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...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...
...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 data suggests, as do some of the decisions in the case studies, that in some cases this principle appears to be given primacy over basic child-protection considerations," Bath told the Australian...
...Other findings in the 2007 Bath report mentioned in the Australian include failure to regularly monitor the children placed in care, poor assessment of carers, and lack of support services for at-risk children in the Northern Territory. "It's a system that's been in crisis for some time and is getting worse," says Jodeen Carney, Shadow Minister for children and families. Carney, based in Alice Springs, is enraged at the "cover-up culture" that has surrounded the report, whose full contents have yet to be disclosed. The Northern Territory's Child Protection Minister, Kon Vatskalis, issued a statement...
...Northern Territory government released a report titled "Little Children Are Sacred," which revealed appalling statistics about rife sexual abuse of children in remote Aboriginal communities. The report was immediately picked up by the press and politicians alike and became the catalyst for the widely contested Northern Territory intervention - a system by which the federal government imposed nine measures upon indigenous Australians living in remote communities, including alcohol restrictions and pornography filters on publicly funded computers...
...addition to inciting loud opposition from human-rights groups, those measures have also failed to alleviate the problems facing Aboriginal children, who are still over-represented in the child-protection system. Indigenous children are nine times as likely to be cared for by people outside their immediate family than non-indigenous kids, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW). Kate Valentine, the AIHW spokeswoman, told ABC News that the reasons behind this are complex. "They involve factors such as the intergenerational effects of previous separations and poorer socioeconomic status." (See pictures of Tiwi Islanders, who live...