Forcible separation and assimilation as trauma: The historical and socio-political experiences of Australian Aboriginal people
Authors
Karen Menzies, University of Western Sydney, Forcible separation and assimilation as trauma: The historical and socio-political experiences of Australian Aboriginal people, Social Work and Society, Vol. 17, Issue 1, 2019
Prepared by Eva Ruggiero, QATSICPP Policy, Research and Evaluation
Background
This paper draws on the timeline of historical, social and political events and child welfare laws that have impacted on Australia’s First Nations people from the time of colonisation and how they contribute to and inform the ongoing inequities experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people including within child protection responses in the present day.
The paper defines and provides examples of key trauma concepts including:
historical trauma
collective trauma
intergenerational trauma.
The paper provides a unique insight into Australia’s history, beginning with invasion in 1788 and outlining the various policies and legislations that enforced separation and removal of children from families from the early 1800s to the end of the Assimilation Policy in 1969.
The resulting impacts of trauma on the wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is evidenced, with connections drawn to how these historic policy settings have influenced the over-representation of our children in the child protection system today.
This paper educates the reader on Australia’s true history of laws and policies inflicted on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and calls for practitioners to understand intergenerational trauma and to acknowledge the past. It provides the evidence on why ensuring trauma informed support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families is essential and how this enables a move from focusing on individual risk factors to seeing the whole story embodied by a person’s historic and present experiences, including the need to offer support for addressing the impact of the trauma experienced.
The paper also provides a challenge to how systems need to understand their historical context and how this influences their current practice and the harm that can result from not addressing this substantively.
