Evaluate the removal policies that created the Stolen Generations and the response of the Bringing Them Home report as a human rights issue

What this dot point is asking

NESA wants you to evaluate the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children as a grave human rights violation, and to assess the responses, above all the Bringing Them Home report. This is a sensitive topic that you must handle with care and respect, centring the voices of survivors. It sits in Part 1, the 55-mark Social Justice and Human Rights Issues section, and rewards responses that connect the policy to international human rights standards.

The answer

The removal policies

From the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, governments and missions across Australia forcibly removed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. The policies were driven by assimilation thinking and by the explicit aim of absorbing children of mixed descent into the non-Indigenous population. Children were placed in institutions, missions and white foster homes, often denied contact with family, culture and language. Those affected are known as the Stolen Generations.

These were not isolated acts. They were lawful government policy, administered by Protection and Welfare Boards under state and territory legislation, which gave officials sweeping powers over where Aboriginal people could live, work and raise their children.

Why it is a human rights issue

Forced removal breached multiple rights now recognised internationally: the right to family life, the right of the child to its culture, and protection from racial discrimination. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007 specifically prohibits the forced removal of Indigenous children. In Aboriginal Studies terms, the policy denied equity, access, rights and participation at the deepest level, by trying to sever the transmission of culture between generations.

The Bringing Them Home report

The 1997 report was a landmark act of truth-telling. By gathering survivor testimony, it documented the scale and consequences of removal and named the policy as a gross violation of human rights. Its finding that the removals satisfied the definition of genocide, because they were intended to destroy the cultural foundations of a group, was confronting and contested, but it reframed the national conversation. Its recommendations covered reparations, the right to records, family reunion services and a formal apology.

Responses and redress

Government responses were partial and slow. The federal government of the day declined to apologise, though it funded some family reunion and counselling services such as Link-Up. On 13 February 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered the National Apology to the Stolen Generations in Parliament, a moment of national significance and symbolic justice. Redress has since included state schemes and, from 2022, the Commonwealth Territories Stolen Generations Redress Scheme for survivors removed in the territories. Many recommendations of the report, however, remain unimplemented, and survivors continue to call for fuller reparations.

Intergenerational trauma and ongoing effects

The harm did not end with removal. The loss of family, culture, language and Country produced intergenerational trauma that contributes to ongoing disadvantage in health, education and contact with the child protection and justice systems. Aboriginal children remain over-represented in out-of-home care today, which survivors and advocates describe as an unbroken thread from past policy. Healing led by Aboriginal communities, on their own terms, is central to any genuine response.

Evaluating the response

A strong HSC answer weighs symbolic and substantive justice. The report and the 2008 Apology were powerful acts of recognition and truth-telling that validated survivor experience. Yet the slow and incomplete implementation of reparations, and the continued removal of children into care, mean justice is unfinished. Always frame survivors as agents of healing and truth, not only as victims.