After the apology: turning hollow words to actions in Indigenous child protection

Changing the Paradigm in Out of Home Care (OOHC) research team with Elder Co-Researchers, Aunty Charmaine Pell, front left and Aunty Millie Penny, front right. 

Aboriginal academic Dr Sharynne Hamilton describes how a research co-partnership with Elders in the Perth Aboriginal community has lead to a clear path of action to achieve justice in child protection. After the scathing criticism of the systemic failures of child protection made this week by National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollands, listening to the Elders has never been more urgent.

The Ngulluk Koolunga Ngulluk Koort Honorary Elder Co-Researchers provide their knowledge, wisdom, and expertise to oversee and guide the Telethon’s Kid’s Institute’s research work in the community in Western Australia. The Elders, with the Perth Aboriginal community, identify child protection and child removal as one of three priority areas.

As part of the project, the Elder co-researchers developed child protection principles and practice recommendations. They have called for a recognition of the harm caused by the Stolen Generation policies, and they want this used as a foundation for formulating future policies and practices.

The Elders have highlighted the distrust of ‘the welfare’ that continues to flow through communities, and they call for child protection services to harness resources and connections from the vast social networks that exist in our communities.

The Elders call for child protection agencies and their workers to:

• Communicate respectfully with community members to restore trust and build community relationships.

• Find community-led, local solutions to child protection concerns.

• Provide a greater commitment to using Aboriginal family-led decision-making forums that prioritise our voices.

They call for greater transparency and information for families about mandatory reporting – who are mandatory reporters and what mandatory reporting means.

Not having this information means there are families who don’t access services, for fear of being reported. Children who don’t attend school or have health checks. Historical trauma and distrust run very deep in our community.

The Elders are concerned about the disregard of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child placement principle.

We are currently working on a research project, led by Elders, and staffed by Aboriginal professionals and researchers. We are exploring the benefits of providing support to individualise and bolster cultural plans for Aboriginal children in the care of non-Aboriginal carers in three mainstream foster care agencies here in WA.

This is critically important work.

It is about a group of Aboriginal kids who have been removed from their parents and families. Some of these kids are thousands of kilometres from their country.

This is an opportunity that they may not otherwise get, to know about and be connected to their kinship networks, to know about their country and culture, their stories, to have the opportunity for cultural experiences, to know about their language, and to spend time with Aboriginal Elders. The potential intergenerational benefits are many.

In previous research with detained children, I yarned with many Nans who were looking after their grandchildren. Some of these Nans were looking up to 15 grannies, very often without support, again, with a deep distrust of ‘the welfare’.

Our Nans are the social and community glue that keep our families and communities together.  The Elders have continually raised concern that the work that our Nans do to look after children very often goes unnoticed and unsupported.

In our communities all our sisters are aunties, all our nans are mums; all our brothers are uncles; all our pops are dads. All our kids are cousins. We need a much greater understanding among Non-Aboriginal people about cultural differences in what it means to be part of an Aboriginal kinship network and what this can provide to bolster the safety of children to live with kin, in their communities and embedded in their culture and language.

We must recognise the incredible work undertaken by our grandmothers to keep their families together.

We must acknowledge that in this process, our Nans are largely unrecognised and unsupported. There are significant economic savings in child protection expenses for these children that is not reinvested in support. This should be one of our biggest investments.

We need commitment from governments around Australia to invest in, resource and support our Elders and Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations to lead reform and decision-making about the safety and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.

For me, that’s why the Australian Government said ‘Sorry’.

The Apology was an incredibly powerful moment.

It was my hope that by saying sorry, we had an opportunity to redress the harms and to revisit the way child protection work is done with our families.

When a family, particularly an Aboriginal family comes under the scrutiny of the state for child welfare concerns, we need an entirely different approach. 

What we have done in our work with the Elders is to combine our two knowledge systems together.

We bought together the cultural wisdom and knowledge of the Elders and the community with academic knowledge of regulatory theory.

We can understand what the Elders and community call for by thinking about the principles of responsive regulation and the use of regulatory pyramids– that is, to consider holistically, the cultures, behaviours and environments of our families.

Regulatory pyramid models use ‘soft sanctions’ to offer advisory and persuasive measures for dealing with a problem first. What Professor John Braithwaite describes as using ‘carrots before sticks’.

The greatest focus of regulatory pyramid models is eliciting co-operation and self-regulation.

Where these soft regulatory responses fail, regulators progress up the pyramid to enforce results and should move back down the regulatory pyramid as compliance is achieved.

So, a regulatory pyramid holds the community at the centre. You don’t reach straight for the top of the pyramid and obtain court order. That’s what happens now – take first, ask questions later … and then remember the 2022 Family Matters report tells us that over 84% of these accusations are unsubstantiated, and our kids suffer all kinds of harms.

If ‘sorry’ meant anything – asking questions about historical involvement of the state and hearing these stories of our families should invite a fundamentally different response to the family. 

A unique and individual response, led by our Elders, led Aboriginal community organisations and the community to redress the harms that a family could have suffered over many generations. Responses where the focus is on recovery, on providing recovery pathways and on ensuring everything is provided to safely care for their children with their families, in their communities and on their country.

These changes would turn hollow words to healing.

These remarks have been extracted and edited from a keynote given by Dr Hamilton on the 22 February 2023 for the Critical capital: recovery and justice  event run by the student-led ANU Law Reform and Social Justice Group.

A vast array of information and publications from this Elder-led program of work is available.