Our State of Mind

by Quentin Beresford

  In many instances parents from the stolen generations have been unprepared for their role in raising children. As the Aboriginal Legal Service acknowledges: ‘For many Aborigines, family and parenting skills have never had the opportunity to develop, the family environment being foreign to many of them.’302 Understandably, this is a very sensitive issue to discuss. To cast judgement on parents in this way risks the unfair stereotyping of all Aborigines who are part of the stolen generations. Not all have experienced difficulties in raising their children. As evidence to the Human Rights inquiry acknowledged: ‘despite all the odds and despite the pain … [m]any parents from the stolen generations are very good parents. Some have been able to reconstruct their sense of self worth and commitment to their children.’303 These are important acknowledgments, yet they do not alter the fact of the sad parenting experience arising from assimilation of a significant number of Aboriginal families. For this group, childhood experiences of removal and institutionalisation have had crippling effects on their ability to parent effectively. It is not surprising many of the stolen generations have experienced these problems. The same phenomenon has been noted in research among Holocaust victims. One writer noted: ‘The price of survival for these people may have been deep rooted disturbances within the families they formed after liberation.’304

  A range of possible factors have been identified linking removal with parenting difficulties. Most obviously, those who were institutionalised lacked a family model around which to develop understanding of the parenting role. It is within the family that children learn the skills essential to effective parenting. By removing the children, white society broke their link with Aboriginal child-rearing practices, and gave them no other family model. As evidence to the Human Rights inquiry noted, the stolen generations ‘have not had a history of socialisation which includes processes of being nurtured, so that they have difficulty in sustaining and developing good constructive family relationships with their own children.’305 Specifically, they were denied the basic affection accepted as necessary to the normal path of personality development. The personal stories of the stolen generations collected by the Aboriginal Legal Service in 1995 affirm this. Many told how they felt distant from their children, which limited the development of close intimate bonds and actual physical care.306 Unresolved trauma, the lack of family role models and the effects of mission life all contributed to these problems.

  The poor self-esteem common to the stolen generations has made some vulnerable to unplanned pregnancies, as parents they ‘are often disorganised, impatient, capricious and ultimately demoralised, feeling unable to provide for their children what they missed out on’.307 Allied to poor self-worth can be an inability to accept family responsibilities. A prominent Aboriginal community worker has observed: ‘the missions have created a handout mentality which was totally foreign to our past society … Those children, today’s parents, have learned a dependency, preferring to pass on responsibility than to take charge of the situation.’308

  The relationship between parenting styles and the experiences of removal remains a largely unexplored area, and generalisations are very hard to make, but it does appear from the interviews conducted for this book that some Aborigines, at least, have internalised the mission experience and expressed it in the way they parent their children. Some are extremely worrying and overprotective of their children. Others replicate the strict corporal discipline of missions. At the other extreme are parents who are compelled to avoid all forms of discipline because of their exposure at the hands of various missionaries. Still others struggle with unresolved trauma which hinders their ability to parent effectively. Unresolved destructive emotions can be passed from parent to child. As psychologist Alice Miller has written, if children exposed to trauma become parents ‘they will then often direct acts of revenge for their mistreatment in childhood against their own children, whom they use as scapegoats.’309 For these reasons, there is a crisis of parenting in sections of the Aboriginal community and a large unmet need for culturally appropriate programs in parenting skills.

  Problems with parenting combined with ongoing poverty have made Aboriginal children, and especially those whose parents are from the stolen generations, vulnerable to being removed into substitute care or to incarceration for juvenile crime. These are new forms of institutionalisation that have become so pervasive in recent decades and the active support given to them by successive state governments are seen by Aboriginal people as mirroring the practices earlier generations endured. The strongest of Aboriginal misgivings are towards the juvenile justice system. This is not surprising. The operation of this system evokes the powerlessness and injustice Aboriginal people suffered under assimilation. The number of children removed from their families by the justice system and the physical distance it frequently puts between them replicates what happened to Aboriginal people under earlier regimes. In fact, the removal of children under assimilation and by the justice system are the product of very similar social forces. Even though the justice system purports to be non-racial in its operation, its disproportionate application to Aboriginal children and families opens it to the criticism that it is a modern-day version of breaking up Aboriginal families and subjecting Aboriginal children to white control. Undoubtedly, the closest analogy between the two systems lies in the lived experience of the stolen generations who are very vulnerable to having their own children taken and locked away in detention. One mother told her story:

  Sean is my son. He is sixteen years of age. He is in gaol at the moment. He has been in and out of gaol since he was twelve years of age. He does not know how much it hurts me to see him locked up. He needs his family. I need him.

  When I go and visit him he tells me that he is very sorry for what he has done to me. He just cannot seem to help himself. He just cannot help getting into trouble with the cops.

  Sean has been in and out of gaol for a number of offences. He does not know what he really wants in life. It is very hard for him and for me, not having him around. I have to look after five children who are all younger than Sean. That has been very hard.

  What is even harder is the fact that Sean is away from me. Things have not changed that much from when I was taken away from my parents and placed in a mission at Norseman. By the time I got out, my mum had died and I could not find my father. I think he had gone somewhere over east and from what I heard he hit the bottle pretty badly.

  Sean’s father had also been taken away from his parents. He had gone to Mogumber Mission. He left me when Sean was only two years of age. The other kids’ father is another man who also left me now. Sean’s dad just could not cope with his childhood. He was subjected to sexual abuse and made to work really hard.

  No wonder Sean is the way he is. I and Sean’s dad have had our own problems and I suppose they have rubbed off on Sean.

  It really hurt me being taken away from our family and culture.310

  There could be no more tragic illustration of the link between past and present. Both systems represent a form of legal discrimination against Aboriginal families and their children. Under assimilation this discrimination was often overt. In the case of juvenile justice, it is underlying, but none the less real.

  Until the early 1980s, the ‘welfare’ model of juvenile crime gave great power to white welfare workers to incarcerate young people for antisocial behaviour. However, it did give some emphasis—often very misguided—to rehabilitation. The alternative to this system has been characterised as the ‘justice’ approach and was introduced in Western Australia in the latter part of the 1980s. This shift in policy from ‘welfare’ to ‘justice’ also involved a shift in the status of young people within the system: from a ‘vulnerable’ group to one which has ‘just deserts’ coming to them.311 The adoption of the ‘justice’ model has caused a skyrocketing in the number of young Aborigines removed from their families and incarcerated. Under this new approach, police officers be
came the ‘gatekeepers’ of the system. They make the initial decision on who is to be charged and with what crimes. In Western Australia, their power to make initial contact with any citizen has no legal limits. Arguably, this power has been used in a highly discriminatory fashion against Aboriginal youth. Partly, this has been a result of entrenched racism within sections of a police force with its historic roots in controlling the lives of Aboriginal people. Recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show that thirty-one percent of all Aborigines between fifteen and forty-four years report being arrested in the last five years, while sixty-two percent of this group report being arrested more than once.312 This over-representation occurs in a police service which pays too little attention to cross-cultural training.

  In addition to the cultural vacuum existing between police as gatekeepers and Aboriginal youth the justice system intervenes with its culturally ignorant legalism. Many Aboriginal youth coming before the Children’s Court are culturally disadvantaged by its proceedings. It is an alien forum even to those living in urban areas. A Queensland study undertaken by Diana Eades, a sociolinguist specialising in Aboriginal issues, has presented unique insights into these cultural disadvantages. She studied the case involving three Brisbane police officers who faced charges of depriving the liberty of three Aboriginal teenage boys. These boys had been approached by the police officers in the inner city of Brisbane and instructed to get into the police car even though they had not been informed of any charges being laid against them. It was a spontaneous, cruel trick. The police took the youths fourteen kilometres away to an industrial wasteland, dumped them, and told them to find their own way home. It appeared a straightforward case of police harassment of Aboriginal youth, like much of which had gone unreported in the past. On this occasion, however, the youths pressed charges relating to deprivation of their liberty. Their case was dismissed by the magistrate but in such a way as to give rise to grave doubts about the justice of the proceedings.

  Eades pointed to a range of ways in which the court process disadvantaged the boys. They spoke Aboriginal English, a recognised and distinct dialect. They also used other, non-verbal ways of Aboriginal communication. However, neither the magistrate nor the prosecutors were aware of these cultural differences. Eades found that, like other Aboriginal people who do not have bicultural skills necessary to participate successfully in interviews,

  the boys were culturally disadvantaged by the pressured and prolonged question-answer sessions. Repeated direct questions, especially in a situation where silence is not allowed as part of the answer, are not an effective means of eliciting information from many Aboriginal people.

  This form of question can lead to what Eades defines as ‘gratuitous concurrence’; a tendency to say ‘Yes’ to any question regardless of whether or not the person agrees with the question, or even understands it. This is ‘a characteristic Aboriginal strategy for dealing with interviews, particularly in situations of serious power imbalance.’ Other cultural differences ignored in the court proceedings included the misinterpretation of silence as a normal part of Aboriginal communication which, in this instance, was taken to mean ‘No’ as answers to questions. Further problems arose in the misinterpretation of the boys’ disinclination to engage in direct eye contact. As Eades points out, in many Aboriginal societies throughout Australia, children learn it is disrespectful to make eye contact with an older person with whom they are speaking. However, the cross-examining counsel for the police officers:

  repeatedly insisted that one of the witnesses should look at him when answering questions. When this counsel suggested that the boy’s refusal to look at him was because he was thinking that ‘we’ll see lies written all over your face’, the court seemed totally unaware of the cultural issues involved, and again no objection was raised.313

  In effect, the juvenile justice system perpetuates a form of legal discrimination similar to the one their parents found during the assimilation era. It is discrimination based on extreme social disadvantage, a gross imbalance of power and unacknowledged cultural differences. In such circumstances the whole notion of ‘justice’ blurs.

  Although forming only 4 percent of the state’s population, in August 1995, 61 percent of youth in police custody in Western Australia were Aboriginal, the second highest rate in Australia. One in five of these young people was fourteen years or younger and over 90 percent already had an arrest history.314 The picture in detention centres is depressingly similar. In Western Australia, 57 percent of inmates were Aboriginal. The degree of over-representation is only fully revealed by a comparison with the number per one hundred thousand. For Aboriginal youth the detention rate is 734 youth per hundred thousand; for non-Aboriginal youth it is 23. The injustice inherent in the system is exposed by Michael Dodson, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner:

  In Western Australia, Aboriginal juveniles are 4.1 times more likely to be imprisoned, if convicted of a crime, than the next non-Aboriginal kid to stand in the same dock and get the same guilty verdict. The average number of charges per Aboriginal kid at each court appearance in Western Australia is 8.6, more than twice that per non-Aboriginal offender. It rises to 12.5 in metropolitan areas.315

  At all levels of contacts with Aboriginal youth, the criminal justice system in Western Australia rates among the highest of any State. This, in itself, reflects discrimination in operation, as Michael Dodson has so pointedly explained:

  The differential likelihood of Aboriginal kids being held in detention in different jurisdictions is a direct reflection of the intensity of systemic discrimination in each jurisdiction. The greater the prejudice in the police force, the more aggressive the police tactics, the deeper the systemic discrimination in health, housing, education and employment, which shape ‘neutral’ discretionary decisions by the police and judiciary, the deeper the alienation and hostility felt by Indigenous youth, the deeper their despair and recklessness, all factors that conspire to inflate the negative, punitive results of the juvenile justice system.316

  Dodson’s reference to the police is worth emphasising in more detail. The wide powers and considerable discretion at their disposal is frequently used to target and harass Aboriginal youth. Despite their renewed official anti-discrimination stance, police are not immune to the racism in the broader community. In fact, entrenched racism has a long history in sections of the Western Australian police force. Consequently, relations between many Aboriginal youth and police are conflict orientated.317

  The absence of community outrage against such a range of injustices is eerily reminiscent of attitudes towards Aborigines during the decades of assimilation. It represents a very similar ‘out-of-sight-out-of mind’ approach to the presence of Aboriginal children in our community. Under assimilation great power was given to the state to banish these young people to missions; now the ‘justice’ approach to their behavioural problems has sanctioned state power to remove many hundreds of them to detention centres over the past several decades. In both cases the removal process has been backed up by community opinion unsympathetic to its effects on these young people. The clamour of public opinion in Western Australia, as elsewhere, about juvenile crime has well-documented racist undertones,318 just like the attitudes which, from the 1930s, unquestioningly tolerated removal to missions. In each case, too, the aura of legal sanction has served to legitimise a process which lacks clear criminological or moral foundation.

  The assimilation laws created the myth of the ‘neglected’ child whose parents were unfit to keep it. The juvenile justice laws have created the ‘myth’ of the deviant Aboriginal youth who requires locking up in large numbers to ensure the public safety. Both are social creations born of racial attitudes which, if not openly hostile to Aboriginal people, are blithely indifferent to the causes and effects of their disadvantage.

  There are still deeper parallels between the justice and assimilation systems in their effects on Ab
original youth. Both systems undertook the removal of children while turning a blind eye to the underlying causes of Aboriginal social disadvantage, a disadvantage which has its historic roots in government policies towards Aboriginal people. In the era of assimilation the shocking conditions of the reserves, which made parenting such an unrelenting battle, were never systematically addressed. Instead, it better suited the purposes of government to remove the children. It is the same with contemporary Aboriginal juvenile crime.

  Crime is common among some Aboriginal young people, as it is among other socially disadvantaged groups. However, as one of the most marginal of all social groups, Aboriginal youth are particularly prone to involvement in crime, although the proportion is not known. Of great concern is the group of predominantly Aboriginal repeat offenders.319 Their way of life creates a self-perpetuating tendency towards criminal behaviour and requires sympathetic and insightful understanding. On the one hand, the forces of racial discrimination undermine the self-confidence of many young Aborigines making them liable to acts of retaliation while, on the other, endemic poverty breeds a spirit of despair which may be expressed in vengefulness.320 Inextricably linked with this is the destruction of their cultural heritage, which of course, is the very outcome the architects of assimilation had in mind. Today’s Aboriginal youth, and especially those living in urban areas, are the direct inheritors of the post-war drive for cultural destruction. As the Aboriginal Legal Service has explained:

  The assimilation and integration policies denied Aborigines their culture, and taught them to be ashamed of and renounce their race and traditions … Aboriginal youth suffer … cultural disempowerment. Many young Aborigines have never been exposed to, or have rejected the controls and authority of their own culture. Similarly many have been rejected by and reject the impositions and restrictions of non-Aboriginal society. For some Aboriginal children laws of neither society control them and as a result they consider themselves to have absolute freedom and apparent independence. That is until they come into contact with the justice system.321