Australia to apologise for child abuse under state care

More has been written about the formal apology being sent to so many.

Meanwhile, little is being written about what is being done so history does not keep repeating itself.

Thousands of British children who suffered abuse in Australian institutions after being sent there by UK authorities are to receive an official apology, it emerged today.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will publicly say sorry after his government said their treatment in care homes was ‘unacceptable’.

Up to 10,000 youngsters, including orphans and children forcibly taken from unmarried mothers and impoverished families, were sent to Australia between 1922 and 1967.

With the encouragement of organisations like the Salvation Army and Barnardos they were sent as migrants to boost the country’s population with “good white stock”.

But many of those who made the 10,000-mile journey went on to lead to a life of starvation, slave labour and sexual abuse.

Mr Rudd’s apology will come eight years after a 2001 Senate report on child immigration recommended his predecessor John Howard to express his government’s regret for the misery endured by half a million children who lived in horrific institutions and apalling foster homes.

It follows his historic apology to Aborigines who taken from their mothers placed in state care during the last century.

Jenny Macklin, the Families and Indigenous Affairs Minister, today said a formal apology would probably take place before the end of the year.

She added: 'Many former child migrants and other children who were in institutions, their families and the wider community have suffered from a system that did not adequately provide for, or protect children in its care.

‘This is a significant national step in the healing process for forgotten Australians and former child migrants.’

TMany of the he British victims, whose average age was eight, often developed drug and alcohol addictions found it impossible to hold down jobs or marriages.

As soon as they arrived at an insitution they were given a number which replaced their name, and dressed in rags – with shoes becoming a luxury.

They were uniformly fed rotting food - ‘maggoty, mouldy, weevilly,’ a former child migrant described it in a submission to the 2001 inquiry.

Another said: ‘The freshest part of the food actually moved.’

They faced regular beatings with straps, canes and even cricket bats were common as was sexual assault.

In some Christian Brothers institutes, small boys were forced into bestial acts.

Many of the institutions farmed the children out to industrial laundries and local farms as slave labour.

And, even into the 1970s, hundreds of children and babies as young as seven months old were used as guinea pigs for new vaccines that did not work or failed to pass safety tests in animals.

The announcement of the apology has been welcomed by the Alliance for Forgotten Australians, which represents those who suffered in state care.

Caroline Carrol, chairwoman of the AFA, said: ‘As children, many of us experienced horrors in the places that were supposed to care for us,’ she said.

‘As adult survivors, we need acknowledgment of and an apology for the harm that was done to us.

‘The apology is an excellent beginning to what we hope will be a comprehensive government response.’

The apology, which may be delivered jointly by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1210026/Australian-PM-apologise-10-000-forced-British-migrant-children-abused-homes.html#ixzz0PmRu0zX7