The abuse of innocence

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.