Ideas@TheCentre
Is preventing ‘another stolen generation’ racist?
Until a decade or so ago, members of the media shied away from detailing the problems in Aboriginal communities, lest they were accused of cultivating ‘racist’ stereotypes.
That an ABC journalist (no less) would ask a Coalition minister why the state government hadn’t intervened in Toomelah in Far North NSW and introduced a John Howard-style ‘emergency plan’ to fix the policing, drink, crime and child abuse problems besetting the community shows how far the debate about Aboriginal Australia has come.
Leigh Sales was also prepared to ask the hard question whether governments are afraid to remove Aboriginal children from hell-holes like Toomelah ‘for fear of being accused of racism, and given what we saw happen with the Stolen Generation?’
The conservative commentator Andrew Bolt has often suggested that the misplaced fear of creating another Stolen Generation is impeding the proper protection of Aboriginal children.
This maybe so, but I think the situation is more complex.
Since the 1970s, child protection authorities have favoured ‘family preservation’ and have removed children – white or black – only as a last resort.
The Stolen Generation issue only came to prominence in the mid-1990s, by which time the current anti-removal practices were already the norm.
The publicity generated by the 1996 ‘Bringing Them Home’ report has probably increased sensitivities and reinforced the reluctance to separate Aboriginal families.
However, the major impact has been on what happens to Aboriginal children who are eventually removed from their families. These days, these children are more likely to enter 'kinship care' and reside with a relative or another community member.
This is called the ‘Aboriginal Placement Principle’ and is designed to balance safety and cultural concerns by ensuring Aboriginal children who cannot remain safely at home have ongoing contact with their heritage.
Sounds fine in theory. But a number of official reports suggest that Aboriginal children are placed in inappropriate and dangerous situations because – in the rush not to repeat past racist errors – the suitability of kinship carers is overlooked.
By putting culture before safety, children are being removed from the frypan of family dysfunction to the fire of extended family and community dysfunction.
We do not know how big a problem this is because of the lack of research on the outcomes for children in kinship care. But the idea that Aboriginal children end up in placements that fail to meet basic standards, and receive ‘a lesser standard of care than non-Aboriginal children,’ is certainly alarming.
If this is happening, then the anti-racist determination to prevent ‘another Stolen Generation’ is promoting perverse and essentially racist outcomes. Black and white children are being treated differently based on the colour of their skin.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
