Kinship placements risk creating a Lost Generation

For six years, the CIS's child protection research has comprehensively explored the major issues facing the child protection system across Australia, and has called for the greater use of adoption to address the systemic problems that impede the proper care and protection of vulnerable children.
 
However, this research has, up until now, slid over the most sensitive issue – the tragic fact that Indigenous children are many times over-represented in cases of child abuse and neglect.
 
To talk of adoption in relation to Indigenous children is to invite the politically explosive claim that this would create 'another Stolen Generation'.
 
This, in part, is the reason why the NSW Government decided to exclude indigenous children from its 2013 adoption-based child protection reforms. Instead, decisions about Indigenous children who need to be removed from their parents for child welfare reasons will continue to be made in accordance with the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (ACPP).
 
The ACPP means that all efforts will continue to be made to place children in 'kinship care', preferable with relatives, or members of the local community, or other indigenous people.
 
The theory behind the ACPP is sound. Child removal practices associated with the Stolen Generations damaged many Indigenous people by denying them contact with their families, communities, and with traditional culture. It therefore makes sense to try to maintain children's cultural identity by placing them close to home if they can't live safely with their families.
 
The problem, in practice, however, is the social problems in many Indigenous communities, which makes it difficult to reconcile considerations of culture and identity with child welfare.
Indigenous children placed in kinship care can be taken out of the frying pan of family dysfunction only to be placed back into the fire of broader community dysfunction. Hence, recent official inquiries in state and territory child protection systems have noted the "lesser standard care" that can be received by some indigenous children, who are placed into situations that non-Indigenous children would not be placed in order to comply with the ACPP.
 
What is and isn't done to protect Indigenous children has national implications. Denying Indigenous children the safe and nurturing family environments all children need to thrive threatens to keep open the gaps in social outcomes and opportunities between the most disadvantaged Indigenous Australians and other Australians – gaps that all intelligent Australians acknowledge are our deepest national shame.
 
This is the thinking behind the CIS's new report. We must address the 'kinship conundrum', and rethink well-intentioned policies such as the ACPP, if we are to 'Close the Gap' and achieve true Reconciliation.
 
My report therefore challenges much of the thinking behind the ACPP, which I argue is outdated compared with much contemporary Indigenous policy, and compared to modern understandings and definitions of Indigenous identity. What the report does not do is ignore the legacy of the Stolen Generation or deny the importance of maintaining Indigenous children's cultural identity.
 
What I do argue is that we need, in children's best interests, to find better ways to reconcile cultural identity with child welfare – such as through cultural support and education programs run by Indigenous organisations for Indigenous children who are adopted (or placed in permanent care).

Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. His report, The Kinship Conundrum: The Impact of Aboriginal Self-Determination on Indigenous Child Protection, was released on Monday, 8 December 2014.