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The abuse of innocence

By Stephen Hagan - posted Tuesday, 5 August 2008


Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900) Irish playwright, novelist, poet and author of short stories once said: “Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.”

In the past 12 months I’ve received numerous calls from distressed mothers expressing outrage at having a child or children removed from their care.

I’m not a social worker, nor do I have any experience in this field and I express this fact to the trembling voices - some I know, most I don’t - on the other end of the phone. I guess to them it is a definitive cry for help to a familiar face. One they see in the newspapers or on television, who advocates on their behalf as Indigenous people, on a range of issues.

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What they don’t know, or chose not to be concerned with, is that I neither have the practical knowledge or expertise to provide the quality advice they seek. Certainly, I refer them on to the authorities who might, or should be in a position to, assist but after further discussion on their particular circumstance I often discover they’ve exhausted all avenues with welfare officialdom previously.

And obviously to no avail.

So why not blame the public servants for their pain and suffering? I don’t doubt that there would be many instances of blatant misuse of power by them precipitated by false accusations of child neglect from meddlesome neighbours or disgruntled ex-partners and their families.

But, as critical as I have been of the ineptness of some public servants in the performance of their duties over the years, I suspect in the majority of cases of child removal they have erred on the side of caution.

The decision to strategically remove children when they are on their way home from school or from their homes, with the apparent muscle of police standing guard, in most cases have been validated in the courts after public servants claimed there was neglect on the part of the parent or parents.

Sadly, it’s become an art form - for those who find themselves in the predicament of having children removed from their care - to blame others instead of being honest about their own shortcomings: an addiction to alcohol, illicit drugs, gambling or an unhealthy infatuation of another man in their lives to the detriment of their children.

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The cocktail of these noxious social activities will, more often than not, culminate in excessive domestic violence at home where paper thin walls leave nothing to the imagination of defenceless younger occupants. Regrettably these acts of domestic violence are witnessed time and again by tender eyes whose innocence was lost on the first sound and/or sighting of the vicious blow to the head of their mother.

Dysfunction generally takes hold when initial love and infatuation by the mother turns to fear of the male aggressor, more often than not a figure who is not the biological father of her children, and all her energy and resources are surrendered to him to her offspring’s disadvantage. The end result of submitting to a deadbeat partner and/or a social addiction is a shortage of food in the cupboards, school uniforms in disrepair, less affection displayed to children, house becomes unkempt and overall mental and physical health of mother and children spiral in an unhealthy decline.

So, when one or both adults of the house have had their fill of alcohol and drugs and the arguing and fighting starts, children in the unsafe home know they will have to fend for themselves the best way they can.

Bigger kids might be fortunate enough to be able to escape the violence through the window or back door to occupy the balance of the night on the streets with other children from similar backgrounds. Or those too young to leave the house and who have access to earphones for IPods or stereos will avail themselves of some respite from the turmoil engulfing the house by turning up the volume for the rest of the night and praying that no uninvited guests attempt to enter their room during the night.

The poor kids who don’t have earphones and can’t escape through secured windows or doors have to endure another emotionally draining night of listening to, and in some cases, witnessing, the savagery of violence being directed at their defenceless mother.

And before you know it the “poor bugger me” tune is played by the mother after her child is taken, for his or her own protection from her care, by public servants.

“The bastards took my children on their way home from school and I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye,” and “… they just walked into the house with police and took the kids”.

You’d be a pretty cold type of person not to have any empathy for the plight of mothers after hearing such stories of children being removed from their care.

As parents it is incomprehensible for my wife and me to think of a situation in which we would find ourselves standing helplessly by while one or both of our young children are forcefully removed from our care.

The scene in the award winning film Rabbit Proof Fence set in Jigalong, Western Australia, in 1931 when Molly Craig (14) and her half sister Daisy (8) and cousin Grace Fields are forcefully taken by police from their mother and guardian to Moore River Native Settlement, is an image I will always remember, especially when the topic of child removal is discussed.

And I guess this is where the problems begin and end for most Australians as they try to come to grips with the causal affects of child removal. For most Australians, who have no personal experience of child removal, their knowledge on this subject is acquired from films like Rabbit Proof Fence and snippets of news read on the background to the Prime Ministers national apology address in federal parliament this year.

And when the recent news headlines of negligent parents being arrested in Ipswich after their twin babies were found dead in their cot, the murder-suicide of three children by their father in Eden and of children taken in Adelaide and Canberra from overcrowded households where children lived in abject filth that experts say was not fit for human occupation, we all shake our heads and try to find a plausible argument of why things got so out of hand.

I’m not suggesting the parents of children identified in these well publicised stories are Indigenous but simply make mention of the fact that parental neglect of children is not a specific disease afforded people on the grounds of their colour, ethnicity, religion or marital status.

Removal of Aboriginal children from their parents was formally recognised through the Aborigines Protection Act that was first introduced in Victoria in 1869 and was followed 17 years later in Western Australia in 1886. These acts gave the right under certain conditions for the removal of children from their families.

However, many in government and the public service back then sought more liberal, unfettered powers to be able to take children at will from Aboriginal families.

The Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 (Qld) was the first statute that provided comprehensive legislative power to public servants to exercise discriminatory practices without challenge. It didn’t take long for other states to follow suit as the appeal of removing Aboriginal children without challenge was too great an opportunity to pass up.

I shudder at the very thought of public servants having such unfettered rights back in 1897 to remove Aboriginal children at will from their parents. However, I am even more concerned today that removing children has reached such alarming levels that governments nation wide are seeking to provide more rights to public servants to perform their thankless job.

HREOC’s 2002 Bringing Them Home Report identified about one in 12 (8 per cent) Indigenous Australians aged 15 years or over reported having been personally removed from their natural family. A further 29 per cent reported having relatives who were removed from their family when they were children. The most frequently reported relatives removed were grandparents (15 per cent), aunts or uncles (11 per cent) and parents (9 per cent).

If the trend is intergenerational, as reports suggest, then what is the answer to solving this over representation of Indigenous children in foster care?

I support the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC) who advocates the following strategies to address the child welfare;

  • healing for victims and perpetrators of family violence and child abuse;
  • education for victims and perpetrators;
  • education in protective behaviour for very young children to lessen the chance of them becoming victims;
  • more education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, including those in remote communities, in sexual health, protective behaviour, life choices, rights, self esteem and parenting training;
  • empowering community leaders who are trusted and respected in their own communities to help with healing and education; and
  • programs addressing familial sexual abuse with elements to address the needs of the victim, the other children in the family, the non-abusive parent and the abusing parent.

It takes a community to raise a child but sadly with the escalation in numbers of Indigenous children being removed from their parents it would appear that many within our communities are not pulling their weight in looking out for children at risk.

We all need to be vigilant and not be frightened to report to police obvious signs of child neglect: patterns of late night partying, domestic violence, unkempt children, excessively untidy households; high grass, washing on the line for days on end, empty car bodies and an accumulation of rubbish and beer bottles littering the yard, to name a few.

But above all parents ought to do more to protect their children by kicking their alcohol, drug or gambling habits and by insisting their partners address their habits or be brave enough to give them their marching orders.

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About the Author

Stephen Hagan is Editor of the National Indigenous Times, award winning author, film maker and 2006 NAIDOC Person of the Year.

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