Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains mentions of deceased persons. Warning: this article mentions suicide.
Tragic. Harrowing. Unforgivable. These are some of the strongest words to describe the devastating suicide of a 10-year-old Aboriginal boy in Western Australia last week. But despite their potency, they still fall short.
The parents of this little boy have spoken of a grief that cannot be described. They have spoken about the eight-month wait to hold their miracle. How his Christmas presents patiently await his return. They have reflected on his intelligence and infectious presence. And how, despite their best efforts, their reunification was at a morgue.
This child was loved and adored. Not by the state, but by his family. Yet he remained in the custody of the state and was denied the care of his family. In the purest years of his life, this little boy was denied the unbridled freedom that he deserved.
Since this child entered the dreaming, the media have continued to propagate that the boy was in “child protection” and “under care”. These are weasel words and an outright denial of reality.
The removal and institutionalisation of Aboriginal children is anchored in eugenics. The wholesale theft and trafficking of Aboriginal children always was and always will be about the total elimination of our societies.
This regime of child removals predates Federation. Victoria was the first state to authorise child removals in the 1860s. States and territories franchised the policies in the years following. And upon Federation, the federal government replicated its own suite of laws designed to materialise the white Australia it had always envisioned.
Over the ensuing years, conservative estimates believe that more than 100,000 Aboriginal children were systematically stripped from the families, communities and cultures that had been successfully rearing children since the first human sunrise.
In some families, children from three or more generations were taken. They were trafficked out to non-Indigenous families, nationally and internationally. Every effort was taken by the state to ensure that cultural, spiritual and family ties were severed beyond repair. Despite the best efforts, most children never made it back home. Families are still reconnecting today; many will never reunify.
We aptly remember these people and their families as the Stolen Generation. The language is accurate: the children were stolen. The abuses that they were subjected to were depraved. Of course, this was just one policy instrument in a wider regime. It sat alongside forced displacement, the violent exploitation of homelands, forced labour, indentured servitude and mass incarceration. And it preceded (while also sitting alongside) mass killings, sexual violence and the spread of disease and illness.
When I was a kid, my father would tell me, “If you break something, then you fix it.” Of course, there’s been no endeavour to fix anything. There has been no commensurate redress. But there has been a solemn commitment to break what’s been broken, again… and again… and again.
It is within this context that today’s “child protection” system must be seen as the antithesis of care and protection. Its function is to merely surveil, punish and perpetuate the material circumstances that our communities have been indentured into. They are an extension of practices that should’ve been eliminated.
This is why our children, despite only accounting for 6% of the child population, account for 43.7% of children aged 0-17 institutionalised in out-of-home “care”. That’s more than 25,000 children stolen from their community, Country and kin.
A recent South Australian inquiry heard of children being taken from their mothers at birth before they even had the chance to hold them. Other mothers are coerced to go outside and have a cigarette. Upon return, they learn that their child has been taken. In a world that is so incomprehensibly violent, that is definitively one of the most obscenely inhumane acts I have ever heard. Yet, that is somehow deemed as “care”?
Many of these kids are stolen from their parents because they are impoverished. They are penalised for the cards that they’ve been dealt and punished for not picking themselves up by their bootstraps. Remarkably, the state will often remove these children from their families because they are poor, only to then pay another (often non-Indigenous) family to raise them. Or, they will remove a child because they deem their environment unsafe, only to transfer them into another, worse environment.
In 2018, a young Aboriginal girl told me that being in a foster home feels like she’s living with a “dog collar” permanently around her neck. I’ll never forget the clarity of these words or the sincerity with which she said them.
Less than a month ago, I came across a young man in the car park of a local shopping centre. He was sitting in the rain, bawling his eyes out. He was completely defeated. It was just after 7.30am and countless other cars had already passed by before me. Nobody had stopped to check in on his welfare. I sat down in the rain with him. He told me that he had run away from his foster home because he was “tired of the abuse”.
As we went into the shopping complex to get some breakfast, he spoke about the irony of his “carers not caring”. He told me that he planned on running away to Sydney in the coming weeks. Whether it was purely self-expression or not, I couldn’t help but notice that he was wearing a studded collar around his neck.
In the wake of the 10-year-old boy’s death, the Western Australian minister for child protection says that the removal of children is a “last resort”. But through the lived testimonies and findings of countless reports, we know that removing children is the first and only option; especially when addressing the underlying ruptures and dislocations that our communities face isn’t on the table.
As we grapple with the preventable suicide of this 10-year-old child, we must also confront the reality that government agencies and departments are engaged in a regime of wholesale theft and trafficking; not “protection” or “care”.
For anyone seeking help, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636. To speak to a First Nations crisis supporter, call 13 YARN (13 9276). In an emergency, call 000.
