Bringing Them Home - Stolen Generations

What was at stake

National Inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal children from families. Foundational understanding of intergenerational trauma driving justice contact.

What happened

Between 1910 and 1970, an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were forcibly removed from their families by Australian federal, state, and territory governments and church missions under various assimilation and 'protection' policies. Children were taken without parental consent, placed in institutions or with non-Indigenous families, forbidden from speaking their languages or maintaining cultural connections, and in many cases subjected to abuse and exploitation. Families were given no information about where their children were sent, and many were never reunited. The National Inquiry, conducted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission under Sir Ronald Wilson and Mick Dodson, gathered testimony from over 500 Aboriginal people and reviewed extensive documentary evidence about the scope, methods, and lasting harms of these removals.

What the court decided

Found removal policies were genocide. Recommended reparations, healing programs, family reunion. Understanding of intergenerational trauma from removals is essential context for youth justice overrepresentation.

How the court got there

The Inquiry reasoned that the forcible removal policies, assessed against international human rights law including the Genocide Convention, constituted genocide because they were carried out with the intent to destroy Aboriginal groups as such by transferring children permanently out of those groups. The Commission further found the removals violated rights to family, culture, and equality, and that the intergenerational trauma caused — including profound disruption to parenting capacity, cultural identity, and mental health across subsequent generations — was a direct and foreseeable consequence of deliberate government policy. Because the inquiry was a non-judicial commission rather than a court, its findings were recommendations rather than binding legal holdings, but its factual and human rights conclusions were grounded in extensive evidence and international legal standards.

Statutes and cases cited

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