Figures say that three out of five Aboriginal children in some parts of Australia are the victims of sexual abuse. The problem is so widespread that, last year, the Australian government sent police and troops into the Northern Territories to tackle it. So why is the Australian government apologising for its past policy of removing Aboriginal children from their own communities and bringing them up in white families?
The short answer is: Well, why not? Everybody's at it these days. Tony Blair apologised for the Famine; Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, apologised for the slave trade; the Catholic Church said sorry for the Crusades. What's one more apology among so many?
Especially in Australia, which already has a National Sorry Day, on which those descended from settlers rather than indigenous tribes are encouraged to beat themselves up for a few hours to atone for their colonial ancestors' crimes. And much fun is had by all in the process.
Indeed, apologising for things which were done by other people, often long before you were even born, is so addictive that once often isn't enough.
Individual states Down Under have already issued apologies for taking Aboriginal children away from their families.
What is being proposed now is an official apology by the federal government.
As gestures go, this probably has to qualify as one of the least contentious in recent times. Even those opposed in principle to the idea of nations apologising for mistakes made by previous generations are resigned to it happening. Their attitude is, "Let's get it over with, and move on."
Plus there's no compensation involved, so it's not going to cost anything more than the price of the paper on which to print the accompanying press release.
Meanwhile, those who think Aborigines are at least partly to blame for their own social problems in modern Australia, and are only using past grievances as a crutch on which to hang their community's failures, tend to keep their mouths shut, wise souls, for fear of being branded racists, or apologists for long-ago colonial aggression.
But it does seem odd that so much energy should be expended on making amends to previous generations of Aboriginal children taken from their families between 1910 and 1970, while the current generation of Aboriginal children is suffering sexual abuse on an unimaginable scale. The gap between this self-indulgent, middle-class bleating about past injustices and the present hell-like reality finds expression in a number of alarming ways.
It's commonplace in certain quarters, for example, to find sexual abuse in tribal lands being explained purely as an offshoot of the "structural violence experienced by aboriginal people in a settler- controlled nation", or for the government's measures to tackle the problem to be condemned for "ignoring the causes of social dysfunctionamong historically oppressed peoples".
In the same way, a young child, who had contracted syphilis at the age of five after being abused, was recently taken from a safe environment and returned to the Aboriginal community, resulting in her being repeatedly abused again, because white social workers believed that to keep her would be to instigate another "stolen generation" (as the Aboriginal children taken from their families in earlier decades are known).
Only an idiot would deny that the Aborigines are a people profoundly damaged by history, with all the social and psychological consequences that flow from that, but it would be an irresponsible society which elevated historical wrong-righting above present child protection, or even compromised the safety of children in pursuit of some bogus idea of political and ethnic sensitivity.
Obsessing over history in this manner is usually nothing but a distraction from the real problems facing any society -- and if you were of a cynical bent, you might even conclude that all these apologies were nothing more than deliberate stunts to convince the gullible that all is well with the world, and that the fortunate have done their duty by the unfortunate and can now go back to ignoring them.
There's certainly something smarmily paternalistic about the Australian authorities' promises to embark, post-apology, on a concerted effort to close the 17-year gap in life expectancy between Aborigines and settlers, and to tackle the alcoholism, substance abuse, poverty and horrendous mental illness which now haunts the original inhabitants of the island.
These people are citizens of a modern Australia. Such things are their right, not some gift which the white man in his boundless generosity may choose to bestow upon them.
But Aboriginal children are Australian citizens too, entitled to the full protection of the law. If the abuse which is inflicted on them on a systematic basis was happening to white children in Sydney and Melbourne, there'd be no calls to go easy on the perpetrators out of respect for their cultural and ethnic heritage.
Better to have a government which acts to protect children today than one which has nothing to offer but mealy-mouthed apologies to the victims years after.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No responsibility or liability shall attach itself to either myself or to the blogspot ‘Clerical Whispers’ for any or all of the articles placed here.
The placing of an article hereupon does not necessarily imply that I agree or accept the contents of the article as being necessarily factual in theology, dogma or otherwise.
Sotto Voce