Aboriginal Children Research Paper

t h e s t o l e n g e n e r a t i o n

Amid 1910 and 1970 up to 100,000 Aboriginal children were taken forcibly or under compulsion from their families by police or welfare officers. A number of these children were taken at birth and in their childhood years. The babies and children were sent either to ‘special intention' establishments or in later years especially, to foster homes. In a small amount of instances mothers or families knew where their children had been taken and were able to maintain some progressing relationship with them. In other occasions they had no idea of the whereabouts of their babies or children who had been taken from them. In some cases within the institutions and the foster homes the children were treated well,
This gave Aboriginal protectors responsibility privileges over Aboriginal people up to the age of sixteen or twenty-one. In all states and territories, policemen or other agents of the state, began to locate and transfer babies and children of mixed descent, from their mothers or families or communities into institutions. In these Australian states and territories, half-caste institutions, government or missionary, were established in the early decades of the twentieth-century for the treatment of these separated half-caste children. These children were separated permanently from family and they were taught to despise their Aboriginal inheritance. If they were brought up without the knowledge of that inheritance, they were sent to work as domestic servants or station hands in the hope that they would eventually merge into European society and marry out. If they were sent to foster homes, the knowledge of their Aboriginality was deprived. Many of the Aboriginal children that were sent away to either the institutions or foster homes experienced sexual abuse, as well as poor living conditions. It is viewed today that this was done, not as a social welfare measure, but as an attempt to break the cultural connection between the children of mixed descent and their Aboriginal families and cultures; to drag the children out of the world of the native settlements and camps and prepare them for a place in the lower branch of European