The past year has seen calls to make amends to the victims of three kinds of state or church initiated child separation. The most publicised separations, of course, have been the "stolen generations" -- the Aboriginal children taken from their families and raised in institutions, or by non-Aboriginal families.
But many people have also become aware of two other forms of child separation, the British "child migrants" to Australia; and the "lost babies", the children of single mothers who were coerced into giving up their new-born infants for adoption.
Knowledge of the child migration schemes became widespread in the early 1990s, through television programs such as Lost Children of the Empire. Starting in the latter decades of the last century, tens of thousands of British children were sent to Australia -- and Canada -- by charitable organisations.
The overwhelming majority of the children who came to Australia arrived in the period from the 1920s till the mid-1960s, and many were sent without their parents' consent. Often, they were falsely told that they were orphans, or that they had been abandoned by families who did not love them. But they had usually been placed in the care of the charities because their single parents had been unable to cope, or because of family breakdown.
As with the forcible removal of Aboriginal children, voices were raised against the child migration schemes from the beginning. But they were also defended by people dedicated to social justice, who believed that the children were getting a wonderful "new start in a new land".
However for many the reality was horribly different. Although ultimate legal responsibility rested with the state, the actual care of the children was in the hands of three dozen religious and charitable organisations. Some appear to have looked after their charges reasonably well. Others were houses of horror, where children were sexually assaulted and otherwise brutalised.
Late last month, seven British parliamentarians visited Australia to interview former child migrants, as part of an inquiry set up to recommend an appropriate response. As well as hearing terrible accounts of abuse, the MPs were told tragic stories of former child migrants attempting to find lost relatives, and discovering too late that parents and siblings had similarly sought to trace their whereabouts before they had died.
In NSW, an inquiry is now underway into the third kind of separation, the "lost babies", and Queensland may also establish one soon. Groups representing relinquishing mothers claim that in their zeal to obtain infants for adoption, social workers used shameful, and even illegal methods. They say women were physically prevented from seeing their babies, deliberately deceived about the alternatives to adoption, and made to sign consent forms under the influence of psychotropic drugs.
The three forms of child removal had much in common, despite attempts by "stolen generations" advocates to minimise the similarities in order to sustain their absurd "genocide" claim. All involved many cases where the authorities were callously indifferent to the human rights and feelings of the vulnerable and powerless people they were dealing with, and where laws were broken with impunity. Children were betrayed by those who were supposed to look after them. Many people had their lives shattered, both the children who were taken and the parents who lost them.
Nevertheless, nowadays there is a common tendency to over-sully the past. It is easy to forget that we are usually talking about reasonably decent people who were faced with difficult and painful decisions about human lives, and who had to act in terms of the only options that seemed appropriate at the time.
As a consequence, a further category of devastated individuals is emerging, made up of adopting and fostering parents, as well as other people involved with separated children. These people feel condemned for actions which they had believed were unselfish and humane, but which are now equated with "crimes against humanity" -- at least in the case of the Aboriginal separations.
Formal inquiries may increase the tendency to concentrate on the failures and wrongs of past practices, and to downplay or ignore cases where individuals believe that separation probably made their lives better than they otherwise would have been. This is partly because people who feel aggrieved are usually much more motivated to participate in such inquiries than those who are fairly content with their lives.
But the people conducting an inquiry may also feel under pressure to shy away from findings that could suggest that the grounds for establishing the inquiry were not as strong as they might have seemed initially.
A good example comes from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. When its criminology unit found that the death rate of Aborigines in custody was no different from the rate for non-Aborigines, many working in the royal commission saw this as a betrayal which undermined the whole purpose of the inquiry.
And the criminology unit's really shattering discovery, that offending Aborigines who had been given non-custodial sentences were twice as likely to die as those who were in prison custody, was virtually ignored. It was hidden away, without comment, in just two sentences of the 2,000 pages of the Royal Commission's National Report.
Certainly, some good can come out of inquiries into past child separations. They may result in additional resources being made available to help people find and make contact with lost relatives. Such assistance, together with a public acknowledgement that wrongs were done, may go a long way towards requiting the suffering of victims.
But the really valuable lessons that the past could offer are seldom drawn. If people who were once convinced that they were acting virtuously could be so blind to the abuses we now know were occurring, we should also consider whether the favoured nostrums of today's social engineers are just as destructive of the human rights of defenceless individuals. But the self-righteous elites of the present are no more prepared to listen to dissenting voices than were the people they condemn from the past.
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