The history of child welfare in Australia has been constructed within the context of empire, but the writing of British child-welfare history has paid little attention to Australia, noting only its ...role as a (complicit) destination for the last generation of child migrants, and, within studies of settler colonialism, its program of Indigenous child removal. This article brings these historiographies into a closer relationship, arguing that developments in the way in which child-welfare history has been written in the wake of Australian inquiries into historical abuse can inform similar inquiries now being undertaken in Britain.
This article has been peer reviewed.
The adoption of boarding out by state children's departments across Australia is often attributed to the influence of English social reformers Florence and Rosamond Davenport Hill, whose visit to the ...colonies in the early 1870s coincided with a period of growing dis-ease with existing provisions for neglected children. However, after their return to Britain, they used their experience in the colonies to castigate English authorities for being too slow to adopt a similar course. This article complicates existing theories of cultural transmission in relation to ideas about child welfare. It analyses the ways in which the Davenport Hill sisters laid claim to their expert speaking position, and argues for the importance of informal networks in the development of child welfare policy in the years before the rise of transnational children's rights organisations.
Advocates of adoption in Australia have consistently argued that regulation ensures the practice remains a service for rather than a market in children. This article contests such a view, arguing ...that its claims to benevolence disguise the assumption that has driven most adoption reforms: that prospective adoptive parents have a right to a child. Left unquestioned, this assumption elides the differences that should be maintained between the interests of adopting parents and the children they adopt. It also erases the interests of the birth parents, creating tensions that are still evident in the practice of both in-country and inter-country adoption.
This article has been peer-reviewed
The announcement of Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was the culmination of a long campaign by survivor groups to have their stories heard. Although ...this campaign, and the organisations themselves, date only from the last years of the twentieth century, institutional sexual abuse has a far longer history. This paper will seek to trace the evidence of sexual abuse back into the nineteenth century and ask why it took so long for survivors to have their stories heard. It will argue that while institutional responses to allegations of sexual abuse remained remarkably consistent over time, it was only in the aftermath of the feminist (re)discovery of child sexual abuse in the 1970s that survivors were able to access a language through which to understand and articulate their experiences. Without access to such a language enabling them to position themselves as victims of, rather than being complicit in, such abusive behaviours, survivors were ill-equipped to resist the attempts by those in authority to silence their concerns.
The announcement of Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was the culmination of a long campaign by survivor groups to have their stories heard. Although ...this campaign, and the organisations themselves, date only from the last years of the twentieth century, institutional sexual abuse has a far longer history. This paper will seek to trace the evidence of sexual abuse back into the nineteenth century and ask why it took so long for survivors to have their stories heard. It will argue that while institutional responses to allegations of sexual abuse remained remarkably consistent over time, it was only in the aftermath of the feminist (re)discovery of child sexual abuse in the 1970s that survivors were able to access a language through which to understand and articulate their experiences. Without access to such a language enabling them to position themselves as victims of, rather than being complicit in, such abusive behaviours, survivors were ill-equipped to resist the attempts by those in authority to silence their concerns.
While the completion of two different inquiries, along with separate apologies and reparation packages, might suggest that the policies justifying the removal of Indigenous and non-Indigenous ...children in Australia were distinct, the situation is far more complex. Both child and 'native' welfare were colonial and later state responsibilities, creating the potential for policies and practices to be informed by different forces and to vary by jurisdiction. However, by analysing the debates around legislation from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article establishes commonalities as well as differences in both the arguments used to justify Indigenous and non-Indigenous child removal and the practices that evolved in the implementation of such legislation. By interrogating such arguments through the lens of whiteness and race, the article identifies the role which child removal was imagined to play in the process of building the settler colonial nation.
Stakeholders as Subjects Swain, Shurlee
The Public historian,
11/2014, Letnik:
36, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper reflects on the methodological, academic, and ultimately personal challenges involved in constructing the Find & Connect web resource, a public history project funded by the Australian ...Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs in response to the 2009 apology to Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants. Central to these challenges is the relationship between the researchers and the key stakeholders: the Care Leavers and the organizations that ran the institutions in which they spent their childhoods. The paper explores the use of collaborative history in negotiating the conflicting hopes and expectations of the various parties to the project.
The Market in Babies tells the history of adoption in Australia from its beginnings in the 19th century to its decline at the beginning of the 21st. In the early years, supply outstripped demand; ...needy children were hard to place. In the mid-20th century, demand and supply grew together with adoption presented as the perfect solution to two social problems - infertility and illegitimacy. Supply declined in the 1970s, and demand turned to new global markets. Now these markets are closing, but technology provides new opportunities, and Australians are acquiring babies through the surrogacy markets of India and the US. As the rate of adoptions in Australia falls to a historic low, and with parliaments across the country apologizing to parents and children for the pain caused by past practices, this book identifies an historical continuum between the past and the present, and it challenges the view that the best interests of the child can ever be protected in an environment where the market for children is allowed to flourish. The book's authors are long-established scholars with expertise in the history of the family, welfare history, and the making of public policy in Australia. *** "The richness of this book lies in equal measure in the sources it uses and its ability to synthesize history and public policy. The voices of adoptees and parents gathered here are moving and sophisticated, even as they tell diverse stories about their experiences. Highly recommended." -- Choice, Vol. 52, No. 2, October 2014Ë.
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