Care-leaver activism and criminogenic welfare: An Australian case study

Introduction

The Out-Of-Home Care (OOHC) of Australian children on welfare grounds has come under intense scrutiny in the past three decades. Much of this stems from the survivor-activism of care-leavers (those formerly in care), which has highlighted the social harms resulting from the 20th century's so-called “welfare” practices, and the ongoing legacies of those systems. This article draws on our research aiming to produce the first in-depth history of the grassroots care-leaver activism that brought the field to light. Its goal is not primarily to detail the evolution of care-leaver activism – that is consolidated in the project's publicly accessible interactive timeline (More than Our Childhoods, 2024). Here, we highlight the insights afforded through the “insider” perspective of the lead author (Wilson) as a care-leaver herself (Hodkinson, 2005; Kanuha, 2000), combined with the project's participatory research (Australian Catholic University Human Research Ethics Approval Number 2021-126R), to highlight the limitations of government responses to the issues raised by survivor-activists, arguing that a major blockage has been Australian governments’ inability to accept that they have embedded child welfare systems which are inherently both criminal and criminogenic.

Failure to consider the criminality of historical government-run systems – as distinct from acknowledging that criminal actions took place within those systems – is a significant barrier to restorative justice for care-leavers, and perpetuates radical social harms (regarding social harm due to official indifference to institutional malfeasance, see Canning & Tombs, 2021, pp. 65–70, 78–9; Hillyard & Tombs, 2021, pp. 17–18). Australia is littered with literal crime scenes, sites of extensive abuse of children which “was all too often not simply inherent in, but essential to, institutional operation” (Swain, 2018, p. 153). Furthermore, child welfare systems not only committed crimes against children, but created environments in which the criminalisation of children was the unexceptional norm. Across Australia, minors were removed from their families, often becoming the formal responsibility of State governments as wards of the State, and placed in residential institutions (e.g., emergency shelters, orphanages, “children's homes” and “training centres”) or fostered in private homes. Too many such children endured institutional and foster placements within a system which constructed the children, rather than itself, as the problem (Musgrove & Michell, 2018; on the establishment's modes of avoidance of responsibility in an analogous case, see Stanley et al., 2024).

Care-leaver survivor-activism coalesced around core identity and justice issues, showing growing tenacity and adaptability in demanding formal government responses. As we show, there have been some gains in terms of acknowledgement and restorative justice, but also persistent reluctance or inability on the part of governments to reckon with the crimes they committed and enabled as “corporate parents” (Fitzpatrick & Williams, 2017; Stanley et al., 2024). Frustrated by this, some survivor-activists have turned to international law to gain recognition of the criminality of the systems they grew up in (CLAN, 2012). This article is also a call for criminologists, many of whom have examined this issue through other lenses, to take seriously the implicit claim of survivor-activism – that child welfare systems were (and may still be) inherently criminal and criminogenic.

Social harms and criminogenic welfare

The word crimes is used here to describe actual violations of Australian State and Federal laws within historical child welfare systems, as well as those systems’ violations of the citizens’ rights upon which the laws of the nation are based. These are systems that not only inflict significant harm, they have routinely produced criminality, rhetorically and literally. Even so, in highlighting this dangerous anomaly, we favour a “social harms” approach, sometimes referred to as “zemiological”, that “moves beyond … narrow confines of criminology” (Hillyard et al., 2004, p. 1). Multiple inquiries (e.g., Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse [hereafter Royal Commission], 2017; Senate Community Affairs References Committee [SCARC], 2004) have established that criminal acts under the laws of the day were committed against State wards residing, unwillingly, in institutions and foster homes. Furthermore, the imprisonment of young citizens at all, non-offending and often themselves victims of offences, constituted a prima facie violation of their human rights (Wilson, 2013, pp. 85, 89), and disdain for natural justice.

To these harms inflicted by historical child welfare systems, acknowledged as criminal in nature, we add that the process of becoming a State ward in the first place, and much preceding it, was so intrusive, impinged so radically upon the individual, that in any other ordinary societal context it would be regarded as crimes against the person. Wilson, who was in care institutions as a child then State wardship as an adolescent, recalls a moment at age thirteen, when, at the instigation of a visiting youth worker, the police were summoned to her home to take her to task for her untidy bedroom. A female police officer accompanied her into the bedroom and berated her about “the state of it”. The reader is invited to imagine this happening in an average middle-class home. As Shaw (2016, p. 156) puts it, “In a ‘normal’ home, a police presence would be viewed as an attack upon personal freedoms and civil liberties, as well as the integrity of the ‘traditional’ family unit”.

Understanding these elements of welfare as criminal, or at least potentially so, helps highlight the criminogenic landscape into which children were thrust. Before any locking-up occurred, the system's criminalisation of the individual and concomitant erosion of self had begun, priming children and young people for the world of transgression. The context and power dynamics of encounters between children, families and welfare authorities are key. The minor who, through family circumstances, poverty, parental neglect or abuse, was deemed to warrant intervention by welfare authorities likely had already developed a highly equivocal attitude toward officialdom and law enforcement. This resulted from what Carrington (1993, p. 42) terms “the visibility of otherness” – the extreme, class-based level of scrutiny to which children in such socio-economic environments were routinely subjected, via which ordinary youthful behaviour could be viewed as evidence of proto-criminality (Fitzpatrick et al., 2023). Such State-authorised involvement in citizens’ personal life can come to seem the norm, and contribute to a criminalising tendency in the young person by casting law enforcement and establishment authority generally as a natural enemy. A vicious cycle follows, of transgression, apprehension, further escalating transgression.

What should be an exceptional process, applicable for family members’ safety, becomes instead a criminalising inevitability, as the State takes over as “corporate parent” (Fitzpatrick & Williams, 2017). The apparatus by which this occurred in the 20th century immersed children in a quasi-criminal justice process. They appeared before the court, alone and without legal representation (Royal Commission, 2016, p. 23), “charged” with “status offences”, such as being “in moral danger”, and as a result literally acquired a criminal record. The Royal Commission (2016, p. 22) judged that this treatment of status offences “blurred the distinction between those children and juvenile offenders … [and drew] into the system children who otherwise would not have been placed in the care of the Department”. Carrington (2011, pp. 33, 40) dubs this process “penal welfarism”, and identifies a “strategic nexus between child welfare and punishment” involving a cooperative relationship between welfare professionals, law enforcement and the children's court. To the minor going through this process the court proceedings were frightening, oppressive and deeply humiliating. The court proceedings signalled, too, a total loss of autonomy. Once mandated by the Court as a ward of the State, consignment to a carceral institution could occur at the immediate direction of the magistrate, or any time after that, at the whim of one's case-worker – that is, imprisonment, purely on welfare grounds.

Wilson recalls that on becoming a State ward at age 15, she experienced a system that combined a radical lack of material support with outright threats:

[D]espite my new status as a minor under the guardianship of the State, I found myself without a place to live. … [A]t that point … my case-worker … put it to me that my efforts to find stable accommodation were not adequate, and that unless I did so she would have ‘no alternative’ but to have me sent to the female youth ‘training centre’ Winlaton. … She further intimated that procedural ‘mistakes’ could sometimes occur that would see [an ‘uncooperative’] juvenile placed in an adult correctional facility. (Wilson, 2013, p. 84)

Wilson's academic researches into adult prisons have since confirmed that the latter warning was neither empty nor reserved for her alone (Wilson, 2008, pp. 99, 112n18).

Given the underlying moralism attached to welfare, plus whatever information about the child was provided to officials, the entire process evokes Harold Garfinkel's (1956) “degradation ceremonies”. Not that degradation necessarily began with the court. Wilson recalls her first experience of institutional care when temporarily removed from her home at age six, and placed in Melbourne's Allambie Reception Centre. On arrival, to her shame and humiliation she was stripped naked and examined for lice by two women and a man. “From that moment you learned that your body – your self – is theirs to do what they want with. Your shame and sense of otherness are irrevocably reinforced”. The settings of these degradations – the court, the institution – reinforce an implied criminality compounding a demeaning social view of the children in OOHC as “moral dirt” (Ferguson, 2007).

While Ferguson (2007) is more concerned with how such perceptions of children in OOHC allow the public and officials to overlook their mistreatment, they can also be internalised by the child and then compounded by a period of incarceration. Simply being locked up can cause lasting psychological damage, let alone when that follows psychologically harmful antecedents. In a study of adult prison inmates, Ievens (2023) describes the discontinuity a prison sentence imposes on an individual's life narrative, and how prison stymies the core life commitments by which a person defines themselves and their self-worth. She speaks of prison as “a space of non-life” (2023, p. 6), “which intersects with and interrupts people's lives outside” (2023, p. 3). We contend that any form of incarceration will likely have such an effect, especially in the early stages of forming the sense of self. Hence the potential detriment of incarceration on a minor is even more egregious than for an adult. An exacerbating factor is that unlike a normal prison sentence, whose fixed term gives the inmate a telos of sorts, the welfare inmate of a children's home or youth training centre faces an indefinite “sentence”. Such disruption of life-narrative at a crucial stage in its formation can later leave the adult emotionally adrift, prone to a constellation of perennial problems such as substance abuse, failed relationships, itinerancy and so on (Mendes & Moslehuddin, 2006; SCARC, 2004). As the following section shows, a sense of having been unfairly harmed and criminalised emerged as an early concern of grassroots care-leaver activism.

Activism evolves

In the mid-1990s, a group of Australians gathered around a kitchen table in Melbourne's northern suburbs to discuss the one major thing they had in common: they were all care-leavers, having spent significant portions of their childhood and/or adolescence in OOHC. The group, of which Wilson was a founding member, gave itself a name, an acronym: LOSS, standing for Lives Of State Shame. In 1999 that name would become the more “positive” For Wards, referencing their mission to act For (former) Wards of the State. In both guises, their purpose was twofold – to seek mutual affirmation and support, and to acquire a public voice and wider recognition of the impact of growing up in OOHC. Wilson recalls endless group campaigns of letter-writing, phone-calls, face-to-face meetings with policy-makers, legal firms, members of parliament (LOSS, n.d.); she also recounted her experience of the system in a pseudonymous feature article in a major newspaper (Thompson, 1996). Their goal was to gain the attention of anyone who would listen and convince them that almost every one of the thousands of Australian institutions entrusted with the care of society's most vulnerable young citizens was literally a crime scene (Browne, 2017; Royal Commission, 2017; SCARC, 2004).

Few of that founding group had ever met other care-leavers as adults. Thus they shared their childhood experiences of institutionalisation, agreeing without demur on the abiding nature of those places which, given their lock-and-key governance, undisputedly qualified as carceral total institutions (Carlton & Sim, 2018, p. 55; Goffman, 1961; Wilson, 2013). Life in them was characterised by systemic, State-sanctioned regimes of emotional and physical abuses up to and including regular, violent rape by staff members (Hawkins & Briggs, 1997; Royal Commission, 2017; SCARC, 2004; Wilson & Carlton, 2022). This litany of offences fuelled the group's second, and arguably most unifying, purpose: a concerted quest – and hence an emerging role as advocates – for recognition by government bodies of the harms done and the criminal nature of those harms, and some form of reparation. The LOSS records of the day show the active support of a prominent law firm, who donated funds while advising that government bodies were indemnified against legal action (LOSS, n.d.).

A further area of activity involved the use of Freedom of Information (FOI) legislation to access the official records compiled on each inmate, kept in centralised archives under the jurisdiction of the then Department of Human Services. Often fragmented and incomplete, these records were, and remain, notorious for their tendency to re-traumatise their recipients, not merely as reminders of past suffering, but also, and more importantly, for their derogatory, mendacious and defamatory content. Care-leavers discovered via “the files”, as they were ominously termed, that their memories of being treated like vermin were not only accurate, but were supported by extraordinarily pejorative documented views, expressed with the candour of officials completely confident that their words would never be read by those they were writing about (Golding, 2019; Hussey-Smith, 2022; Wilson & Golding, 2016).

The files’ significance for care-leavers is indicated by LOSS's phone logs, which show that (for example) in December 1997, 55% of incoming calls were from care-leavers seeking advice or assistance regarding FOI access to their “State files” (LOSS, 1997). People were looking for information about themselves and their families, but in a troubling parallel with prison records, children were frequently described by only their Department-assigned ward number.

This “kitchen-table activism” provided material and moral support to people whose life experiences had left them feeling voiceless and, in many salient ways, abandoned. Stories of the system formed the narrative ambience among the LOSS founding members as they strategised their campaign to be heard. The timing was propitious. The “Stolen Generations” of First Nations children were coming to light (Australian Human Rights Commission, 1997), and as LOSS numbers grew and the meetings graduated to lounge-rooms, their activism began to bear fruit in the public forum, as Australia's complicity in global child migration schemes came under scrutiny (Bean & Melville, 1989; SCARC, 2001) – dire legacies of Australia's colonial and imperial history (McKemmish et al., 2020, p. 49). This accompanied a groundswell of revelations regarding child abuse in institutions and government organisations (Hawkins & Briggs, 1997). It was becoming apparent to some – although only dimly among the general public – that the institutionalisation of children was intrinsically deeply harmful.

The work of LOSS/For Wards was being echoed by other grassroots groups around the nation. In Queensland, the Neerkol Action Support Group, comprising former residents of St Joseph's Orphanage in Neerkol, just outside Rockhampton, was pivotal in the formation of a major judicial inquiry into the abuse of children in Queensland institutions (More than Our Childhoods, 2024). Known as the Forde Inquiry, it produced revelations of rampant, State government-sanctioned institutional child abuse (Forde, 1999). This was an important milestone for care-leaver activism because it helped make visible the concept that care-leavers were a rights-bearing group who had been systematically wronged by government authorities, and that formal recognition of this might be possible. In 2000 what would become the largest care-leaver activist group in Australia – now known as Care Leaver Australasia Network (CLAN) – was formed in Sydney, drawing much of its membership (including Wilson) from the original kitchen-table groups (More than Our Childhoods, 2024). CLAN was an early leader in pressuring the Federal Government to hold the SCARC Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care (2003–2005).

Through this inquiry, the notion that care-leavers were a group whose rights should be recognised on a national scale began to solidify in public discourse, along with the scale of the problem: its 2004 report, “Forgotten Australians”, revealed that approximately half a million Australian care-leavers carried memories of institutional incarceration and abuse, courtesy of failed government “corporate parenting” (SCARC, 2004). This report spurred another surge in activist organisations, including the ongoing work of CLAN, the formation of the National Alliance of Forgotten Australians, and the formalisation of State-based activism through bodies such as Elm Place (South Australia), Wattle Place (New South Wales), Open Place (Victoria), Lotus Place (Queensland) and Tuart Place (Western Australia), which were resourced by the Commonwealth Department of Social Services in 2015 through the “Find & Connect” Program (More than Our Childhoods, 2024). Other important points of progress on the national stage have included: a formal, bi-partisan apology to all those who spent childhoods in institutional care, delivered from Parliament House by the Prime Minister (Rudd, 2009) and the leader of the Opposition (Turnbull, 2009); and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, launched in 2013 and one of the most far-reaching judicial inquiries in Australia's history (Daly & Davis, 2019).

These events were significant; but they do not remotely signify a narrative of steady “improvement” in responses. Rather, they indicate the ongoing and seemingly never-ending need for independent survivor activism to continuously “correct” partial, tokenistic and misguided reform. Activist groups have kept restorative justice for care-leavers on the agenda despite governments’ tendency to mark issues as “resolved” once inquiries are completed (Musgrove, 2015). Standard politics – for which, read expediency and/or policy-makers’ fealty to public sentiment – can prompt governments to undertake the grand gesture of a national inquiry. Yet public sentiment readily follows the “news cycle”, financial dictates constrain resources, and, too often, even well-meant measures fall short of what is needed (Musgrove, 2015). Furthermore, fully recognising the criminality of government-sanctioned child welfare systems, and governments’ concomitant responsibility for the criminogenic environments in which they compelled children to live, could threaten the perception of legitimacy upon which rest present-day governments’ authority. This is, of course, a challenge which many nations have faced in confronting the horrors of the past, perhaps most notably in response to war crimes and colonial genocides (Nobles, 2008). The frustration for care-leavers is that, so far at least, government recognition and public appreciation of the weight of the historical wrongs inflicted upon them have been fleeting.

The 2004 SCARC Forgotten Australians report made 39 recommendations for action to: provide support for care-leavers and recompense, both material and symbolic, for their suffering; ensure accountability for responsible organisations and institutions; and safeguard against continuation or repetition of the maltreatments those in Care suffered (SCARC, 2004, pp. xix–xxviii). Five years later, the same Senate committee noted that of those 39 recommendations, the Federal Government had refused to support four, given qualified support to seven, fully supported only four, and sidestepped or deflected 24 as other bodies’ responsibility (Parliament of Australia, 2009).

Care-leaver activists hoped that the 2013 Royal Commission, which ran for four years, might return public and government attention to their unresolved concerns and needs. But despite intensive activist lobbying during the inquiry for the Commission to widen the criteria for redress, it retained its narrow focus on sexual abuse (CLAN, 2012; Golding, 2016, 2018, 2019). The Commissioners themselves acknowledged the unusual limitations placed on them by their Terms of Reference (Royal Commission, 2015, p. 5), but explicitly rejected any suggestion that they broaden the scope of their inquiry (Royal Commission, 2015, p. 6). Wilson both testified and was invited to assist the Royal Commission as an expert witness, and can attest to the Commissioners’ professionalism and personal commitment. Nevertheless, many care-leavers were left feeling that justice and accountability had been unfairly denied them, yet again.

It seems likely that the Royal Commission's Terms of Reference and the subsequent inflexible interpretation of its brief were influenced by “standard politics”. The notion that sexual abuse was something Australian society had to confront struck a chord with public sentiment, but many care-leavers regard this narrowness in the official definition of what sort of suffering merits reparation as deeply unfair (Golding, 2016, 2019). As CLAN co-founder Joanna Penglase (2007, p. 145) puts it: “What gets lost here is that children were violated in every sense in an institution, and being used sexually was just one of those violations”.

It has been shown that psychological/emotional trauma in children, and/or general physical abuse, are equally likely to have long-term effects as sexual abuse (Spinazzola et al., 2014; Vachon et al., 2015). If a lack of public understanding of this helped keep the scope of the Royal Commission and its National Redress Scheme (NRS) confined to sexual abuse, so too did financial considerations and a tendency to protect the “interests of participating institutions and [the] scheme operator” instead of prioritising “providing justice to survivors” (Daly & Davis, 2019, p. 1289). Given that even survivors of sexual abuse, the ones who most easily elicit public emotion and sympathy, have been disappointed by tardy government restorative justice initiatives (CLAN, 2024b, p. 3), it seems fair to ask what it will take for Australian society to truly confront this part of the nation's past, and how long survivor–activists must carry the burden of keeping the issue alive?

Ongoing concerns

Care-leaver activists devote time and energy to the cause because they believe there can be positive change, and there have indeed been some advances, for both care-leavers and those currently in OOHC. Archival access and record-creation have both advanced over the last decade (Hussey-Smith, 2022; Murray, 2014), as have educational opportunities. The “Raising Expectations” project, initiated by Wilson, now helps care-leavers and those about to leave care to complete their education, including the pursuit of higher education – areas in which those groups previously had a vanishingly small showing (Victorian Government, n.d.). However, there are important ways in which the criminogenic elements of OOHC systems have not been resolved. Although the last of the major carceral institutions discussed above was closed in the 1990s, the alternative placement options in contemporary OOHC are not unproblematic. Kinship care or foster care are the prioritised placement methods. When these so-called home-based forms of care are successful, they can provide for children exceptionally well, but there is also a long history of children being isolated and suffering terribly in such placements, unable to communicate their suffering to anyone who can help, and of caseworkers accepting undesirable placements because of foster carer shortages (Musgrove & Michell, 2018).

Another placement alternative in contemporary OOHC is so-called “residential care”, which places the child in a suburban, nominally home-like environment similar to a “share-house”, supervised by youth workers. But this still imposes restrictions and indignities that any young person, especially those with experiences of trauma and other vulnerabilities, can find confronting: staff work rotating shifts and there is often a secure staff zone (most un-home-like), the doors are locked at night, curfews are enforced, absconders are tracked down and apprehended by the police – in effect arrested – and forcibly returned. Almost any refractory acting-out, from serious to trivial (such as simple recalcitrance regarding bedtime), can prompt a call for police to attend (Gerard et al., 2018). In other words, “residential care is in itself a criminogenic environment” (Day, 2017: 124). This tendency to criminalise the young person in care still translates to subsequent involvement with the juvenile criminal justice system (Day, 2017; Fitzpatrick et al., 2023; Fitzpatrick & Williams, 2017; Gerard et al., 2018; McFarlane, 2018).

Despite the aforementioned improvements in record-keeping and records access, this area also remains problematic; after multiple inquiries care-leavers still report major difficulties with the system (Rolan et al., 2018). The negative psychological effects of growing up in care can lead to the kinds of situational and emotional vulnerabilities which research has linked to higher risk of criminal offending (Fitzpatrick & Williams, 2017). Many care-leavers turn to their files for answers that might help them formulate a more complete and healthy life narrative, only to be distressed by the extent of redactions in the records they receive (Wilson & Golding, 2016). These occur ostensibly to protect the privacy of individuals, often family members, who are named in the FOI applicant's file. The governing FOI legislation is intended to strongly privilege disclosure; however, releasing officials tend to err very much toward minimising information disclosed (Murray, 2014, pp. 496–500). Abundant anecdotal evidence from care-leavers (including Wilson) attests to this: many report a plethora of blacked-out passages of text (Hussey-Smith, 2022; Murray, 2014; Wilson & Golding, 2016). Some applicants with reason to access their files more than once years apart found more redactions on one or the other occasion, with comparisons showing the redacted passages were often incongruent and seemed arbitrarily chosen.

The impact of redactions is not limited to identity work. Also important are redactions that conceal those responsible for pejorative remarks about the care-leaver, or which conceal information that might count against the care-leaver should they ever come into contact with the system as a parent. Records can become “evidence” in post-care interventions, with such systemic “opacity” contributing to “multi-generational involvement with child protection that is difficult to escape” (Rolan et al., 2018, p. 423). The calumnies in a care-leaver's file – which their subject may not even know exist – can potentially influence whether their own child is removed from their care (Fitzpatrick et al., 2023).

The criminogenic nature of child welfare systems, and the impact of the trauma of being demeaned and criminalised by such systems, mars care-leavers’ trust in authorities. Seeking records and making redress applications require engagement with authorities, and many care-leavers report that the pay-off for braving such processes is a tendency for officialdom to patronise them, negate their experiences, and infantilise them. Redress application processes can be over-long, invasive, demeaning and embarrassing (Cortis & Katz, 2022); long-anticipated files can arrive as little but redacted text, which can be experienced as a revival and perpetuation of the original injustices. This system-inflicted humiliation, combined with the psychological harm caused by the files, leaves many care-leavers despairing of real progress towards the justice they have sought since first gathering around those kitchen tables.

That said, however, there are moments when activists do feel heard. A milestone was achieved last year by CLAN with the opening of the Australian Orphanage Museum. After years of lobbying, hundreds of artefacts, archival records and items of memorabilia meaningful to care-leavers now have a permanent display venue in the regional Victorian city of Geelong, in a building purchased with a federal grant (Wilson, 2024).

On a more material level, as a result of sustained activist pressure and behind-the-scenes meetings with policy-makers (in which Wilson participated), as we write the State of Victoria is preparing to roll out a redress scheme for care-leavers that will cover non-sexual abuse and respond to a number of the concerns care-leavers have with the NRS (CLAN, 2024a, 2024b; Kolovos, 2024). Given the history of government responses falling short, however, it is not surprising that scepticism remains. Promising though this scheme may be, eligibility will rest on verifiable evidence as provided by the files – hardly a reliable record. Further lobbying, too, was needed to convince policy-makers that the claimants’ needs are urgent. As it stands, well over a year has passed from the scheme's announcement to reach its current stage of imminent operation (Abbott, 2022; Find & Connect, 2022); and it cannot be overlooked that it comes a full 20 years after the SCARC recommendations were promulgated, eleven years after the revelations emerging from Victoria's own inquiry (Family and Community Development Committee, 2013), and seven years after the Royal Commission wound up. In a matter affecting a large, aging and often ailing group of citizens, it is hardly hyperbole to describe such progress as glacial.

After multiple highly public inquiries, each of which has under-delivered on its recommendations, glacial progress begins to feel inevitable. Political ideology plays a role, with conservative governments typically less interested in the kinds of truth-telling that activists seek. The Human Rights Commission's “Stolen Generations” report (1997) provoked considerable public outrage, but the conservative Federal Government of the day and its allies in the academy and the media resisted many of the Commission's findings, and rejected the notion of an Apology to the First Nations people who comprised the Stolen Generations. Likewise, the same conservative government greeted the SCARC (2004) recommendations with assiduous indifference, denial, and/or deflection, including, once again, the call for an Apology (Daly & Davis, 2019). It took the election of a Labor government in 2007 to produce Apologies to both the Stolen Generations (Parliament of Australia, 2008) and the Forgotten Australians (Rudd, 2009; Turnbull, 2009). But ideology accounts for only part of the “headwind”. Official Apologies aside, scant progress for care-leavers also characterises nominally progressive political regimes. It seems survivor–activists must constantly remind policy-makers and the general public what happened to the care-leavers they represent. They contend against a darkly ironic tendency for the half-million Forgotten Australians to remain forgotten. This, we suggest, stems from a lack of recognition of the fundamental nature of care-leavers’ experiences and the causes of those experiences.

A call to scholars

To return, for a moment, to the LOSS kitchen table and the 1990s: as previously mentioned, in concert with similar groups in other states and First Nations activists, they were able to attract the attention of influential policy-makers (LOSS file, n.d.). This led in time to State and Federal inquiries and eventually the Forgotten Australians report (for an activist-created timeline of all major care-leaver activist-driven inquiries, see More than Our Childhoods, 2024; also Swain, 2014). Much of this looks like success, and a validation of “grassroots” activism. Two aspects are noteworthy, however: first is the inordinate amount of time it took; second, interest among academic researchers was negligible. Any suggestion that care-leavers might be a valid area of research was long ignored. Indeed, at around the time of the SCARC report, Wilson, then researching her history PhD, was firmly advised by a senior academic to “stop talking about being a ward of the State, it has nothing to do with history”.

The academic work that was done was desultory and those who did engage with the issue had markedly little impact. Thus, for instance, Carrington’s (1993) ground-breaking study of the societal and juridical biases that render girls from low socio-economic and/or First Nations backgrounds vulnerable to the “nexus” between welfare and the justice system prompted virtually no follow-up work from other researchers. Similarly, when child psychologists Hawkins and Briggs (1997, p. 42), in a scathing indictment of institutionalisation of children, stated bluntly that “[t]he Australian government … has facilitated abuse … [by] ignoring individual rights, especially those of children”, their highly credible accusation of wholesale criminal negligence produced virtually no sign of interest among other academics, in particular, criminologists.

With rare exceptions, not until well into the 2000s – that is, after the Forgotten Australians report – do we find academics taking an interest, and the initial research mostly fell to social historians, sociologists, psychologists and social workers (Swain et al., 2012). Only recently have criminologists entered the field in significant numbers, and even in the wake of major revelations and inquiries, some criminologists are effectively adversarial, openly adjudging activists’ claims as “media manipulation”, “hyperbole” and “problem exaggeration”, all contributing to a “moral panic” pursued as a misguided “moral crusade” (cited in Wright & Henry, 2019, p. 5). Such views may in part account for, or at least reflect, a body of public opinion based on “societal norms and values about who is weak, what constitutes wrongdoing, and who is deserving of sympathy” (Wright & Henry, 2019, p. 7). And those who do take a constructive approach to care-leavers and children in care tend to focus on the connections between care and subsequent youth offending (e.g., Baidawi & Sheehan, 2019; Day, 2017; Fitzpatrick & Williams, 2017; McFarlane, 2018) – an undeniably important area of research, but one that misses, or downplays, a key aspect of the problem.

We argue that the familiar terms used in discussing care-leavers, such as “abuse”, “maltreatment” and so on, while not inaccurate, are subtly euphemistic; they tend to direct the interpretive lens toward welfare as the core issue. What needed to be made explicit, from the moment the realities of institutional care began to emerge, was that the children and the adults they became were, and are, survivor-victims of crimes, perpetrated as much by governments as by the institutional actors those governments empowered (Stanley, 2016, Ch. 2). As such, criminologists’ focus should and could have been not only on the behaviour or life-trajectories of those survivor-victims, but on the crimes themselves – including systemic crimes – and the perpetrators. This, we argue, would have fostered a far better understanding of the criminogenic environments from which those survivor-victims emerged, and hence a potentially more compassionate and constructive view of their subsequent behaviour, especially in cases of offending behaviour. Issues of this kind should surely have been the subject of researchers specialising in the nature and origins of crime, and in the social harms to which they give rise.

This lacuna produces a gap in our knowledge today, regarding the long-term consequences of surviving the criminogenic childhood institution: although some data exists on the links between OOHC and subsequent involvement with the juvenile justice system (Baidawi & Sheehan, 2019; Fitzpatrick & Williams, 2017; McFarlane, 2018), almost no work has been done to determine how many Australian care-leavers end up in adult prisons. A recent British study indicates that as many as 24% of adult male prison inmates and 31% of adult female inmates report having been in OOHC as children (Ward & Spence, 2023, p.1049). It is reasonable to infer that an even greater percentage may apply here in Australia, given the significant numbers of First Nations peoples incarcerated today, and the shockingly high rates of child removal amongst First Nations communities; yet no research has been done on the subject (McFarlane, 2018). This bears on questions of care-leaver reparations, since one of the modifications to the Royal Commission's recommendations regarding redress is that the NRS excludes applicants with a significant criminal history (Daly & Davis, 2019, pp. 1270–1271). The basic premise of redress is monetary recompense for crimes committed against the survivor, and one of the crimes committed against care-leavers was to set at least some of them on a path toward criminality – a deed that would, in a person-to-person setting, qualify as contributing to the delinquency of a minor. It follows that denial or restriction of redress for that group is yet another instance of the State failing to acknowledge its culpability in the matter. More research evidencing this trajectory could, therefore, have significant social benefit.

Conclusion

A core theme of our discussion is governments’ persistent, calamitous failure as corporate parents, both while directly responsible for the child, and in the post-care period. Accompanying that theme, as a tenacious, oppositional counterpoint, is care-leaver activists’ ongoing campaigning, without which the crimes of government against some of the nation’s most vulnerable citizens might never have emerged. That their campaigning has never ceased, nor looks likely to, shows that the need is undiminished. Activists have been adaptable in their methods, beginning with grassroots groups, brought together through their physical location or connections to specific institutions, who networked by phone and mail, and lobbied policy-makers face-to-face (LOSS, n.d.; Wilson & Carlton, 2022). In that early phase, activists focused on making their cause visible through avenues such as government responses and preservation of the physical sites of their incarceration (Carlton, 2023; McLay et al., 2020; Wilson, 2005, 2008, 2013). More recently, activists have exploited the internet, using social media platforms such as Twitter/X strategically to give voice to carefully crafted emotive rhetoric (Henry et al., 2022), and as a tool for circulating rallying-cries for more “traditional” modes of action like gathering outside Royal Commission hearings, displaying placards and providing moral support for victim-survivors attending to give testimony (Marie, 2013).

Care-leaver activists have done – and continue to do – all this not only for themselves, but for the good of children in OOHC now and in the future. Governments may view recent reports revealing increasing abuse of children in OOHC and “an over-stretched and under-resourced child protection system” as a liability issue, but care-leaver activists understand the human cost and its potentially dire consequences for future generations (Smethurst, 2023). If the motivations and actions of government and activists are fundamentally framed within different paradigms, and indeed perhaps the adversarial nature of activism means this is necessarily so, all the more need for scholars to step into a space which might help bridge the gap.

This article represents a call for support: from community organisations, governments and, importantly, researchers. Rather than relying on fatigued and sometimes demoralised activists to lead their own reforms alone, it is up to those within systems of authority to follow the leadership shown by activists and grasp the nettle of responsibility to transform their own systems. It is time for those academic researchers and officials, alongside insider researchers, to engage fully with the pervasive nature of criminogenic welfare, to extend understandings of how we can prevent further harm to care-leavers, children currently in care, and the many more for whom welfare systems will need to provide in the future.