Word: childe
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...Melville, an indigenous child placed in the care of her great-aunt after her birth mother lost custody of her in 2001, was not likely to have been crying out of fear of abandonment, but out of sheer agony. She had a festering bone infection from a three-week-old fracture in her right leg that had already spread to her organs. The following morning, according to reports, Deborah was carried outside by her carers - apparently at her own request - and for eight hours she lay dying in the backyard. An autopsy revealed that one and a half liters...
...that Melville suffered, a largely unpublicized audit claims that her death was only part of a much greater problem. According to a 2007 report leaked to the Australian on Feb. 6 and written by psychologist Howard Bath, then the director of a nonprofit organization that specializes in support for child, youth and family services, the Northern Territory child-protection system is near collapse. Today, just over two years after Australia apologized for six decades of a policy that forcibly removed Aboriginal children from their homes, a new inquiry into that system is being launched...
...women were charged with manslaughter in the case but were eventually acquitted in 2008 on the grounds that they couldn't have known just how sick she was. Not everyone, however, was let off the hook: In an inquiry completed on Jan. 19, the national Department of Families and Child Services, the authority that was supposed to be protecting Deborah, was found largely responsible for her death, having ignored the many red flags raised throughout her six years in foster care. (See a brief history of baby lifts...
...crucial conclusions of Bath's report is that the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (ACPP), a guideline instated in 1983 to avoid another Stolen Generation scenario, is problematic. Responding to the painful legacy of old laws by which children were forcibly removed from their families and placed thousands of miles away in homes of white Australians, the ACPP stipulates that Aboriginal children removed by the state from their parents should be placed with family members or other indigenous Australians whenever possible. But it's a system, the study shows, that is failing the children it was designed to protect. "The present...
...Frank Hytten, the CEO of the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC), dismisses conclusions that the ACPP is to blame as absurd. "The guideline has been in place for more than 20 years, and in that time, the absolute first principle has always been child safety," he says. Hytten faults inadequate support and training for child-protection staff as the problem, not the concept itself. "You have the least experienced staff on the front line, and they are often overwhelmed by the complexity and highly charged emotional situations in which they have to work; taking a child...