little about and hear even less from: women who inject drugs in relatively affluent suburbs. Based on a 2020 qualitative study of people who inject drugs in an affluent area of Sydney known as 'The Beaches', we use in-depth interview data to thematically explore the lived experiences of gendered stigma among women who inject drugs. Even when women occupy the 'ideal' social position in terms of class (middle-class) and race (White) they remain subject to harmful forms of gendered stigma related to injecting drug use. Participants had internalised negative attitudes around injection drug use as a form of failed femininity and, despite being part of 'good' families and neighbourhoods, participants experienced forced child removal. Taking the lead from feminist intersectionality scholarship, our data illustrate how stigma and discrimination act as a form of structural violence against women who inject drugs in affluent communities. While the social relations of gender provide some degree of protection by 'performing proximity to Whiteness', gendered stigma and violence persist.

African immigrants in Sweden experiencing the threat of forced child removal

ABSTRACT This study investigated the experiences of African parents living in Sweden around the concept of forced child removal. The study aimed at finding out their experiences and attitudes around the concept and how the threat of it affects their parenting styles and coping strategies in Sweden. Nine semi-structured qualitative interviews were made with participants of African origin living in Sweden. Data was analysed using a reflexive thematic analysis. An important contribution of the study to parenting amongst African immigrants in Sweden is knowledge gained of the shift from an authoritarian style of parenting towards an authoritative one. It is about going from punishing the children if they make mistakes in life to reasoning with them more about what is right to do in life. This knowledge is helpful for social workers working with this segment of the population because an authoritative style of parenting takes into consideration the autonomy of the child and, therefore, closer to the Swedish styles of parenting, than authoritarian styles, which can make interventions with such parents easier. Social workers, however, need to get closer to their clients to understand the motivations of this shift from individual clients as this might differ.

Tribal Communities and Opioids

American Indians/ Alaskan Natives (AI/AN) experience overdose rates higher than any other ethnic/ racial group in the US. In recent decades the opioid epidemic has had a particularly negative impact on AI/AN populations. To respond effectively to this issue, it is vital to understand its root cause. A range of factors are responsible, with some dating back hundreds of years. The main factors are the impact of colonization and exclusion; forced migration to peripheral areas; forced removal of children and attempts at cultural genocide; poor social environments; poverty and unemployment; adverse childhood experiences; and inadequate and under-funded Federal health services. Particular blame can be attributed to the pharmaceutical industry and its active over-promotion of opioid use. A number of strategies for tackling this scourge are outlined.

Experiences of family therapists working with parents after the forced removal of children: What can the contextual model tell us?

Experiences of family therapists working with parents after the forced removal of children: What can the contextual model tell us?

Community views on ‘Can perinatal services safely identify Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents experiencing complex trauma?’

AbstractFamily and extended kinship systems which nurture healthy, happy children are central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Since colonisation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have been impacted by intergenerational cycles of trauma, stemming from colonial violence, genocidal policies and discrimination, including the forced removal of children from their families. Becoming a parent offers a unique life‐course opportunity for trauma recovery and preventing intergenerational trauma. However, identifying or ‘recognising’ complex trauma carries significant risk of harm for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents due to reactive prenatal child protection involvement potentially compounding experiences of trauma, and limited benefits due to lack of culturally appropriate support. The Aboriginal‐led participatory Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future project aims to co‐design safe, accessible and feasible perinatal awareness, recognition, assessment and support strategies for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents experiencing complex trauma. This paper presents views of 38 workshop participants to determine prerequisites for ensuring benefits outweigh risks of assessment to safely recognise parents experiencing complex trauma, consistent with screening criteria. Six essential elements were identified from thematic analysis: high‐quality holistic care; cultural, social and emotional safety; empowerment, choice and control; flexible person‐centred approaches; trusting relationships; and sensitive, skilled communication.Key Practitioner Messages The impacts of colonisation and rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait children in out‐of‐home care mean that there can be a myriad of issues facing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents with regard to perinatal child protection involvement. The benefits must outweigh the risks of identifying parents experiencing complex trauma. Assessment must be offered within foundations of supportive relationships and holistic care in culturally‐safe, empowering settings, where choices are respected and skilled communication approaches are used.

There and Back Again: A Commentary on Social Welfare Policy in the Wake of 2020

There and Back Again: A Commentary on Social Welfare Policy in the Wake of 2020

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Understanding the Australian Aboriginal experience of collective, historical and intergenerational trauma

This article provides a summary of the evolving definition of trauma, including different forms of trauma and its impact on the health, behaviours and well-being of individuals and communities. Specifically, it discusses collective, historical and intergenerational trauma and the value of these concepts in understanding the health and social challenges we see within colonized Indigenous communities, particularly within Australian Aboriginal communities. The article argues that the current approach to addressing challenges within Australian Indigenous communities will have limited impact unless accompanied by a significant focus on understanding and addressing the level of trauma that permeates these communities. Programmes and initiatives that focus on reducing the rates of certain variables, such as rates of infant mortality, rates of incarceration or rates of school completion, are very important but are only treating symptoms unless the underlying trauma is addressed. Due to the ongoing devastation caused by many years of forced child removal, this is especially important for health, legal and welfare practitioners within the child protection system and the social work field if we are to break the cycles of family and cultural disruption.

Yarning quiet ways: Aboriginal carers' views on talking to youth about sexuality and relationships.

Research suggests that young Indigenous people want carers to take a more active role in discussions about sexual health. The aim of this study was to ascertain carers' perspectives of: the importance of providing young people with information about sex and sexual health; what they want young people to know about sex and sexual health; and facilitators and barriers to discussing sex and sexual health with youth. Thirteen focus groups and three interviews were conducted with 81 carers in four rural and urban regions of Western Australia. Data were coded using a thematic approach, analysed using inductive Framework Analysis, and interpreted using the Aboriginal Family Wellbeing Model of Empowerment. Many participants recognised the need for talking with young people about sex, and said they drew upon resources such as books, pamphlets and television and used humour to impart lessons. However, a large proportion of participants reported difficulties in educating youth about sex. Participants noted that colonisation had disrupted traditional structures for educating young people, and that sex was a challenging topic. The forced removal of children had interfered with Indigenous family structures and deprived some participants of the opportunity to acquire knowledge and skills from their own parents. Our findings emphasise the potential role of culture and empowerment in further improving outcomes related to relationships and sexual health. There is a need for more research into models of culturally-empowering, family-centred strategies for improving the sexual literacy of Indigenous youth.

Benevolent Cruelty: Forced Child Removal, African Refugee Settlers, and the State Mandate of Child Protection

AbstractPractices of state‐mandated forced child removal in Australia have historically served to govern minority cultural groups. Despite an overarching imperative to prevent harm to children, contemporary systems of child welfare continue to impose forms of governance, particularly in regard to resettled refugees. This article focuses on the experiences of women who have been resettled in Australia as refugees from Africa, and who have, upon their resettlement, had their children forcibly removed from their care as a result of concerns over child protection. Examining how forms of governmentality are embedded within these interventions but legitimated by assumptions of benevolence, I show how the child welfare system can impose forms of pastoral power on resettled refugees, in which “care” for children is concentrated within institutions of government authority and, subsequently, oriented through state agendas. I argue that the state mandate of child protection combines governmentality and pastoral power to produce what I term benevolent cruelty, in which the imperative to protect children complicates and contradicts the refuge that is provided to resettled refugees.

Forced Childlessness and Ruptured Personhood: The Politics of Motherhood for Central African Refugee Women Resettled in Australia

This article explores the phenomenon of forced childlessness as a result of state interventions for child protection, with a focus on the ways in which such practices impact subjective experiences of motherhood. I draw on the case of an intervention by the child protection system in Australia, in which an African woman experienced the forced removal of her children after being resettled as a refugee. I analyze this experience not as the result of parental deficiency, but as the outcome of a disciplining imperative implied in the operations of the child welfare system and through which resettled refugees are governed as either "deserving" or "undeserving" of civic belonging. In the case study, the intervention of forced child removal results in an experience of what I term "ruptured" personhood: whereby intersections and contestations of motherhood as, concurrently, a social role, legal category, and affective experience, produce a situation in which a woman lives a paradoxical state of existence that she herself describes as being "dead." The case study compels a broader problematization of refugee resettlement and motherhood as domains in which contemporary forms of biopolitics are constituted and played out

Forced Child Removal and the Politics of National Apologies in Australia

Inquiries into the removal and mistreatment of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children, national regret, and national apologies constitute a congested political landscape in contemporary Australia. Within two years, two formal apologies were delivered by the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, to individuals who had suffered forced removal from family and consequent mistreatment as children. The first in February 2008 was the apology to the Indigenous Generations; the second in November 2009 was an apology to forced imperial child migrants, institutionalized children, and wards of the state, the so-called lost Innocents and Forgotten Australians. These apologies came as the culmination of over a decade of serial formal inquiries that saw at least five national-or state-level investigations into the past treatment of children, the results of concerted activism by the groups concerned. In the case of Indigenous activism around child removal, the roots run deep into the twentieth century. For former child migrants and institutionalized children, organized political activity has a shorter history and, as we have argued elsewhere, was enabled by and accelerated to a large degree by the ground prepared by the national inquiry of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) into the (2005-7), the tabling of its final report, Bringing Them Home, in 1997, the sustained controversy that accompanied the refusal over eleven years of the Liberal-Coalition prime minister, John Howard, to countenance an apology to Indigenous Australians, and the long-delayed apology to the of 2008. Across this congested landscape, the have cast a long shadow. Non-Indigenous groups with similar claims have rallied in response, often emulating the strategies of Indigenous activists and benchmarking their suffering against that of their Indigenous counterparts. In the period following the publication of Bringing Them Home in 1997 and more intensively since the formal apology to Indigenous Australians in February 2008, Australia has been witness to a number of groups and individuals pressing their claims for justice and apology by co-opting or alluding to the term Stolen Generations in their own claims. Thus, as documented in this article, both former child migrants and institutionalized children have referred to themselves as the other or the white Generations. Further, some non-Indigenous mothers agitating for justice for themselves and their children with respect to the forced removal of their children under past adoption regimes have rallied under the name of the Mothers of the White Generations.

Forced Child Removal and the Politics of National Apologies in Australia

Inquiries into the removal and mistreatment of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children, national regret, and national apologies constitute a congested political landscape in contemporary Australia. Within two years, two formal apologies were delivered by the prime minister, Kevin Rudd, to individuals who had suffered forced removal from family and consequent mistreatment as children. The first in February 2008 was the apology to the Indigenous Generations; the second in November 2009 was an apology to forced imperial child migrants, institutionalized children, and wards of the state, the so-called lost Innocents and Forgotten Australians. These apologies came as the culmination of over a decade of serial formal inquiries that saw at least five national-or state-level investigations into the past treatment of children, the results of concerted activism by the groups concerned. In the case of Indigenous activism around child removal, the roots run deep into the twentieth century. For former child migrants and institutionalized children, organized political activity has a shorter history and, as we have argued elsewhere, was enabled by and accelerated to a large degree by the ground prepared by the national inquiry of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) into the (2005-7), the tabling of its final report, Bringing Them Home, in 1997, the sustained controversy that accompanied the refusal over eleven years of the Liberal-Coalition prime minister, John Howard, to countenance an apology to Indigenous Australians, and the long-delayed apology to the of 2008. Across this congested landscape, the have cast a long shadow. Non-Indigenous groups with similar claims have rallied in response, often emulating the strategies of Indigenous activists and benchmarking their suffering against that of their Indigenous counterparts. In the period following the publication of Bringing Them Home in 1997 and more intensively since the formal apology to Indigenous Australians in February 2008, Australia has been witness to a number of groups and individuals pressing their claims for justice and apology by co-opting or alluding to the term Stolen Generations in their own claims. Thus, as documented in this article, both former child migrants and institutionalized children have referred to themselves as the other or the white Generations. Further, some non-Indigenous mothers agitating for justice for themselves and their children with respect to the forced removal of their children under past adoption regimes have rallied under the name of the Mothers of the White Generations.

Beyond Sorry — the first steps in laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians

The Prime Minister has issued a formal, unqualified apology to Australia's Indigenous peoples for past mistreatment, particularly for the sufferings of those who were affected by the forced removal of children from their families. The Apology needs to be seen as the first step in a reparations process that adheres to human rights principles, involves Australians at all levels, is sustainable and upholds self-determination. The Apology is the first of five steps recommended in Bringing them home: the report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families. Further steps are: guarantees against repetition, measures of restitution, measures of rehabilitation, and monetary compensation, but the Prime Minister has steadfastly refused to discuss reparations or compensation. Monetary compensation has been recognised internationally as an essential component in the redress for similar experiences of the forced removal of children. As long as the final steps in reparation remain unresolved, they will obstruct our pathway to a future that embraces all Australians.

Occupational deprivation: A consequence of Australia's policy of assimilation

Wilcock (2003) has recently reminded our profession of the importance of understanding the occupational experiences of the past, in order to recognise how historical events impact on the health of individuals and communities today. One area of Australia’s history we have found to be notably absent from occupational therapy and occupational science literature is that of the forced removal of indigenous children from their families. However, we believe this period of Australian history holds many lessons for our profession. Hence, within this paper we aim to give a brief overview of Australia’s policy of assimilation of indigenous Australians and how enactment of this policy deprived indigenous youth of engagement in culturally significant occupations. We argue that this lack of engagement of culturally significant occupations is a clear example of occupational deprivation. Whiteford (2000) describes occupational deprivation as ‘a state of preclusion from engagement in occupations of necessity and/or meaning due to factors that stand outside the immediate control of the individual’ (p. 201). Within this paper, we analyse how the forced removal of children from their families and communities, through the Commonwealth policy of assimilation, was indeed an external force of control that deprived indigenous children of culturally significant occupations. This paper outlines our analysis of three aspects of occupational deprivation we believe resulted from children being forcibly removed from their families. (i) in Deprivation of a culturally significant social environment, we discuss how indigenous children were denied access to their families, and consequently prevented from learning their cultures and their associated roles and occupations; (ii) in Spiritual deprivation of one’s land and story, we examine how children were prevented from engaging in occupations relating to the stories of their people, their land and their role within society (the Dreamings, the Dreamtime and/or the Dreaming); (iii) in Deprivation of initiation processes, we analyse how children were denied their rightful place in initiation processes, ceremonies, and occupations, leading to the preclusion of the establishment of culturally significant roles within their community. We will examine evidence of these significant forms of occupational deprivation in an attempt to gain some insight into an area of occupational justice which, so far, has been left untouched within occupational therapy literature.

Stolen Children, Invisible Mothers and Unspeakable Stories: The Experiences of Non-Aboriginal Adoptive and Foster Mothers of Aboriginal Children

One of the measures of the cultural, if not political, success of sustained Aboriginal activism on the issue of the forced removal of children from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, leading up to the instigation of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's inquiry into the issue and the widely disseminated publication of its findings in 1997, is that it now appears nearly impossible to tell the story of indigenous child removal in terms other than those provided by the powerful Aboriginalised tropes and narrative modes that have come to shape both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal understandings of issue. I do not wish to take issue with the long-overdue emergence of Aboriginal voices and an Aboriginal discourse on this issue. However, as the older ways of understanding the meaning of removing indigenous children from their communities ‘for their own good’ (Link-Up & Wilson 1997) have lost their provenance and are replaced by Aboriginal stories with the critically revised meanings of cultural loss, ethnocide, grief and harm, which are expressed in a wide range of discourses (see, for example, Ward 1988; Edwards & Read 1989; Roach 1990; Huggins & Huggins 1994; Smallacombe 1996; Harrison 1997), it becomes apparent that there are still more stories to be told about how Australian's high assimilationist policies of forced child removal and placement played out on the lives of the men, women and children of the nation. From a (non-Aboriginal) feminist perspective, a particular case in point is the stories of the non-Aboriginal women who, both knowingly and unknowingly, came to adopt and foster these children, raising them as their own−a task in which many have been engaged for upwards of 30 or 40 years. These women, who must on any estimate number in their thousands across the nation, remain all but invisible in both the former and now discredited accounts of indigenous child removal and placement, and in more recent Aboriginal revisions of this appalling history. This paper presents preliminary analysis of research undertaken with a small group of these women in 1997 and 1998.

The `Stolen Generations' and Cultural Genocide

From around the turn of 20th century up to the 1970s, Australian government authorities assumed legal guardianship of all Indigenous children and removed large numbers of them from their families in order to `assimilate' them into European society and culture. This policy has been described as `cultural genocide', even though at the time it was presented by state and church authorities as being `in the best interests' of Aboriginal children. This article outlines the results of a study of the development of the policy of forced child removal, its antecedents, its surrounding philosophy and politics and the emergence of a more critical understanding of it in recent years, as well as examining the more general implications of this history for the sociology of childhood.