Plight and Fate of Children During and Following Genocide

Samuel Totten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351296380
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Genocide & War Crimes
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Plight and Fate of Children During and Following Genocide examines why and how children were mistreated during genocides in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Among the cases examined are the Australian Aboriginals, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Mayans in Guatemala, the 1994 Rwanda genocide, and the genocide in Darfur. Two additional chapters examine the issues of sexual and gender-based violence against children and the phenomenon of child soldiers.

Following an introduction by Samuel Totten, the essays include: "Australia's Aboriginal Children"; "Hell is for Children"; "Children: The Most Vulnerable Victims of the Armenian Genocide"; "Children and the Holocaust"; "The Fate of Mentally and Physically Disabled Children in Nazi Germany"; "The Plight and Fate of Children vis-a-vis the Guatemalan Genocide"; "The Plight of Children During and Following the 1994 Rwandan Genocide"; "Darfur Genocide"; "Sexual and Gender-Based Violence against Children during Genocide"; and, "Child Soldiers." Contributors include: Colin Tatz, Henry C. Theriault, Asya Darbinyan, Rubina Peroomian, Jeffrey Blutinger, Amanda Grzyb, Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, Sara Demir, Hannibal Travis, and Samuel Totten.

The editor and several of the contributors have personally investigated and witnessed the aftermath of genocidal campaigns.

1

Australia’s Aboriginal Children: Stolen or Saved?

Colin Tatz

Introduction

Why are Aboriginal children included in this volume? They weren’t murdered systematically as 1.2 million Jewish children were during the Holocaust. They were not institutionalized in euthanasia centers, deliberately emaciated, and then “put down” by lethal injection. They were not rounded up and killed by the Nazis as the Romani children were. They were not killed as Tutsi children were by extremist Hutu during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Nor were they “spared”—as Armenian, Assyrian, and Pontian Greek children were—when parents were coerced into their “Turkification” by adoption, forced marriages, or sexual chatteldom.

Aboriginal children are included herein because they were forcibly removed from their parents, from the early 1800s to the late 1980s, to fulfill a religious as well as an eugenicist fantasy, that their placement in a variety of “assimilation homes” would end their Aboriginality by moving them into the white, Christian, and “civilized” mainstream. Other alleged (and contradictory) motives were concerns about child abandonment or neglect by their parents, and hence their need of protection; fear by some well-wishers that white or “mixed-blood” contact would hasten the demise of “full-blood” Aborigines; and fear (by many) that a “hybrid colored population of very low order” threatened the prevailing civilization. Churchmen, police, government officials, and even private citizens were the instruments of forcible removal. Despite claims about “the best interests of the child” and “loving protection,” removals were not voluntary, consensual, or because of “reckless and depraved indifference”—what American law defines as wanton, morally deficient behavior, lacking regard for human life, and hence criminally blameworthy.

Another question that needs to be addressed is this: Why is the forcible transfer of children of one group to another group considered as criminally heinous as the deliberate ending of procreative, “feebleminded,” or biological life? First, the 1946–1948 Genocide Conventions (the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; hereafter, UNCG) drafting committees were heavily influenced by the horrific racial policies and practices of that decade. Some UN delegates may have remembered the fate of Armenian children. None, though, would have known about the Australian Aboriginal experience, deliberately hidden from public view for so long. Second, the first draft of the UNCG defined three categories of genocide: biological, physical, and cultural. The drafters excluded cultural genocide, but later, by the smallest of margins, agreed to an exception by way of Article 11(e), “forcible transfer of children” Thus, child transfer came to be equated as an act of genocide with biological and physical killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy a group, and sterilization. Whether we agree with such synonymy of unequal behaviors (and outcomes) is irrelevant. Forcible transfer of children has been a genocidal and criminal act since January 1951 when the UNCG went into force, and is likely to be so for the next fifty years in the catalog of crimes scheduled by the (2002) statute of the International Criminal Court.

Child Removal—With Intent

Are the “Stolen Generations”—the term current since the 1980s—an ethical or conceptual category, a collective which “simply” suffered one or another form of mistreatment, relocation, dislocation, or separation? Or were they individuals removed by duress and force to special institutions to be divested of their Aboriginality?

Notions of assimilation, including “retention” and separation of children, usually of mixed descent, began as early as 1814. New South Wales Governor Lachlan Macquarie created a “Native Institution” at Parramatta to “civilize” children for at least ten to twelve years, preparing boys for agricultural work and girls for domestic service, with no parental visits and no holidays-at-home time. All the children absconded and the institution closed in 1820. “Retentions” were prevalent at Yarra Government Mission (1837–1839), Buntingdale Mission (1838–1848), and Merri Creek Baptist School (1845–1851)—all of which were institutions in that part of New South Wales that was to become the separate colony of Victoria in 1851. Employers across the spreading frontiers also “retained” children, often for “work” purposes. After the Victorian Aborigines’Protection Act of1869, statutes in Australian colonial/state jurisdictions allowed governmental guardianship of all Aboriginal children, with power to remove children of mixed descent in order to absorb them either culturally or physically into the general population (Tatz 2011a, 96–97).

Child removal gained momentum after federation in 1901 and lasted another three or four generations. For well over a century, across the continent, between 20,000 and 35,000 children, possibly 50,000—often the progeny of Aboriginal women and white cattle ranch workers, crop growers, miners, and adventurers—were taken away to dormitories, reformatories, hostels, mission properties, and especial “assimilation homes.” The assimilation homes that were run by govenremnt staff and by church agencies flourished. Several were in urban domains, some in settled rural areas, but most were in remote Australia. Over time, Western Australia had no less than eighty-four such state-run institutions, another fifty-nine were run by various church denominations, and seven were nondenominational homes (for all children). Most had a longish life. New South Wales closed Kinchela Boys’ Home (established 1924) in 1970; Colebrook Children’s Home in South Australia (1927) terminated in 1972; the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin (1946) ceased in 1980; Western Australia closed one of its major institutions, Sister Kate’s Orphanage (1933), in 1987; and the last such mission institution in Bomaderry (NSW) (1908) shut down in 1988.

In northern Australia, “yellafellas,” the common derogatory term used for “half-castes,” were embarrassments to a society desperate to maintain its whiteness and were quickly taken to institutions to extinguish their Aboriginality (Choo 2001, 143–51). Private shame led to removals becoming a cornerstone of action by state and federal administrators. Australians always assumed that their culture and color genes were the stronger. Dr. Cecil Cook, Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, had no doubt about it: “Generally by the fifth and invariably by the sixth generation, all native characteristics of the Australian Aborigines are eradicated. The problem with our half-castes will quickly be eliminated by the complete disappearance of the black race, and the swift submergence of their progeny in the white” (Gray 2011, 61).

Australian eugenics was not simply an ad hoc policy of “misguided child welfare,” which has been the inevitable theme and counterclaim by denialists of removal with intent.

The “Science” of Removal

In Western Australia, harsh views about aboriginals were a regular occurrence. In 1904, Father Nicholas Emo told the Royal Commission on the Condition of the Natives that “the children ought to be sent to the mission schools (where there are Sisters or Matrons), while the half-castes should be sent to reformatories” (Choo 2001,144). In his opinion, “the half-caste girls are in general of a very vicious temperament” (Choo 2001, 144). In 1909, the Chief Protector in Western Australia, Charles Gale (1909), quoted one of his traveling protectors, James Isdell: “The half-caste is intellectually above the aborigine, and it is the duty of the State that they be given a chance to lead a better and purer life than their mothers. I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its Aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic her momentary grief might be at the time. They soon forget their offspring” (7).

It was but a “maudlin sentiment” to leave children with their Aboriginal mothers, Isdell added: “They forget their children in twenty-four hours and as a rule [were] glad to be rid of them” (Haebich 2000, 233).

In 1911, the State Children’s Council in South Australia was the major body concerned with the welfare (and removal) of children. Cameron Raynes (2009, 2–13) and Anna Haebich (2000, 199) cite an “unequivocal statement” of the intent to “put an end to Aboriginality” or at least significant manifestations of it—such as the kinship relationships, communality and reciprocity systems, birth, circumcision and mourning rituals, earlier than “normal” sexual development, and color (if possible). The Council wrote on the proposal to remove “half-caste, quadroon and octoroon” Aboriginal children, paying “special attention” to the girls: “The Council is fully persuaded of the importance of prompt action in order to prevent the growth of a race that would rapidly increase in numbers, attain a maturity without education or religion, and become a menace to the morals and health of the community. The Council … feels that no consideration … should be permitted to block the way of the protection and elevation of these unfortunate children” (Raynes 2009, 13).

Several of the key state bureaucrats—Charles Gale and Dr. Walter Roth early in the century, and later, Auber Octavius Neville in Western Australia, John William Bleakley in Queensland, Dr. Cecil Cook in the Northern Territory, and a few years later, William Penhall in South Australia—were educated men and were doubtless aware of the eugenicist principles prevalent in Europe and the United States. Ultimately, their ideas were consummated at a national summit of ministers and their officials in Canberra in 1937: “The destiny of the natives of Aboriginal origin, but not of full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth and it is therefore recommended that all efforts shall be directed to this end” (quoted in Tatz 2003, 88–94). These men never defined absorption, but the kernel of their ideas was physical distance from tribal kin and, ideally, disappearance of color and ethnicity. These bureaucrats were part of a Western tradition which has long contended that some lives are more valuable, more worthy, than others. They were hardly the pioneers of what came to be called “racial hygiene” in the early twentieth century, but their ideas go to the heart of genocidal thought and action, that is, resorting to biological solutions to social (and racial) problems (Aly, Chroust, and Pross 1994, 1).

Neville presented a three-point biological plan. First, keep “full-bloods” in inviolable reserves where they are destined to die out. Second, take all “half-castes” away from their mothers. Third, control marriages so that “pleasant, placid, complacent, strikingly attractive, auburn-haired, and rosy-freckled” quarter- and half-blood Aboriginal maidens marry into the white community. In doing so, it would be possible to “eventually forget that there were ever any Aborigines in Australia” (quoted in Beresford and Omaji 1998, 48).

Neville also asserted that: “The native must be helped in spite of himself! … Even if a measure of discipline is necessary it must be applied, but it can be applied in such a way as to appear to be gentle persuasion… the end in view will justify the means employed” (quoted in Haebich 2000, 259). Here, indeed, is the quintessence of Australian genocidal intent—the erasure of the Aboriginal presence, one way or another. Dr. Cecil Bryan recommended the following to the 1934 Moseley Royal Commission regarding the treatment of Western Australian Aborigines: “I am come to the Commission to ask that steps be taken to breed out the half-caste, not in a moment, but in a few generations, and not by force but by science. I mean the application of the principle of the Mendelian law” (quoted in Haebich 1988, 320).

Some of these notions became official practices. The “full-blood” people in isolated reserves didn’t die out, an abiding and enduring premise of both those who had a care and concern for Aborigines and those who despised or attacked them. After 1937, some reserves were phased out but dozens of new ones were established and older ones reinforced by tougher regulations. Coaxed (or even coerced) Christian marriages, as proposed by A. O. Neville, were never going to succeed but child removal by policemen and other officials became the order of the day.

Public Awareness

Whatever explanations and rationalizations were offered before 1949, there can be no justification of forcible child removal after Australia ratified the UNCG in June 1949. And yet, it persisted.

In the late 1970s, the Aboriginal Child Care Agency in Victoria and in South Australia agitated against child removal and in 1980, a New South Wales Link-Up movement began to fight removals and retrieve children. Ultimately, the long-suppressed saga of child removal started to come into some public discussion several years after Peter Read s 1981 pioneering monograph helped bring the phrase “Stolen Generations” into Australia’s political vocabulary. That “dissociating the children from [native] camp life must eventually solve the Aboriginal problem” was official New South Wales practice. To leave them where they were, “in comparative idleness in the midst of more or less vicious surroundings,” the government claimed, would be “an injustice to the children themselves, and a positive menace to the State” (Read 1981, 7). Read found 5,625 removals in that jurisdiction between 1883 and 1969. In the documentary records, there was space allocated for a column headed “Reasons for [Aborigines Welfare Board] Taking Control of the Child” The great majority of entries carried the handwritten entry, “For Being Aboriginal” (Read 1981, 6). After 1939, removals in that state required a hearing before a magistrate.

Read stated on the ABC televisions 7.30 Report (April 3,2000) that 50,000 was the likely number of removed children across the country. Several denialists claim that “only” 10 percent of children were forcibly removed. Arithmetic doesn’t alter the precepts of the UNCG, and here the word “only” is both mischievous and obfuscatory. The matter of intent to destroy in “whole or in part” is certainly not specific in the UNCG: we know intuitively what “whole” is, but the term “in part” is both unclear and unresolvable.

By 1980, when the Link-Up movement began in New South Wales and sprea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Australia’s Aboriginal Children: Stolen or Saved?
• 2. Hell Is for Children: The Impact of Genocide on Young Armenians and the Consequences for the Target Group as a Whole
• 3. Children: The Most Vulnerable Victims of the Armenian Genocide
• 4. Children and the Holocaust
• 5. The Fate of Mentally and Physically Disabled Children in Nazi Germany
• 6. The Plight and Fate of Children vis-à-vis the Guatemalan Genocide
• 7. The Plight of Children during and following the 1994 Rwandan Genocide
• 8. The Darfur Genocide: The Plight and Fate of the Black African Children
• 9. Sexual and Gender-Based Violence against Children during Genocide
• 10. Child Soldiers: Children’s Rights in the Time of War and Genocide
• List of Contributors
• Index