Please save these children.

In 2003 Dr Lara Wieland was the resident Royal Flying Doctor medico on Kowanyama Aboriginal Community in Cape York. Her abhorrence at the incidence of sexual abuse of young children forced her to write a 10-page letter to Prime Minister John Howard and Queensland Premier Peter Beattie.

After she handed the letter to Mr Howard, she was sacked by the Queensland Department of Health for making public her concerns.

She has been widely hailed as “The Angel of the Cape” for her humanitarian work among Aboriginal children.

This is an excerpt from a piece she wrote for The Australian immediately after Sorry Day. I strongly urge people to read the whole article.

I could not fathom the possibility that so many people in a community would “not care” about their children. The dysfunction has become so deep that many people do not even realise the damage that is being done to their young people.

They hardly bat an eyelid at events that would make your stomach churn. A young mother in a drunken state beats her young child with a stick and screams that she is going to kill him. The next day, that same mother, sober, hugs her child and does not even think about the lasting emotional scars. Why would she when her mother did the same to her, and her neighbours do the same, and no one has ever told her that it is wrong?

Children who have had sexually transmitted diseases and have been raped and molested are now parents. No one ever helped them or told them that what happened to them was wrong or not normal. Today’s teenage parents grew up in homes with hardly any furniture or toilet paper or soap or toothpaste.

They don’t know what it means to make your child wash with soap in the shower or brush their teeth at night. They eat meals that materialise – if they’re lucky – occasionally around pay day…

Boys raping younger boys becomes just boys “playing gay” – to be “told off”. Yes, young boys do often engage in explorative sexual play but that is completely different to non-consensual acts where pre-pubescent boys sodomise little kids with objects while they scream out “no”, or where older teenagers or adults watch as they make younger teenagers rape little kids, who then have nightmares….

I can see now what I couldn’t understand before – why a person could feed their child hardly at all, sporadically send them to school, yell at them, criticise them, beat them and then still genuinely be heartbroken, despairing and confused when their child is removed from them. Some people, in their heart, really didn’t realise that what they were doing was so bad. In fact, you’ll often hear someone say, “But why did I lose my kid for that when I know many other families who are doing the same or worse?”

Dysfunction is so entrenched that large swaths of the population’s children could meet the definition for removal because of abuse and/or neglect. It is impossible to remove all the children who would meet the criteria for removal. Certainly, children who are at immediate risk or who are in an unsafe situation must be removed immediately, and away from the community…

There needs to be a solution to this problem before we “lose” an entire generation to the dysfunction of their parents…

…

And yet the “Stolen Generations Alliance” has made a huge number of demands in a report handed in person to new Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin recently, the most frightening of which to me is this one, as reported by political correspondent Daniel Street:

The success of the Rudd Government’s apology “depended on more than just the ceremony and the wording”, with SGA insisting that the government should “specifically declare that forcible child removals will never happen again in Australia under any circumstance and under any future government“.

As I read that, they’re demanding that in order to avoid another “Stolen Generation,” abused and neglected children could only ever be saved (”stolen”) with the explicit permission of their parents. And even permission might not be enough, for as we’ve seen with some Aborigines who now claim to have been “stolen,” they were actually voluntarily handed over to various welfare institutions by their family.

If we accept the Bringing Them Home report’s accusation that the “stolen generations” were an attempt at genocide of the Aboriginal race by the Australian Government, what child protection worker in their right mind would dare to advocate another child removal, even with the parents’ permission? For who wants to be implicated in another “genocide” accusation, no matter how groundless, 30 or 40 or 50 years from now?

Now, please, take the time to read the text of Dr Lara Wieland’s letter to Prime Minister John Howard in 2003, five years ago now. The one that, according to The Australian and other sources, helped get her sacked by the Queensland Department of Health for making public her concerns.

And a final note: Keep in mind that neither the Coalition nor the ALP seem to have been able to make much of an inroad into this issue as of yet, so please, nobody should go jumping on their high moral horse; if for no other reason than that it’s hard to see the little children from way up there, and they’ve been trampled enough already.