The Stolen Generation: Who Is Responsible, And Can Past Wrongs Be Made Right?

8 Pages 1923 Words

According to Bringing Them Home , between 10-33% of indigenous Australians comprised of the “Stolen Generation”: people who, as children, were for forcibly removed from their families and communities. This report says that all Aboriginal families at the time were affected badly by the government’s behaviour, and that this was because of the law from 1910 that tried to ‘assimilate’ the Aborigines into white Australians culture.

Some people have called this “our legacy of unutterable shame” . Manne has argued that the Aborigines suffered very badly and endured a lot of shame and crime because of this . The forced seperation of children from there families was a violation of their basic human rights: no government should have ever been able to do this. Every time this seperation occurred, there must have been somebody there to see it. Maybe a nurse or missionary, to see the children and the parents crying who were upset at being taken away. It is suggested that modern Australia has a difficult time acknowledging who was responsible for what happened because of how atrocious and severe the events were, and because we can still see how it effects the Aborigines now .

In this essay I will be looking at the causal and moral/social responsibility. Australia and some of its subsidiary bodies may be deemed to be ‘responsible’ for the Stolen Generation in the legal sense. The treatment of the Aborigines by the state and church has been said to be Genocide by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) according to the United Nations definition . Also the Stolen Generation may be able to launch a civil action against the Australian Government . However, the focus of this essay is not intended to be on legal responsibility, some legal things such as legislation and the Australian constitution are involved with the two types of responsibility mentioned before.

Social responsibility, which for all intensive pu...