The justification seems to be to avoid abuse.
This is one of the taboo subjects on the whole “Stolen generations” issue: what was the alternative.
We’ve seen recently what happens when governments refuse to remove Aboriginal children from their families: communities where 25% of children under 12 have been raped, 50% are clinically malnourished, 75% have chronic, untreated health problems etc. And everyone wrung their hands and cried about how tragic it was.
That was what the removal of at-risk children, of any race, was all about. So what exactly was the alternative? Are the rates of child abuse that we’ve seen uncovered in recent years a better alternative?
Or perhaps you think the parents should have been punished. But how? You can;t fine a person who has no money and no possessions. If they were jailed then the children would still have been removed. And getting convictions against Aborigines within communities has always been notoriously difficult, because getting reliable testimony is almost impossible.
Which is why simply being Aboriginal was deemed to be sufficient grounds for declaring a child at risk. It circumvented the problem of being unable to obtain to gain a court finding even in the most blatant cases of abuse. While I don’t think that removing Aborigines’ right to a trial was just or even a great idea, it becomes, once again, a question of what the alternative was. If the authorities were forced to get a court finding that children were at risk they would never have been able to remove children even in cases where they were being pimped by their parents. And so the situation that we see today would have prevailed.
This is what I find most frustrating about the whole issue. The same people wringing their hands of the “Stolen Generation” are the ones crying most loudly that the state hasn’t doing enough to protect Aboriginal children from abusive communities.
I have no knowledge of Taylor or his work and no interest or motivation in defending him or it. However, on reading the quoted sentence it could be that taken in context, what he means is that he somehow extrapolates or interprets or infers his conclusion about the past from studying present day aborigines, not that his conclusion can simply be seen in present day aborigines directly.
I do know if I had been born and raised in a typical South African Aborigine community (of the few that remain), I, too, would have wanted to be taken away. Those places are hellholes of alcoholism, woman and child abuse, violence (often drunken violence and crimes of passion), theft and just general neglect. Going to work on some sheep farm or in a factory where you’re fed properly, where someone actually comes and checks up on your welfare every now and then (I assume apprentices weren’t just placed and left), where you learn more than just how to sit around and beat your woman? That’s worth being taken away from some nebulous “culture” that’s so degraded and ignored it isn’t even worthy of the name.
Now, I’d feel different about kids being taken away (against their will) from *viable *traditional groups, of which there are still a very few here (but it sounds like none in Australia?). Either H/G bands or the ones who were early historical adopters of pastoralism. But the degenerate remnants? Not a damn.
Of course, I may be drawing too much equivalence between the Australian and South African situations, but I’d hope some Aussie would tell me if that were the case.
If that is the case then it’s just as invalid as the literal reading. He has taken a notoriously dysfunctional society, where the men are known to be more dysfunctional than the women. Then he has observed that the women do more work than the men, then he extrapolated that into the past, when the society was functional.
I can’t see that ever being valid, can you?
Do you know that is how is his research worked or are you assuming? ISTM it could perhaps be more sophisticated than you assume. Perhaps that’s unlikely. In any event, I was merely pointing out that your initial rebuttal might not have been apt. I was not attempting to suggest that no rebuttal was available.
Blake, I’ll keep the rest of my posts free of opinion for the time being, and let you argue with the snippets I present from the book.
Here’s the one that made me think they deserved some tolerance for the way they may be now, though.
"Estimates of their population at the time of Captain Cook’s “discovery” of the country in 1788 range from 300,000 to one million. By the 1920’s, however, there were fewer than 50,000 Aborigines. They had no tradition of resisting foreign invaders with military force, and their lack of weapons, defences, and their peaceful nature meant the Europeans must have had as easy a time conquering them as their ancestors must have had conquering the Neolithic peoples. The land which was so sacred to them became another treasure house for the Europeans to ransack, and their culture was suppressed and destroyed. "
I think you need to be arguing with a guy called Robert Lawlor about those other things you contested.
Things that happened to your grandparents before you were even born are not an excuse for you to be an asshole. And nothing can justify tolerance for the sexual abuse of children.
How about doing what we do when people of any other race prove to be unfit parents? We take the kids away from them, but (and this bit is important) only after they’ve actually done something to prove that they are unfit parents. We don’t take your kids away because your neighbors molest their kids, or because your parents molested you, or because other people of your race or ethnicity or socioeconomic class abuse their kids. We don’t take kids away for something that might happen, only for something that has happened. Arresting or punishing people because they seem likely to do something bad might be a good way to prevent crime, but it’s not the way free societies do things.
If we measure the impact of the Stolen Generation solely on its effect on the kids’ lives, it looks like the wrong thing to do. The kids who were taken away from their parents are more likely, not less, to use drugs, have a police record, or not have completed school. Just from an efficacy standpoint, ignoring all considerations of rights, it didn’t work very well.
What an absolute load of crap.
Aboriginal populations were decimated by disease. The decline had absolutely nothing to with weapons, defences or some fictitious “peaceful nature”.
Yet this galah never even mentions disease as a cause. Instead he wants to blame it all on violence. The number of Aborigines killed by European violence was totally insignificant to population maintenance. Even the most enthusiastic estimates I have seen says that it was less than 30, 000 people, out of 300, 000, over a period of 150 years. How can that possibly have reduced a population from 300, 00 to 50, 000?
I can only say that if what you have posted so far is representative of this author’s research, you should discount the whole document. To put it bluntly it’s a load of provably incorrect, lefty, bleeding-heart nonsense with no respect for the truth and no reference to the facts.
I think should be arguing with whoever posted the nonsense in Great Debates, no?
That is exactly what did happen.
I think that’s a gross simplification. Various government powers existed to allow the removal of aboriginal children without any or very little evidence. Large numbers of aboriginal people have recounted horror stories of inappropriate use of these powers. To suggest that it was all necessary and used for the good of the children is unbelievably convenient.
I don’t, and the courts dont.
For the reasons already explained. I don’t like it, but I like the current levels of abuse and neglect even less.
Yes, stories. The actual evidence on the other hand is so slim that they can’t even get a single court finding to the effect that they happened.
So are you disputing the child abuse statistics that have been reported since the policy stopped?
Once again, we are back to the same problem. Much hand wringing about how terrible it was and how it can’t have been for the good of the children, and then hand wringing about the absolutely horrific conditions that children have been forced to live under since removal ceased.
There seem to be only a limited number situations that can exists: Aboriginal children in communities may be left there, and they will be neglected, raped and abused en masse. This is the situation we have had for the past ~20 years. Or Aboriginal children, as with all other children, can be removed when parents are unable or incapable of protecting and caring for them. This is the situation we had prior to the current tragedy. Or Aborigines can be treated as incompetents, they can be told what they can and can’t buy with their money, they can be specifically forbidden from doing things that are legal for whites, especially as pertains to alcohol, they can have armed protectors living permanently in their communities maintaining the peace. This was the situation prior to 20 years ago and it is the current situation under the intervention.
The problem is that there are large numbers of people who wring their hands and bewail all situations, without being able to come up with any solution that actually works and allows Aboriginal children to live anything like an normal, acceptable lifestyle free from abuse, neglect and rape. The problem at the end of the day is that we have a group that has proven itself incapable of raising its children in a manner that meets basic standards of human decency. The problem is then exacerbated by the tendency of the group to live in insulated communities and close ranks and shield offenders.
Given that this is the situation, what do you see as being the solution? Do you favour the intervention style program with Aborigines having the minutiae of their lives controlled, an option that wasn’t practical 50 years ago? Do you favour removal of at risk children, necessarily based on a lesser standard of evidence than for other groups? Do you favour letting the current standard of abuse continue unabated on the grounds that it is cultural and has gone on for millennia? Or do you have some other solution that will work and that won’t be decried in 30 years time, just as past policies have been and just as I’m sure the current intervention will be?
This is not a situation with an easy solution, and any attempt at dealing with it will be looked back on as abhorent and racist as far as I can see.
The courts said no such thing. Legal compensation for things the government had the power to do is really tricky. Just because its incredibly wrong doesn’t mean it was illegal.
I don’t think its a question of one or the other. I think the way the stolen generation happened has made it much harder to get kids away from abusive situations and thats just another bad consequence of racist legislation.
I don’t think every victim or descendant of victims is interested in gathering evidence and taking their claims to court. I think saying that proves it didn’t happen is disingenuous . We’re talking a long time ago in a lot of cases, you just can’t expect the legal system to be the arbiter of history. That’s not its role.
Well to be honest I don’t see how thats relevant.
I think kids should always be taken out of very harmful situations. I think standards of proof for this should always be fairly high. Its a tricky one, but it seems to be mostly got right in modern non-indigenous Australia. Personally I think most of your response was a bunch of moral relativism, and I don’t buy it. It is hard and I don’t have a solution, I also don’t see how that makes the Stolen Generation go away.
Its a hard problem to solve even with the best intentions, but that doesn’t mean every attempt to solve it had the best intentions. It also doesn’t mean that even if they had best intentions that it was a good thing in practice.
There have been numerous court cases attempting to prove what you claim has happened. What the trial invariably shows is that the parents voluntarily gave up the child or that the state had compelling evidence that the child was at risk.
What that proves is that while people often make up stories about being unjustly removed, they are either mistaken or lying when they do so. So at this juncture the onus is on you to provide evidence, any evidence, that the events you claim actually happened.
Yep, and in 20 years time somebody will be saying exactly the same thing about the intervention, or any other solution you care to propose.
No, the numerous failed court cases show that claims of unjust removal, even very claims thought to be the strongest, are not based in fact and are the result of faulty memory or deception on the part of the claimants. When we throw in claim like those of Cathy Freeman or Lois O’Donoghue, which brief investigation showed to also be untrue, it pattern emerges about the reliability of claims made in regard to this issue.
There’s nothing disingenuous in that.
No, its role is to establish the truth. And the truth is that no Aboriginal child seems to have been unjustly removed.
You don’t?
A policy was put in place, ostensibly to protect children. When the policy ceased to be applied, children were harmed at far greater levels than when the policy was in place.
And you don’t see how that’s relevant to whether the policy protected children?
And as I pointed out above, it was impossible to apply those standards of proof to Aboriginal communities because of the insular, isolated nature of those communities. Do you dispute that Aboriginal communities at the time were isolated, that there was great difficulty in getting Aborigines to testify against one another? These issues remain a massive problem in Aboriginnal communities even today, it was far worse in the days when such communities were literally a weeks travel from the nearest police station.
Care to point out something that is relativistic, rather than based in fact?
It doesn’t make it go away. What it does do is make a nonsense of your claims that it shouldn’t have happened.
You admit to not even having a concept of how the problem should have been dealt with, but you are adamant that the way it was done was wrong. It’s akin to Churchill’s statement that democracy is the worst possible form of government… aside from all the others. The odd part is that you don’t seem to be ironical when you say it. You honestly seem to believe that the removal of Aboriginal children was the worst thing that could have been done, while simultaneously admitting that something had to be done, and that all the others options are at least as bad.
No, that’s true. So how about providing some evidence, any evidence at all, that it wasn’t done with the best of intentions?
Once again, you’re saying it was bad thing, while saying something had to be done, despite admitting that as far as you can tell it was the absolute best thing that could have been done.
I ask you once again: if this policy was a bad thing in practice, as you claim then tell us what would have been a better thing in practice? Because if you can’t answer that question then your criticism that it was abad thing is just nonsense. If it was better than all the alternatives you can think of then it was the best thing that could possibly be done, and criticising those who did it is the worst manifestation of Black Armband history.
Its just too time consuming to take these points individually. I don’t the right standard of proof for historical events is the success of ill advised court cases. Those few that happened late enough to fit within the statute of limitations aren’t necessarily representative of the entire issue. Let alone that at its heart it was probably legal for the government to do what it did.
I certainly don’t admit the government did the best that it could with its policies regarding the stolen generation. I don’t think agreeing that there isn’t a perfect solution in anyway makes all other solutions equally valid. It is an absolute travesty of justice that we had legislation allowing the removal of children from parents without proof, simply because of the race of parents.
I think the idea that any historical event that you find uncomfortable has to be proven in a court of law is ridiculous. There just is not going to be that kind of proof available, thats why we have a statute of limitations.
I agree with the broad thrust of what you are saying but this simply isn’t correct. Courts are about deciding whether someone has proved something to a degree sufficient for a requested outcome to be justifiable. The fact that a court does not grant the outcome the plaintiff seeks can just reflect of a lack of evidence one way or the other.
However, **greendestiny **you can’t bootstrap your own argument by describing things that you believe to have happened as “historical events”, as if that somehow means the veracity of the events is beyond debate. You need evidence or you have nothing.
So, the lack of any military defence against the Europeans, had nothing to do with the ease in which they colonised the place and spread their diseases?
You’ve established that by reading one paragraph from a book you haven’t read? That’s mighty clever of you.
Who do I accept as an authority - “Random-guy-on-internet forum” or “Guy-who-has-written-much-acclaimed-book”? Ooh, that’s a tricky one!
Carry on then, and convince me why I should accept your views, over an anthropologists?
Not trying to suggest that it was a historical event, and therefore true, simply that it happened too long ago and composed of too many actions to try to verify it by judging a few court cases.
Instead I would expect people to judge its veracity in the way in which most history is looked at. We have unquestioned evidence about the powers granted to the government. There is a more vague idea of the numbers of people removed according to those powers, with estimates of 1 in 3 to 1 in 10 (from the same report, I don’t expect those are unquestioned). Then finally we have many accounts from affected people about the impact and unfairness of it. I don’t know what ability we really have to determine that abuse was or wasn’t occurring 100 years ago. However I doubt most people would agree with Blake that that picture adds up to a justified and reasonable measure. I don’t think proving any particular conditions in Aboriginal communities as a whole in that time period says anything for the justice of taking away children without having to prove abuse.
Well, I did read Mutant Message Down Under, but I’m a little skeptical of it.