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Almost a month has passed since the now infamous Sunrise segment where an all-white panel claimed there is a “conspiracy of silence” around the abuse of Aboriginal children.
Despite incessant media attention on Aboriginal child safety in the time since, this baseless claim continues to be repeated. It begs the question: what have these people been listening to? Have we not been having the same conversation?
Whether it’s a national article sledging a tiny outback town, or a federal parliamentarian criticising a major event for being “too Aboriginal”, we’re used to defending ourselves against insults in the public arena.
But the past month has taken a toll. To be accused of not just allowing, but enabling the abuse of our own children is on a whole other level. To care for our children is one of the most fundamental human instincts. To suggest that Aboriginal people as a whole are somehow immune to that instinct is to deny our humanity.
And it’s to deny the life’s work of dozens of Aboriginal people who advocate tirelessly to improve the child protection system for our kids. There’s AbSec, the organisation I lead in New South Wales, which provides an Aboriginal perspective on policy in the NSW child protection and out-of-home care system. Nationally there’s SNAICC, the organisational voice for Aboriginal children and young people; and in Queensland there’s QATSICPP. And who can accuse the determined women of Grandmothers Against Removals of perpetuating a so-called conspiracy of silence?
We are all talking, and we have been for years. Our people talked to the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families in the 1990s, opening raw wounds to speak of their own experiences of being torn from their families, in the hope it might prevent such a horror from ever occurring again.
That led to the Bringing Them Home report in 1997, which made 54 recommendations to promote healing and prevent the repetition of further stolen generations. This was to be achieved through putting Aboriginal people in the lead, resourcing us to design our own approaches to the wellbeing of our children and young people. It’s something we’re still arguing for, 20 years later.
As the Healing Foundation reports: “there has never been a collaborative and systematic attempt to address the recommendations the report made. Most have never been implemented.”
It took another 10 years after the report just to get a formal government apology to the stolen generations (the subject of one of the recommendations). As much as prime minister Kevin Rudd’s words were eloquent, they were ultimately meaningless; the number of Aboriginal children in out-of-home care has more than doubled since his apology.
That brings us to where we are now: with well over 17,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children currently removed from their homes by statutory authorities. Modelling by the Family Matters campaign shows that this number will more than triple by 2036 if we keep doing things the same way.
That’s why we need to do them differently. Severing Aboriginal children from their families is not a new solution, and it has demonstrably failed. The Family Matters campaign (which includes AbSec and the other Aboriginal children’s peak bodies) proposes four building blocks to pave the way forward:
In NSW, AbSec works alongside the state government to articulate how we can put these building blocks into practice. We’ve just co-designed an Aboriginal case management policy, with input from Aboriginal communities across the state, to guide how the child protection system should interact with our kids. We look forward to seeing the policy take effect.
Neither myself nor any of my colleagues wish to see Aboriginal children kept in unsafe homes. We respect that the statutory child protection system has a role to play in removing kids from unsafe environments, and where this is necessary, we work with the system to ensure kids removed from home retain the connections to their community and culture which help form their identity.
Rather, we want to see greater focus on early intervention and family support. Why can’t the system work with our families, rather than against them? Why should it be that less than $1 in every $5 of child protection funding is invested in support services for children and their families? And how can we expect anything to change if we do not support parents, only punish them after they have reached breaking point under the stresses of poverty and intergenerational trauma?
These are the vital discussions we have every day in Aboriginal organisations and communities. It’s a conversation we’re committed to, that’s been going on for decades.
There’s no conspiracy of silence. If you don’t hear us, it means you’re not listening.
By Tim Ireland
11 April 2018
