At last count by the Family Matters campaign, well over 20,000 Indigneous children were in out-of-home care. That compares with just over 9,000 the year before Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology.
Indigenous children are 10 times more likely to be in care than their non-Indigenous peers, says Professor Larissa Behrendt, Professor of Law at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). They account for nearly 40 per cent of children in care today, despite representing just 5.5 per cent of the total population of children in Australia.
Researchers from the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research at UTS, which Professor Behrendt leads, have been investigating the contemporary, large-scale removal of children by child protection agencies since 2012.
The institute, through its work with communities, had started to see an exponential rise in the number of people challenging removals by child protection agencies. This included challenges from grandparents who weren’t being accepted as alternative carers.
It prompted a multi-pronged approach by the Institute, to research what was happening, to bring the practice to the attention of the public, to support families and community groups fighting unwarranted removals, and to drive policy change.
“I felt many Australians wouldn’t realise this was the case,” Professor Larissa Behrendt, a Eualeyai/Kamillaroi woman, says of the scale of removals. “They’d assume we’d had an apology and that this was an issue in now the past.”
In fact, in 2013 Jumbunna researcher Padraic Gibson was able to show, through original archival research, that there were far more Aboriginal children being removed than at any time in Australia’s history – including the period of the Stolen Generations. The numbers removed had increased five-fold since the Bringing Them Home report in 1997, he found.
Professor Behrendt, Gibson and Jumbunna’s Head of Legal Strategies, Craig Longman, began providing direct research and legal support to families in the Northern Territory, where Gibson was then based, and in New South Wales.
“This advocacy – involving intensive research assistance to lawyers representing the families in the Children’s Court, and direct representations to child protection workers and their managers – ensured at least some children were safely returned to their families,” says Gibson.
Between 2014 and 2019 at least 15 children were successfully returned to their families because of the direct advocacy of Jumbunna researchers.
The team also connected with Grandmothers against Removals (GMAR), a network of Aboriginal families directly affected by the child removal crisis that emerged at about the same time as Jumbunna started focusing on this work.
Jumbunna assisted GMAR with funding, resources, research support and media outreach as it grew into a national network. Together, they worked on public events such as conferences, demonstrations and skill-sharing workshops.
As a result, the issue of contemporary forced removal of Indigenous children was discussed in the Federal Parliament and most state parliaments, including a number of formal inquiries where Jumbunna either presented or supported GMAR to present.
In New South Wales, GMAR was able to negotiate a set of ‘guiding principles’ with Family and Community Services (FACS) which provided for far more consultation with Indigenous communities.
The collaboration between Jumbunna and GMAR culminated in After the Apology, a feature-length film written and directed by Professor Behrendt documenting the work of GMAR. The film showcased a number of the cases Jumbunna had worked on since 2012, and it received critical acclaim when it premiered at the 2017 Adelaide Film Festival.
‘Impact screenings’ of the film, which attracted senior politicians, were held at the Federal Parliament and in a number of state parliaments throughout 2018. Screenings have also been held for senior and front-line staff in child protection and related agencies.
“Dozens of community organisations and concerned citizens have also organised local screenings with the assistance of Jumbunna, bringing people together to reflect on the current crisis and begin a discussion about steps people can take to bring about change,” Gibson says.
Gibson believes the work of Jumbunna and groups like GMAR has achieved a shift in the public position of the child protection agency and New South Wales Government, with the Minister and the department publicly expressing pride in a 35 per cent reduction in the number of Indigenous children brought into out-of-home care in 2017–18, compared with two years earlier. Previously they had been defending the practice.
But the work is not over. The problem is ‘still very acute’, he says, and in New South Wales it will be compounded by new laws making it easier to adopt children from the child protection system – shutting the door on restoring those children to their families.
A report commissioned by the New South Wales Government in 2015 in response to GMAR’s advocacy and growing concern across the Aboriginal child welfare sector, has made 125 recommendations to overhaul the way Aboriginal families are treated by the care system. Among them is a call for a ban on adopting Aboriginal children who are in out-of-home care.
The report, released in November 2019, found ‘widespread non-compliance’ with laws and policies, to the extent of false and misleading evidence being given in court.
The New South Wales Government has said it will respond to the report in the first half of 2020.
Research team
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Distinguished Professor and Director, Research and Academic Programs, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research -
Senior Researcher, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research
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Deputy Director and Senior Researcher, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research
