Still We Are Making Welfare Hells

By Jack Waterford
Canberra Times
March 2, 2014

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/comment/still-we-are-making-welfare-hells-20140301-33sp8.html

Kevin Rudd embraces members of the Stolen Generation, but how much welfare abuse still exists today? Photo: David Mariuz

Australians could hardly help but be shocked and appalled by recent evidence coming before the royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse.

The incompetence, negligence and, sometimes effective enabling of abusing teachers in schools is bad enough, casting fundamental doubts about the stewards, the managers or the overseers. But how much more horrible to think that children in obvious need of the state's tender care and protection - such as orphans in Salvation Army homes, and children made state wards because they were thought to be neglected and abused - being handed over, by our representatives to people who would neglect, and abuse them, physically and sexually, even more.

Thank heavens this could not happen today! Now we know about the risks and temptations of sexual abuse. We know about duty of care. We, or our modern representatives, would never put vulnerable people at risk. Enlightened people run our churches, parliaments, bureaucracies, and institutions. We can be sure the horrible epidemics are no more.

Or can we? It is of the essence of the horrors in the institutions that they represented the best practice of the days in question, endorsed at the time by the whole establishment. This is not to suggest consciousness of abuse - though many players were not so naive as to dismiss the possibility - but a certain blind eye. The sort, for example, some Australians have about conditions in our concentration camps.

Complacent politicians and bureaucrats were closely involved in welfare institutions. The legal establishment clothed the abusers with power, stripped them of accountability, disbelieved complaints, and provided a never-ending supply of fresh victims. Police, social workers and welfare officers worked with diligence and sanctimony by the book. Most inadequacies were not from bad apples but official indifference and stinginess. Media and religious establishments were complicit, too. Just the same types of people - no better or worse than then - and just the same convictions that the latest fad for looking after vulnerable children is the best way.

Perhaps, but only perhaps, some old abuses have been addressed. But there is no room for certainty. We cannot be sure we will not be condemned by our own children and grandchildren for our silence and complicity in equally appalling neglect and abuse today.

The recent reports are like stories of the Aboriginal ''stolen generation'', which, about two decades ago, often, of course, involved the same victims. Folks will recall that Kevin Rudd apologised for that sort of thing six years ago. We said we were wrong and that we wouldn't do it again.

Then we went straight back into doing it again. During the Rudd government, more Aboriginal children were taken from their families by government officials than ever during the years up until, say, 1990. My guess is that, Australia-wide, about 20 per cent of Aboriginal children are now separated by the state from their parents, and are in the care of others, or in institutions and remand centres.

One: Most came from poor situations. That can be taken for granted.

Two: But most are presently in situations no better or, by any standards, worse.

The optimist focuses on statement one. The realist on statement two. But doing something worse is not better. Or even cheaper.

Seventy years from now, Australia will be coping with the personal physical, social, cultural and mental tragedies of children who are infants today. Their lives in the care of welfare, described to presidential inquiries then, will seem every bit as Dickensian, awful and unthinkable, as those being described today. Much the same classes of people will claim they didn't know and can't be blamed.

The seizure of neglected children is so commonplace that the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, didn't even mention it in a fine speech about Closing the Gap this month.

We no longer remove children because they are Aboriginal. Now we take them because they are thought to be neglected, not properly looked after, being physically abused, perhaps sexually abused, with ineffective parenting.

This is not only a historical problem, reaching into the present but likely to fade away. It is also a new and modern one, sprouting new tendrils, bitterness and despair. The incarceration rate for Aboriginal women has increased by 60 per cent since 2010, and for men about 40 per cent. The increased prison population since the modern throw-away-the-key phase began Australia-wide, has been largely of Aborigines.

Perhaps the horrors of Parramatta Girls Home, and Hay girls institution and even Bidura in Glebe were secrets not told in the most respectable households. But they were widely known among the poor, among the battlers, and among classes of people (young pregnant girls, for example) who became suddenly vulnerable to the ''helping hand'' of the coercive welfare state.

It was certainly no secret that the institutions were physically brutal establishments, with harsh and often arbitrary punishments, and with superintendents whose obsessions with discipline and submission extended into an openly expressed need to have their charges admit their inferior and dependent status.

''We will make you, or we will break you,'' one welfare officer was said to have told a girl at Parramatta Girls Home. By ''break you'', the person did not necessarily mean rape and sexually abuse the child: this was an unspoken extra. It required rather that the inmate be submissive, obedient, respectful and appreciative, not cheeky or inclined to stand up for her rights.

Many of these young girls were homeless. Some had been picked up in Kings Cross, or, partly through desperate poverty, had engaged in petty crime. There was media innuendo about their promiscuity - as about shamed pregnant girls in other types of institutions. The implication was that if they were subject to sexual abuse, they had probably encouraged it, or somehow deserved it. In much the same way, the occasional judge or policeman has seemed to express indifference about the prospect of a prisoner being raped in jail.

Decent people flatly repudiate either argument. But decent people will deserve the condemnation of their descendants if we, by confining our disapproval to mere tuts, allow the situation to continue.