Media Releases
National apology must lift taboo on adoption
Child protection policies endanger children by failing to remove them from unfit parents – and the forthcoming national apology for forced adoption could make the situation worse.
The trauma of forced adoption will be rightly acknowledged in Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s national apology on Thursday (21 March), but the federal parliament should also use the apology to exercise national leadership on child protection issues, according to a new report from The Centre for Independent Studies.
The Gillard government and the opposition should endorse the use of adoption to halt the growing scourge of child abuse and neglect, finds Jeremy Sammut in The Fraught Politics of Saying Sorry for Forced Adoption: Implications for Child Protection Policy in Australia.
‘We must face the fact that rates of child maltreatment have spiralled because increasing numbers of parents are incapable of properly parenting their children, which ironically, is partly due to the social changes that help end forced adoption,’ says Dr Sammut.
‘The establishment of the single mothers benefit by the Whitlam government in 1973 has led to single-mother families being over-represented in child abuse and neglect cases at more than twice the expected rate.’
‘In reaction to past forced adoption practices, Australian child protection authorities believe in family preservation at nearly all costs, which profoundly harms children by prolonging the time they spend in the custody of abusive or neglectful parents, or in temporary foster care.’
‘Federal MPs and senators, under the influence of the strong anti-adoption movement, are in danger of endorsing the mistaken idea that we should “never again” remove children from even highly dysfunctional parents, because this is akin to the forced adoption practices of the ’50s-’70s.’
If Australia had the adoption-friendly practices of, for example, the United States, 5,000 children could be adopted each year. Yet in 2010–11, fewer than 200 children were adopted, despite more than 37,000 children being in government-funded care placements, and more than 25,000 of these children languishing in care for more than two years.
‘The under-responding to child maltreatment in Australia should be scrutinised as part of the national apology,’ argues Dr Sammut.
‘Permanently removing children from unsafe homes into suitable adoptive families should be supported so that the current toxic approach to child welfare becomes history.’
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
The CIS Issue Analysis, The Fraught Politics of Saying Sorry for Forced Adoption: Implications for Child Protection Policy in Australia, released on 19 March, is available at the CIS website.
Dr Sammut discusses the findings of the report in this YouTube video.
All media enquiries: Aimee Cornelius
Mobile: 0411 759 934
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Twitter: @cisoz
