In early 2008, Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologised to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous children stripped of their connection to family, community and country. Sadly, ten years later in 2018 the number of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in care had doubled. Lacking ways to enact the intentions of the apology, child ‘protection’ systems across the country have continued apace with the practice of removal.
In 2017, the then-Department of Child Protection and Family Support commissioned Dr Tracy Westerman, an Indigenous West Australian psychologist to do a comprehensive review the cultural competency of the West Australia child protection agency. The report was completed in 2019 and submitted to the now-renamed Department of Communities. Westerman’s review included individual interviews and many focus groups with hundreds of staff including the majority of Indigenous staff (who make up about 5% of Communities’ workforce). Communities decided to not make the report public, though Dr Westerman continually requested very publicly that the report be released through interviews on many media and making many assertions of systemic racism.
In August 2021, the Australian Prime Minister reviewed the Close the Gap targets set by all levels of government across Australia to focus the country on equity and justice for Indigenous Australian Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. The Prime Minister announced the fact that in the main very little has changed and there has been significant worsening in areas like deaths in custody. By contrast, over the past three years Elia has been involved in a whole system child protection transformation in the Northern Territory that has seen a reduction of over 10 percent of Indigenous kids in care alongside a halving of the renotification rates from 16 to 8 percent. This is the first time since the early 1990s when nationally comparable data began to be gathered in Australia that any state or territory has seen any multi-year decrease in children in care.
The What Works Centre for children’s social care recently released a systematic review of the Signs of Safety (WWC 2018), a summary of which was published in Community Care on November 15. In this short paper, Andrew Turnell, Eileen Munro and Terry Murphy offer a brief response to the review.
We want to thank the What Works Centre (WWC) and Cardiff University’s Cascade team for their intelligent and nuanced mixed methods review which provides a balanced, valuable summary and critique of the published evidence that supports the Signs of Safety.
The over-developed, over-commodified, colonising rich world is playing out its shadow side and desire to feel good about itself in orphanages across the developing world. Well-meaning people like ourselves through our desire to make a difference in an unjust, polarised world get suckered into the idea we can somehow do good by funding and supporting institutions that seem to rescue the poorest children in the poorest countries. It’s a ruse. It’s a story about us not about them and it decimates traditional cultures and traditional ways of care in the poorest countries.
In early 2008, Australia’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologised to the Stolen Generations of Indigenous children stripped of their connection to family, community and country. Sadly, ten years later in 2018 the number of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in care had doubled. Lacking ways to enact the intentions of the apology, child ‘protection’ systems across the country have continued apace with the practice of removal.
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