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TechnoratiAustralian PM Kevin Rudd Issues Apology to British Child Migrants
Kevin Rudd, the Australian prime minister, has issued an emotional apology to 7,000 British child migrants who suffered abuse and neglect in the country's state-run orphanages and religious institutions.
He also apologised to the 500,000 "Forgotten Australians" who were taken from their families and placed in care homes around the country.
![[In this 1953 black and white photo released by the National Archives of Australia shown are British orphans working in a garden at Melrose House, near Parramatta, Australia. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd issued a historic apology Monday, Nov. 16, 2009, to thousands of impoverished British children shipped to Australia with the promise of a better life, only to suffer abuse and neglect thousands of miles from home. (AP Photo/National Archives of Australia) ]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/ruddapologizes_childmigants.jpg "ruddapologizes_childmigants.jpg")
"We come together today to offer our nation's apology. To say to you, the
Forgotten Australians, and those who were sent to our shores as children
without their consent, that we are sorry," Mr Rudd said.
"Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. Sorry for the tragedy – the absolute tragedy – of childhoods lost."
Mr Rudd spoke specifically about the experiences of thousands of British children taken from their families and sent to Australia.
"We acknowledge in particular the children shipped to Australia as child migrants, robbed of your families, robbed of your homelands, regarded, not as innocent children, but sources of child labour," he said.
"To those who were told they were orphans but were taken here without their parents consent, we acknowledge the lies you were told, the lies told to your mothers and fathers and the pain the lies caused for a life time.
"To those of you separated on the dockside from your brothers and sisters, taken alone and unprotected to the most remote parts of a foreign land, we acknowledge today that the laws of our nation failed you.
"And for this we are deeply sorry."
Some in the audience wept openly as Mr Rudd shared painful stories of children he'd spoken with — children who were beaten with belt buckles and bamboo, raped and who grew up in places they called "utterly loveless."
He said he hoped the national apology would help to "heal the pain" and be a turning point in Australian history.
The apology was welcomed by victims of the system, despite ongoing calls for compensation.
It came two days after Gordon Brown said he would issue an apology to all child migrants deported from Britain early next year.
Child migrants to Australia have told of terrible physical, psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of those who were supposed to be caring for them. The average age of child migrants to Australia was eight, but some children were sent away as young as two.
In the 1990s one man told a British parliamentary committee of the criminal abuse he was subjected at the hands of Catholic priests at Tardun in Western Australia.
A number of Christian brothers competed between themselves to see who could rape him 100 times first, he said.
Because the men liked his blue eyes, he would beat himself in an attempt to make them change colour.
Other children have told of having to eat flies to survive and of being forced to beat other children. When they told adults about the abuse, they were not believed.
Sandra Anker was sent to Australia in 1950 aged just six years old - or "exiled", as she described it.
"I spent years waiting for someone to realise they had made a mistake and to come and collect me," she told the BBC. "I was at a loose end for a very long time."
"It took years and years of misery of not knowing where we'd come from, who were, being denied our birthright of being British.
"It's really been horrendous. And I wouldn't wish it on anyone... We need to be welcomed back to our homeland."
Many of the children sent to Australia - predominantly from impoverished British families - were told their parents were dead, and that a better life awaited them in Australia. Their parents were given very little information about where the children were going, many didn't know they had left the country. On arrival in Australia, the young migrants were separated from their brothers and sisters and plunged into a life of hardship and brutality.
Now adults, many suffer from health problems as a result of their time in care.
In total 150,000 British children may have been shipped abroad between 1618 – when a group was sent to the Virginia Colony – and 1967, most of them from the late 19th century onwards.
A 2001 Australian report said that between 6,000 and 30,000 children from Britain and Malta, often taken from unmarried mothers or impoverished families, were sent alone to Australia as migrants during the 20th century.
10 Comments so far
Show AllNever trust anybody who tries to tell you they have connections with supernatural authorities.
If absolute power corrupts absolutely then buying into the Catholic Church's claim of being God's representative on earth is a clear invitation to an organized religion to bully and bludgeon without mercy or limits.
I was once told by a protestant man of the cloth that he could, if he wished, consign my soul to hell.
Child slave labor in the United States is often hard to detect mainly because slaveholders range from lawyers to pharmacists to child welfare works to teachers. Slave owners regions, age and income are usually very different as well. Therefore, owners benefit from the free labor and also from the limited risk that there is in being caught. A new law was passed in 2000, The Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act. This law provides a basis to charge perpetrators but it is difficult to win these cases because they must actually be discovered. Law enforcement officials are also not trained as well as they should be on how to detect cases of indentured servitude.
Fortunately, awareness of this horrific problem is being raised. Many groups such as the American Anti-Slavery Group, the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking, the Human Rights Law Group and the Campaign for Migrant Domestic Workers Rights help to raise awareness of slavery within the United States and also help former slaves to speak out about their own experiences. There are also several websites which show graphic pictures and descriptions of life as a slave.
Sources Used:
Reinhardt, Dorothy. Modern-Day Slavery in America. World & I, Feb2001, Vol. 16 Issue 2, p52, 6p, 3c.
Pasztor, Eileen Mayers; McFadden, Emily Jean, Child Labor: A Forgotten Focus on Child Welfare. Child Welfare, Sep/Oct2001, Vol. 80 Issue 5, p611, 12p.
"Ending Child Labor." Time for Kids, 9/20/96, Vol. 2 Issue 2, p4, 2p, 2c.
www.hrlawgroup.org
www.iabolish.com
" ... one man told a British parliamentary committee of the criminal abuse he was subjected at the hands of Catholic priests at Tardun in Western Australia. A number of Christian brothers competed between themselves to see who could rape him 100 times first ..."
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After the revelations of similar nightmares under Catholics in Newfoundland, and then in Ireland, then all over the U.S. and Canada, then ....... well, everywhere ... I have to wonder why, in the name of good sense, people stay in that nightmare of a religion. Sorry, but I had a stint in Catholic school. The brutality was amazing, both physical (yes, fists on children) and psychological. Thereafter I've learned from friends who have also had terrible experiences.
When revelations first started coming out in the US, John Paul ll actually blamed it on the permissiveness of US society. Really! Later, when similar revelations started coming in from all over the world, US priests were told that further instances had to be referred to the Vatican, not the press. There, of course, they disappeared under the authority of a Cardinal ... who is now Pope.
Do we have an apology from England for dumping her citizens?
Gordon Brown has said he will issue one.
The myth that the profit margin leaps fully intact from the mind of Athena to the tune of Nero's fiddle needs to be dispelled. Profit margin and marginalization go hand in hand in globalization - the recognition by the Australian gov't indicating one set of roots. The film Rabbit Proof Fence tells another part of the story.
Gobalization is a politics of the consumate fact, presented as something that is not yet finished/perfected to keep people 'on board' an already floundering ship.
The "predictions" of water shortages are the advertising spin for water control underway.
The margin has been exported and reimported but the exploitation is onging.
Large scale industrial agriculture's claim to fame of a green revolution is bunk. The initial idea was hijacked early on and is resulting in desertification, agrotoxin poisoning, loss of biodiversity, massive misuse of water resources, ethnocide, genocide, societal destabilization, claims for the necessity of massive instructure (massive hydroelectric works like 3Gorges dam in China and Belo Monte in Brazil etc.) and misrepresentations of history.
Kudos to the Rudd government for at least doing the right first step with those truly unfortunate persons (and with the Aborigines as well, something the Howard government pointedly refused to do time and again). What happens afterward is important as well.
Throwing another shrimp on the barbie?
Western culture
governance/religion
a proud legacy
So when do the religious groups apologize for the abuse? When are the abusers punished?
When will we stop covering up some of the worst abuses of power? The greatest powers in the world have causes some of the worst abuses. We are always so eager to point the finger at others wrongs but when it comes time to admit our own mistakes we first blame others then cover up and then tell everyone all the great things we have done. This world is sick and getting sicker.
Children are still used and abused in factories, fields and brothels. The rich of the world abuse childeren to get cheap products to sell to the poor. I doubt this will ever change, humans will not change.