The above is the title of a chapter that Katie Wright of LaTrobe University and I have written for Fault Lines: Australia’s Unequal Past, a book just off the presses from Monash University Publishing. You can buy the book at https://publishing.monash.edu/product/fault-lines/
The following is a near final version of our chapter.
FORGETTING AND REMEMBERING, INDIFFERENCE AND RECOGNITION:
Institutionalised Children and Family Dislocation
Frank Golding and Katie Wright
In 1956, Freda Harrison grieved over the loss of her two children, Monica, aged eleven, and Vernon, thirteen, who had been taken from her and placed in the Royal Park Depot, a Victorian state institution. One day, on the pretext that she had permission to take them to the pictures, Freda hitchhiked with them almost 1000 kilometres to Sydney, where they lived in boarding houses for about four months. When they returned to Melbourne, police arrested them and charged Freda with abduction. A North Melbourne magistrate sentenced her to fourteen days’ jail but, apparently impressed by her devotion to her children, suspended the sentence; and pending a satisfactory inspection of the family home, they were allowed to stay with her.1
Not all accounts of state intervention and maternal resistance have a happy ending. ‘Can you imagine the shame?’ asks a mother whose child had been taken from her twenty years previously: ‘How do you ever tell anyone they took your kids away? You don’t. You just look at the pavement for the rest of your life – even though you did nothing wrong except to have no one to help when things got bad. But he came back when he was eighteen and now I am having to undo all the damage they did. He got into heroin in there.’2
Throughout the twentieth century, mothers with children in ‘care’3 – often after being trapped in crises beyond their control – were forced to live with unresolved anger, guilt, shame and despair. Stripped of their legal and moral rights, many felt utterly powerless in the face of welfare authorities who routinely intimidated, denigrated and marginalised them. Many came to regard themselves as failures. Even when reunited with their children they found the remaking of their family too great a challenge.4
In this chapter we explore the legacy of institutional ‘care’ for children, focusing on how the family is ‘unmade’ by the child welfare system and the enduring impact of systems abuse, including the dehumanising nature of institutional life. We begin by exploring the ways in which the long history of institutionalising children in the twentieth century was underpinned by official determinations of parental failings, and we explore the effects of this overarching ideology and policy on families. We then consider, in the context of increasing societal awareness of institutional abuse over the last two decades, how the focus on child sexual abuse has overshadowed other forms abuse and their ongoing legacy. We then turn to Care leavers’ activism and public inquiries, which has resulted in new knowledge of the past and inquiry recommendations for redress and systemic reform. Finally, we consider the extent to which the lessons from the past are shaping (or not) approaches to child welfare in the present.
Children put into ‘care’ for the real or assumed deficiencies of their parents
A recent review of Child Protection Legal Aid Services found ‘strongagreement that the removal of children from their family is one of the most serious actions that the State can take, and should be a last resort’.5 The ‘last-resort’ policy is now standard in Australia.6 There is, however, strong evidence that far too often removal is rushed. The assumption that children will be better off should not be taken for granted.7 The evidence in too many cases is that separation from parents and placement in an institution changes children’s lives for the worse – not just damaging their childhood but creating long-lasting harm into adulthood.
Many Care leavers are shocked to discover in their childhood case files that they were charged and committed with status offences such as ‘being without sufficient needs’ or ‘being exposed to moral danger’. They find it hard to comprehend the idea of children being charged by the state for offences for which they had no responsibility. Yet criminal frameworks and the juvenile justice system were central to the administration of child welfare for much of the twentieth century. Until the 1980s, children could be charged with status offences, such as ‘being neglected’, which enabled their removal from their families and committal to children’s Homes and orphanages. Courts could commit children to institutions for an indeterminate period or until they reached eighteen years, sometimes older.8 The entanglement of child welfare and the juvenile justice system blurred the boundaries between poverty, neglect and delinquency; and it meant that the state had extraordinary powers over young people, especially those from Indigenous families and those whose parents were living in poverty.9
While there is now greater societal understandings of the injustices experienced by some 500,000 institutionalised children removed from their families during the twentieth century, the full extent of the impact of government policies and practices on parents, and on mothers in particular, is yet to be widely explored.10 Child and family welfare policy and practice in Australia has systematically highlighted the personal failings of parents, rather than the systemic social or economic problems that impact their lives. In Victoria in 1963, for example, social work academic Len Tierney found that it was difficult for welfare officers not to prejudge parents because the police evidence produced in children’s courts was deliberately designed to show the failings of the parents in order to convict the children as ‘neglected’. Tierney found that ‘Police reports tend to strip parents naked showing them in their very worst character’.11 And more often than not, the parents were not told their child was being charged and were not in court to offer a defence.
Historical contempt for poor parents continues into contemporary times. In the late twentieth century, a report found child welfare workers were still inclined to use labels such as ‘dangerous’, ‘unwilling’ and ‘inadequate’ for parents who are unable or not allowed to care for their children.12 Despite wider social changes and growing recognition of the grave injustices of out-of-home ‘care’ systems, this culture of blame, shame and parental failure remains entrenched.13 As one social worker told a parent: ‘I don’t consider you a parent. You’re more like genetic material …’14
Over the decades, many parents formed the perception that society cast them as not loving or caring about their children.15 This is a gross misperception in the light of evidence found. Nell Musgrove, for example, describes ‘the myth of the unwanted child’ as a mistaken view that indolent parents carelessly abrogated responsibility for their children.16 While some parents, particularly mothers with absent or incapacitated partners, did at times turn to the State for support, it was overwhelmingly a difficult and painful decision made in situations of impoverishment and where other options had been exhausted. Typically, it was viewed as a temporary solution to a crisis, and there is much evidence to show that parents tried to reunite with their families. In Musgrove’s examination of numerous child welfare case files, she discovered many ‘echoes of longing – people aching for lost parents, siblings and children’.17
The ‘unmaking’ of families and the dehumanising environment of institutions
To ‘unmake’ a family on the assumption that the children will be safer and better off may be the ultimate betrayal of trust.18 There is now ample evidence from public inquiries that this flawed assumption has had profoundly negative and long-lasting effects for children and their families.19 Families were ‘unmade’ by the system in a range of ways. Often given no prior warning of a sudden upheaval, or subsequent explanations of their dislocation, children were detached from their mother and father and had all connections severed with familiar places and faces. If a large institution could accommodate them together, siblings lived in the same facility but were separated by age and gender, leaving them only fleeting opportunities to see one another. They were the lucky ones. In the 1960s in Victoria, 60 per cent of siblings were assigned to different institutions in different parts of the state. Sometimes they were parted forever.20
Parents wanting to contact their children were often obstructed, either ‘pushed to the periphery’ or completely blocked from contacting them.21 It was thought that they were likely to taint their children with their ‘defects’.22 Letters were not passed on; some have been found in personal files decades later, unopened. Older Care leavers are angry to find that as children ‘[they] were lied to about their parents; and many have trekked through life believing what they were told – that their parents were derelict, deserters or dead – only to discover, as they reached older age, those parents’ struggle to maintain or regain contact. Sadly, the passage of time now makes it impossible for some to bridge the genealogical void.’23
While sexual abuse and physical brutality have now been thoroughly exposed along with institutional neglect – and rightly so – other forms of systems abuse have received relatively little attention in formal inquiries or in mainstream and social media. Commentators tend to overlook systems abuse, that is ‘the harm done to children in the context of policies and programs that are designed to provide care or protection’.24
Joanna Penglase, co-founder of Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN), argues that the primary abuse from which all other more easily identifiable forms of abuse stem (such as sexual and physical abuse) is the dehumanising environment of the institution.25 Hundreds of Care leavers reported to the 2004 federal Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care that the experience of a childhood in institutions left them with damaging and enduring legacies. Among these are complex identity issues caused by routine processes of depersonalisation – being called by numbers, not names; having names arbitrarily changed; standardised uniforms; the lack of personal possessions or photographs; and the numbing rituals of queues for meals, work and bathrooms.26
That depersonalisation was accompanied by an absence of love and care. The institutional failure to provide emotional nurturing left children without a growing command of the essential elements of personal relationships, which is needed to connect to others and build a life after ‘care’. Dr Phyllis Tewsley, who from 1948 to 1959 was the Medical Superintendent at Turana – at that time the government’s sole reception centre for children who were committed to state ‘care’ – told a conference of superintendents and matrons in 1965 that since leaving her position she had met a number of former inmates who were socially incompetent, could not relate intimately and had problems raising children. A woman told her: ‘My husband has great difficulty in getting on with my mother, because he doesn’t know how to get along with an older woman. He was brought up only by men. He doesn’t even know what to call her – he keeps on calling her lady.’27
Institutionalised children are produced by, and reproduce in turn, the social world in which they grow up. One of this chapter’s authors reported to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse that people who grow up without parents as role models face enormous problems in later life. ‘They’ve never seen a father, they’ve never seen a mother and how a mother works. So when it’s their turn, biologically, to become a mother or father, how do they do it?’28 Furthermore, there is consistent evidence that many Care leavers, in response to the emotional void in their upbringing and with little or no sex education and limited experience of positive personal relationships, become parents at an early age. There is also consensus that ‘young people disengaging from services were vulnerable to abusive and exploitative relationships and that many pregnancies and incidences of early parenting resulted from these relationships’. This ‘typically led to greater problems, including children’s entry into care and possibly ongoing cycles of intergenerational child protection involvement’. 29
This intergenerational legacy is all too familiar to Care leavers, reflecting yet another layer of injustice to which they were subjected.30
The focus on child sexual abuse overshadows systems abuse
Internationally, the torrent of personal testimony since the 1990s about child sexual abuse in institutions and public shock at revelations of institutional failure and complicity suggests that child sexual abuse is the core transgression of childhood innocence.31 Sexual assault is of course not a recent phenomenon: it runs as a continuous dark thread through Australia’s settlement history.32 The key elements of this – vulnerable children afraid to tell anyone for fear of being beaten, legal defence alleging girls had been provocative, lenient sentences and irresponsible transfer of the perpetrator to fresh opportunity – resonate even now. Like many other inquiries, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found abundant evidence that children have been sexually assaulted in institutions for generation after generation.33
Earlier inquiries similarly concluded that child sexual abuse was all too common and that it formed part of a wider pattern of abusive behaviour that characterised institutional life for children. In its submission to the Senate Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, the Forgotten Australians inquiry, the Victorian state government proposed that criminal acts against children could be framed within the circumstances and standards of the day:
In the past, some children were abused and neglected while in care, and a larger number of children were subjected to standards of care which would not be considered adequate by today’s standards. However, it is also important to recognise that the people who cared for children in the past, either in children’s homes or in their own homes, generally did so as well as they could in the circumstances of the times, and that auspice organisations for children’s homes and foster care programs generally sought to provide the type of care which they believed to be best.34
Contrary to this kind of government defensiveness, which rests on a questionable argument about the norms of ‘previous times’, little thought was given to children’s safety and the need for external oversight or supervision because it was falsely assumed that children placed in foster care would be secure once removed from their parents, and that children placed in institutions by their parents required no further protection.35 Both assumptions were untenable. In 2009 the Senate Committee revisited First Report from the Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care, Forgotten Australians (2004), to assess progress on the implementation of its thirty-nine recommendations.36 The Victorian government declined the invitation to make a submission.
As recent inquiries show, institutional child abuse cannot be framed as historical simply because large institutions are a relic of the past. Complacency is misguided because the sins ‘of the past’ continue. In 2010 the Victorian Ombudsman reported instances of children in ‘care’ having been physically and sexually assaulted by foster and kinship carers as well as by residential carers, some of whom were also reported to be selling drugs to children. In addition, there were reports of children involved in sexual exploitation rackets.37 Five years later, another inquiry found these practices continued, with only one staff member out of eighty-seven interviewed by the inquiry being of the view that the current system of residential care provided adequate safety to children.38
The use of the term ‘historical abuse’ also does not sit well with survivors for another reason. Childhood abuse and neglect continue to blight the daily lives of scores of thousands of adults who grew up in orphanages, children’s Homes and other forms of institutional ‘care’. Their experiences continue to have very real, present, enduring impacts.39 It is therefore little consolation to hear that things are managed better nowadays, that traumatic incidents should be left in the past and that people should ‘move on’. Survivors have made it very clear that healing and recovery are closely linked to justice, and they will never ‘get over it’ until they see justice done.
Activism and the exposure of institutional failings
By the late twentieth century, longstanding cultural silences around institutional abuse and neglect of children began breaking down.40 Care leavers connected, mobilised and were increasingly speaking out about their experiences. Advocacy groups formed and worked to raise awareness of the ways in which children’s rights had been flagrantly disregarded, giving lie to the concept of institutional ‘care’. By the early 2000s, organisations such as CLAN were demanding justice for Care leavers, along with systems reform to prevent other children suffering the same dehumanising experiences of abuse and familial dislocation that they had endured.
The collective voice and tireless activism of survivors has been instrumental to the breaking of silences around institutional abuse, challenging the prevailing culture of secrecy, shame and denial that the offending institutions had benefited from for so long. As Musgrove has documented, ‘Grass-roots activism by survivors of children’s institutions led to a series of national inquiries which confronted difficult and disturbing parts of Australia’s past’.41 The first of these inquiries, which reported in 1997, focused on Indigenous child removal and the experiences of the Stolen Generations (Bringing Them Home).42 This was followed in 2001 by an inquiry into unassisted child migration to Australia (Lost Innocents).43 A similar inquiry examining the experiences of children in institutional or out-of-home ‘care’ (Forgotten Australians) reported in 2004.44 These three inquiries have been referred to as a trilogy, with the reports collectively documenting the history of callous and inhumane treatment of children in Australia throughout the twentieth century.45
Care leavers and others who experienced institutional child abuse have called for official government inquiries because they offer an opportunity for the past to be examined and for institutional wrongdoing and harm to be acknowledged. Both in Australia and internationally, inquiries have played a key role in rewriting national histories and remaking collective knowledge.46 However, such inquiries have not always benefited victims and survivors. As historian Shurlee Swain has documented, prior to the 1990s inquiries into child welfare tended to privilege the voices of experts and the perspectives of institutions.47 When children were given a voice, their testimony was tainted by their social status. While there were inquiries investigating alleged maltreatment and excessive punishment of children in institutions, little came of these examinations and systems change did not follow.
However, the form and focus of inquiries in Australia began to change from the late 1980s with the turn to testimony and a new focus on listening to victims. Swain dates this to the Royal Commission into Deaths in Custody (1987–1991).48 In this case, testimony came from family and community members, rather than victims directly, but it signalled an important new direction in which lived experience is recognised and valued. The importance of this shift cannot be overstated. As Swain argues in relation to child sexual assault:
The practices of individualising accusations of sexual abuse, discrediting witnesses and minimising reporting in the interests of public morality were successful only while inquiries looked to experts rather than victims for the answers to the problems they were addressing. The inquiries since the late 1980s, which have actively sought survivor testimony, have broken open such silences.49
The demands from survivors for governments to establish inquiries into institutional child abuse, and the willingness of Care leavers and other survivors to participate in them, reflects a belief in the value of inquiries and their capacity to spark change. An important path to inquiries has been the work of Care leavers and other survivors forging alliances with the media and politicians.50 Media coverage and investigative journalism have played a crucial role in bringing people’s experience to public attention – although sexual abuse scandals have dominated, with much less attention to other forms of institutional abuse.51 Media scrutiny has put pressure on politicians, who have the powers to establish an inquiry to investigate abuse and make recommendations for redress and systems reform.
Revelations from inquiries also fuel further public awareness and new discussions on the need for improvements in particular areas, such as safeguarding children and record-keeping practices for children currently in the care system. Inquiries may also reveal to wide audiences knowledge that was previously held by those with lived experience, at times leading to new inquiries. For example, child sexual abuse did not form part of the terms of reference for the Bringing Them Home inquiry. Yet testimony from Indigenous peoples who were removed from their families and placed in institutions revealed child sexual assault to be widespread. The Lost Innocents and Forgotten Australian reports similarly demonstrated child sexual assault to be an all-too-common experience for institutionalised children.
Likewise, after initially telling Care leavers that it doubted its terms of reference would allow it ‘to do much about records’,52 the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse finally conceded that the weight of evidence and Care leaver testimony warranted examination of both past and contemporary record-keeping practices.53 The Royal Commission’s final report included an entire volume on recordkeeping and information sharing. It concluded that accurate and detailed records were not only fundamental to children’s identity and family relations, but also, importantly, that ‘the rights of children to be protected from all forms of physical, mental and sexual abuse are promoted by good records and recordkeeping’.54
In accessing their childhood case files, Care leavers often find a mismatch between what was recorded about them and their personal and collective memory. They challenge the many inaccuracies and gratuitous value judgements in their files and are distressed by the lack of basic information such as medical histories and the redactions relating to their siblings or parents. They are disappointed to discover that critical incidents of maltreatment were not recorded. Above all, they find the records lack any sense of what they were like as children, their strengths and achievements. Their voices, and those of their parents, are never to be found in these records.55
Care leavers have been at the centre of a social movement to increase community awareness of the systemic brutality of life inside children’s institutions, which for too long was cruelly disguised as benevolence. Survivors have challenged official institutional narratives about ‘care’ and demanded recognition and justice for the harms they experienced.56 As ‘care’ experiences and survivor narratives became more widely known, and in the context of increasing awareness of child rights and changing attitudes towards children, activism, media coverage and public outrage have led to ongoing and repeated demands for accountability.57 There have now been at least twenty inquiries since the late 1990s that have investigated institutional child abuse in jurisdictions across Australia.58
In the wake of these inquiries, governments, institutions and the wider public have been confronted with the sobering reality that the abuse of children was not exceptional, but rather that it has historically been part of the fabric of institutional life, one that has had significant long-term impacts on survivors.59
Redressing the past and remaking the future
Once injustice has been exposed, the question then becomes how it may be addressed. Based on their findings, inquiries in Australia typically make recommendations that cover both redressing the past and preventing abuse in the future. These may include formal apologies, the erection of memorials on historic sites, improved access to personal records, funding for support services such as counselling, legislative reforms aimed at removing institutional barriers to civil action, and requiring greater transparency and accountability by institutions providing services to children.
Recommendations for monetary compensation or redress are often flawed, controversial60 or fall short of Care leaver expectations.61 Providing redress to survivors is not always entirely driven by altruistic motives stemming from, especially in the case of child sexual abuse, a sense of collective shame and a resolve to remedy a great wrong. Redress schemes can also be interpreted as a strategic reaction to the threat of civil litigation and the reputational damage that comes with court action and public agitation.62 One of the ways governments and other large institutions seek to regain moral authority and faith in the community at large is to be seen to be doing something to put things right.
While a number of inquiries have examined all forms of child abuse and neglect in institutional ‘care’, public policy responses over the past two decades have focused on sexual crimes against children. A stark example is the implementation of the National Redress Scheme for victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse, set up in 2018 following the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Both the Royal Commission and the National Redress Scheme are limited to child sexual abuse (and physical abuse only if it related directly to sexual abuse) but their scope extended to a wide range of institutions, well beyond out-of-home ‘care’. The Royal Commission and the Redress Scheme were constructed as national collaborations and were set up despite the complexities of formal responsibilities around child protection and family welfare. There is as yet no comparable national scheme in Australia to acknowledge the profoundly negative impacts for all institutionalised children of the insidious yet deeply damaging forms of systems abuse of children and families.63
Care leavers and their supporters have learned they cannot rely on governments and other formal institutions to provide the most fitting means of addressing and redressing the past. However, the experience of participation in the major public inquiries and the ceremonies of public apologies, the creation of public memorials and national and local heritage projects have combined to engender in Care leavers a growing sense of being part of a historical community of interests. This sense of community has been reinforced by an unaccustomed flurry of media coverage, including television and radio documentary programs, and a growing number of films, theatre productions, online resources and academic research articles, the best of them done with their collaboration. These public activities and resources have led many Care leavers to feel now that they are part of a broader history that is about them.64
Care leavers have not been content, however, to leave it to mainstream media and institutions to articulate how their collective past is to be understood. In recent years they have developed a variety of ways of adding to the abundant testimony they provided to the formal inquiries – and in some ways reclaiming their history. They reject the expression ‘historical residential care’, as if the remains of the past can now be considered a closed and settled chapter in their lives. They speak of an interplay between their childhood experience – the critical incidents and the day-to-day activities and routines of the treatment received as a child in institutions – and the subsequent, recurring and shifting reflection on that time in life and its consequences for how they live their life today: ‘The child that I was then and the person that I am now constantly interact. Memory is not a fixed outcome of experience. Insights change over time. Making sense of memories of childhood is an active part of the never-ending process of creating, inventing, re-inventing and re-imagining identity – carrying history within us.’65
The numbers of Care leavers publishing memoirs and personal accounts is indicative of the need to articulate and reclaim the lived and living experience of institutional childhood. The approximate number has risen from seventy in 2012 to more than 160 in 2024 and shows no sign of tapering off.66 This collective insider knowledge is characterised by several recurrent themes of childhood.
Not surprisingly, there are graphic descriptions of brutality and neglect, trauma and grief, shattered innocence, dispossession, betrayal of trust and loss of faith and family. However, these personal accounts often culminate in triumph against the odds and constitute an antidote to the discourse of victimhood by featuring the resourcefulness and resilience of many Care leavers, both as children and as adults.67
Perhaps the most remarkable manifestation of a Care leaver collective voice is the newly created Australian Orphanage Museum located in Geelong, Victoria. Founded by CLAN with the aid of an Australian government grant following a national apology, the Museum interprets the experience of child institutional welfare from the perspective of those who lived it. Through information panels, photographs, film clips, soundscapes and interactive activities, the Museum exhibits countless artefacts and items of memorabilia donated or collected by Care leavers, challenging ‘top-down’ histories of out-of-home ‘care’. CLAN aims to help people in the wider community to understand a significant but neglected story in Australia’s history while at the same time affirm and validate the memories and standpoints of Care leavers and their families. The Museum also honours Care leaver activism and the part it played in generating formal inquiries and challenging the power relations between survivors and institutions.
Conclusion
For decades, Care leavers have worked to make visible the systems abuse and human rights violations to which they were subjected as children. They have been relentless in the pursuit of justice, working tirelessly to ensure the history of institutional ‘care’ is recognised, recorded and remembered. Public inquiries, often prompted by survivor testimonies, have affirmed Care leaver voices and served as crucibles of accountability. There can now be no doubt that life inside children’s institutions in the twentieth century was marked by brutality and a distinct lack of care. The reports of dozens of inquiries conducted since the late 1990s make for grim reading. Arguably one point of hope is that things may be different now and in the future. Inquiry recommendations provide policy advice to governments on ways forward, both in relation to redress to help alleviate the impact of institutional abuse for survivors, and systems reform to ensure that young people today who are unable to live with their families do not suffer the same injustices that people who experienced out-of-home ‘care’ in the past were forced to endure.
There are very rich learnings from Australia’s history of institutionalising children. Yet often the stories that emerge in the present too closely resemble the mistakes of the past. Care leaver narratives and inquiry reports attest to the wide-ranging negative consequences of institutionalisation and abuse of children, and here we have drawn particular attention to the problem of family dislocation. Unfortunately, this remains a pressing problem in the present, one we know all too well has intergenerational impacts. At the time of writing, an article in The Guardian newspaper reported the case of Mia Buckley, a fourteen-year old Indigenous girl with an intellectual disability.68 Early in 2023, Mia’s care became the responsibility of the child safety department in Queensland. Mia soon became pregnant, and after giving birth, returned to the residential care setting in which she had been living. The residential home refused to allow the baby to stay with its mother and the child safety department brought an order of custody for the baby. The magistrate was highly critical of the department, finding it had failed to plan appropriately for the birth by providing Mia with the supporting care she needed to be able to look after the child.69 The failure of care at the heart of Mia’s story is a sobering reminder that systems designed to care for children continue to fail them.
ENDNOTES
1 ‘Mother Stole Children, Hitch Hiked to Sydney’, The Argus, 8 June 1956, p.12.
2 Maria Harries, The Experiences of Parents and Families of Children and Young People in Care (Perth: Centre for Vulnerable Children and Families, 2008), p.25.
3 In this chapter we use the form ‘care’ throughout to signify the widely held view that care in institutions was often inadequate or deficient. Many people who, as children, experienced institutional ‘care’ refer to themselves as Care leavers or Care Leavers, the latter being used in a collective sense.
4 Harries, Experiences of Parents, p.35.
5 Victoria Legal Aid, Child Protection Legal Aid Services Review: Consultation and Options Paper, (Melbourne: Victoria Legal Aid, 2016), p.22: www.legalaid.vic.gov.au/child-protection-legal-aid-services-review
6 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australia’s Youth: Young People in Out-of-Home Care (Canberra: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2021): www.aihw.gov.au/reports/children-youth/young-people
7 Alliance for Family Preservation and Restoration, Submission No. 44 to the Inquiry into Child Protection, (Canberra: NSW Legislative Council, General Purpose Standing Committee No. 2, 2016), p.3.
8 Kerry Carrington and Margaret Pereira, Offending Youth: Sex, Crime and Justice (Annandale: Federation Press, 2009), chapter 4.
9 ibid., chapter 6.
10 Community Affairs Reference Committee, Forgotten Australians: A Report on Australians Who Experienced Institutional or Out-of-Home Care as Children (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia Senate, 2004), p.29.
11 Len Tierney, Children Who Need Help: A History of Child Welfare Policy and Administration in Victoria, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1963), p.93.
12 Elizabeth Fernandez, Significant Harm: Unravelling Child Protection Decisions and Substitute Care Careers of Children: Perspectives of Child Welfare Workers and Biological Parents (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), p.7.
13 Donella Jaggs and Catherine Jaggs, Advancing this Good Work: A History of Glastonbury Child & Family Services (Belmont, Victoria: Glastonbury Child and Family Services, 1988), p.19.
14 Nicola Ross, Jessica Cocks, Lou Johnston and Lynette Stoker, ‘No Voice, No Opinion, Nothing’: Parent Experiences when Children are Removed and Placed in Care (Newcastle: University of Newcastle, 2017), p.45.
15 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Final Report: Private Sessions, vol. 5, (Sydney: Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017), p.101.
16 Nell Musgrove, The Scars Remain: The Long History of Forgotten Australians and Children’s Institutions, (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013), pp.51–2.
17 ibid, p.73.
18 Judge Ernestine Gray, who sat on the Parish Juvenile Court in New Orleans, dramatically reduced the number of children entering foster care in her jurisdiction by insisting the State proved that removal was necessary. ‘If the child protection agency can’t offer evidence that a child’s safety is imminently at risk, I send the child home to their family, consistently,’ she said. Quoted in Melissa Carter, Christopher Church and Vivek Sankaran, ‘A Quiet Revolution: How Judicial Discipline Essentially Eliminated Foster Care and Nearly Went Unnoticed’, Columbia Journal of Race and Law 12: 1 (2022): https://doi.org/10.52214/cjrl.v12i1.9923
19 Johanna Skold and Shurlee Swain (eds), Apologies and the Legacy of Abuse of Children in ‘Care’: International Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015); Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997).
20 Tierney, Children Who Need Help, pp.39–40.
21 Musgrove, The Scars Remain, pp.67–8.
22 Shurlee Swain, ‘Narratives of Innocence and Seduction: Historical Understandings of Child Sexual Abuse in Australia’, in The Sexual Abuse of Children: Recognition and Redress, Yorick Smaal, Andy Kaladelfos and Mark Finnane (eds), (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2016), p.39.
23 Frank Golding and Jacqueline Z. Wilson, ‘Strangers in the Village: Care Leavers and History’, in The Australian History Industry, Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton (eds), (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2022), p.153.
24 Judy Cashmore, Robyn Dolby and Deborah Brennan, Systems Abuse: Problems and Solutions (Sydney: Child Protection Council, 1993), p.1. See also Joanna Penglase, Orphans of the Living: Growing Up in ‘Care’ in Twentieth Century Australia (Fremantle: Fremantle Press, 2005), p.50.
25 Penglase, Orphans of the Living, p.50.
26 Community Affairs References Committee, Forgotten Australians, pp.91–125.
27 Phyllis Tewsley, ‘Address to Superintendents’ and Matrons’ Association of Victoria’, Report of Ballarat Conference (Ballarat: Superintendents’ and Matrons’ Association of Victoria, 2–4 April 1965).
28 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, ‘Case Study 57: Nature, Cause and Impact of Child Sexual Abuse’, (Sydney: Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Transcript 31 March 2017), p.27831.
29 Jade Purtell, Philip Mendes, Bernadette Saunders and Susan Baidawi, ‘Healing Trauma and Loss and Increasing Social Connections: Transitions from Care and Early Parenting’, Child and Adolescent Social Work Journal 39 (2022), pp.735–47
30 Care Leavers Australasia Network (CLAN), Struggling to Keep it Together: A National Survey about Older Care-Leavers Who Were in Australia’s Orphanages, Children’s Homes, Foster Care and Other Institutions (Sydney: CLAN, 2011).
31 Frank Golding, ‘Sexual Abuse as the Core Transgression of Childhood Innocence: Unintended Consequences for Care Leavers’, Journal of Australian Studies 42: 2 (2018), pp.191–203; Katie Wright, Shurlee Swain and Johanna Skold, The Age of Inquiry: A Global Mapping of Institutional Abuse Inquiries, 2nd ed., (Melbourne: La Trobe University, 2020), http://doi.org/10.4225/22/591e1e3a36139
32 In Botany Bay and Norfolk Island, there were disturbing reports of child rape and sexual abuse. In 1796 Henry Wright was the first man to be convicted of child rape. The victim was an eight-year-old girl, but the perpetrator’s death sentence was commuted to a life sentence on Norfolk Island. Eighteen months later, Wright was free to strike again; this time his victim was a ten-year-old girl. Robert Holden, Orphans of History: The Forgotten Children of the First Fleet (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000), p.154.
33 Shurlee Swain, History of Australian Inquiries Reviewing Institutions Providing Care for Children (Sydney: Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2014).
34 Government of Victoria, ‘Submission No. 173 to the Senate Committee Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care’ (Canberra: Australian Senate, July 2003).
35 ibid.
36 Senate Community Affairs References Committee, Lost Innocents and Forgotten Australians Revisited: Report on the Progress with the Implementation of the Recommendations of the Lost Innocents and Forgotten Australians Report (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2009).
37 Ombudsman Victoria, Own Motion Investigation into Child Protection – Out of Home Care (Melbourne: Ombudsman Victoria, May 2010), p.10.
38 Commission for Children and Young People, ‘… as a good parent would …’ Inquiry into the Adequacy of the Provision of Residential Care Services to Victorian Children and Young People Who Have Been Subject to Sexual Abuse or Sexual Exploitation Whilst Residing in Residential Care (Melbourne: The Commission, 2015), p.108.
39 Golding and Wilson, ‘Strangers in the Village’, pp.152–65.
40 Golding and Wilson, ‘Strangers in the Village’, pp.157–62; Penglase, Orphans of the Living, pp.41–5; Skold, and Swain, Apologies and the Legacy of Abuse in ‘Care’, pp.1–2.
41 Musgrove, The Scars Remain, pp.x–xi.
42 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home.
43 Community Affairs Reference Committee, Lost Innocents: Righting the Record – Report on Child Migration, (Canberra: Australian Senate, 2001).
44 Community Affairs Reference Committee, Forgotten Australians.
45 Community Affairs Reference Committee, Lost Innocents, pp.8–9; Community Affairs Reference Committee, Forgotten Australians, pp.2–3.
46 Katie Wright, ‘Remaking Collective Knowledge: An Analysis of the Complex and Multiple Effects of Inquiries into Historical Institutional Child Abuse’, Child Abuse & Neglect, 74 (2017), pp.10–22: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2017.08.028
47 Swain, History of Australian Inquiries, p.9.
48 Commonwealth of Australia, Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 1991), p.10.
49 Swain, History of Australian Inquiries, p.9.
50 Katie Wright and Alasdair Henry, ‘Historical Institutional Child Abuse: Activist Mobilisation and Public Inquiries’, Sociology Compass, 13, vol. 12 (2019), e12754: https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12754
51 Lisa Waller, Tanja Dreher, Kirsty Hess, Kerry McCallum and Eli Skogerb., ‘Media Hierarchies of Attention: News Values and Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse’, Journalism Studies, 21, vol. 2 (2020), pp.180–96, https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2019.1633244; Wright and Henry, ‘Historical Institutional Child Abuse’, pp.180–6.
52 On 17 February 2017, Justice Peter McLellan, the Chair of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, wrote to CLAN: ‘… when I came out to talk to you people … you asked about records. That exchange has always been at the front of my mind. Whether our terms of reference allow (probably not) we are doing what we can on that issue.’ (CLAN inward correspondence files.)
53 Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Final Report: Recordkeeping and Information Sharing, vol. 8 (Sydney: Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse), p.54.
54 Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Final Report: Recordkeeping, p.44.
55 Frank Golding, ‘Problems with Records and Recordkeeping Practices are Not Confined to the Past: A Challenge from the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse’, Archival Science 20 (2020), pp.1–19, https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09304-0
56 Frank Golding and Jacqueline Z. Wilson, ‘Lost and Found: Counter-Narratives of Dis/Located Children’, in Children’s Voices from the Past: New Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Kristine Moruzi, Nell Musgrove and Carla Pascoe Leahy (eds) (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp.311–19; Penglase, Orphans of the Living, pp.35–40.
57 Jaqueline Z. Wilson, Nell Musgrove and David McGinniss, ‘Care-Leaver Activism and Criminogenic Welfare: An Australian Case Study’, Journal of Criminology (2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/2633807624128657
58 Wright, Swain and Skold, The Age of Inquiry.
59 Shurlee Swain, ‘Institutional Abuse: A Long History’, Journal of Australian Studies, 42:2 (2018), pp.153–63.
60 Robyn Kruk, Final Report: Second Year Review of the National Redress Scheme (Canberra, Commonwealth of Australia, 2021), pp.8–14.
61 Golding, ‘Sexual Abuse as the Core Transgression’, pp.191–203.
62 Ronald Niezen, Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), p.31.
63 There have been limited redress schemes for Care leavers in Tasmania, Queensland and Western Australia, and a proposed Victorian redress scheme has been announced. These schemes cover more than sexual abuse. There have also been national and state apologies that have focused on the broad impacts of abuse and neglect in out-of-home ‘care’, and some services have followed these apologies.
64 Find & Connect, ‘Blog: Watching the Past in the Present – Films, TV & Documentaries’, 15 June 2018, www.findandconnect.gov.au/blog/watching-thepast-in-the-present; Find & Connect, ‘Blog: Hearing the Past in the Present – Online Exhibitions, Oral Histories, Radio/Podcasts and Theatre’, 16 June 2018, www.findandconnect.gov.au/blog/hearing-the-past-in-the-present; Find & Connect, ‘Blog: Bored? Here’s Some Quality Care-Based Content’, 29 May 2020, www.findandconnect.gov.au/blog/bored-heres-some-quality-care-based-content
65 Golding and Wilson, ‘Strangers in the Village’, p.160.
66 CLAN Library at the Australian Orphanage Museum at Geelong, Victoria.
67 Golding and Wilson, ‘Strangers in the Village’, p.161.
68 Ben Smee, ‘Care Home Refuses to Accept Baby of 14-Year-Old Resident, Prompting Magistrate to Criticise Queensland Authorities’, The Guardian, 10 November 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/10/care-home-refuses-to-accept-baby-of-14-year-old-resident-promptingmagistrate-to-criticise-queensland-authorities. Note: Mia Buckley is a pseudonym.
69 ibid.