Stolen Generation: Ethnographic Case Study

Throughout Australia’s short colonist history the lives of Indigenous individuals and groups have been greatly impacted mostly to a negative degree as the invasion of White Settlers in 1788 set up centuries of inequity and unfair treatment of Aboriginal Australians. Green and Saggers (2013) state that Australian policy in the early twentieth century allowed governmental bodies to legally remove Indigenous children from their families for a multitude of reasons. The Aborigines Protection Act (NSW 1909) with its amendments and other legislative policies allowed for the events of what is now coined as the ‘Stolen Generation’ to occur (Dungeon, 2014). The devastating events that occurred during this time period significantly impacted all Aboriginal

The psychological damage done to the lives of those who were taken continue to be impacted and further pass down its impacts to younger generations. In contemporary society, Aboriginal families face psychological trauma in complex varieties, including grief, mental illnesses, family violence, parenting practises and behavioural problems (Dungeon, 2014). Murphy (2011) notes that in an ethnographic case study, she found many instances of parental grief as some parents did not end up seeing their children ever again after they had been taken away. The trauma of physically losing a child would have everlasting effects on the parents’ mental health as well as their families, especially with the context of having no contact or information about their exact whereabouts (Ibid). As mentioned previously, the mental health of children from the Stolen Generations were significantly impacted and a strong inequity in health demonstrates how Aboriginal families still agonize the trauma decades after the events initially occurred. Issues surrounding domestic violence are very prevalent in Australian society, moreover, there is a higher rate of violence in remote Indigenous communities in rural areas than other Indigenous families in urban areas (Poole, 2005). The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Women’s Taskforce on Violence Report (ABS, 2000) cites that this statistic is caused by reasons such as cultural fragmentation, dispossession, and marginalisation in society. Subsequently, Topp (1997) writes that young Aboriginal mothers in Victoria who were taken as children had a limited understanding of motherhood and this is due to the lack of a role model during their teenage years to learn their parenting skills. A lack of understanding parental skills has a direct impact on younger generations as Topp (1997)