Welfare or Cultural Genocide? Law, Civilization, Decivilization, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in Australia

Abstract

This paper will examine the ways in which the prevailing representation of the legal practices and institutions related to the management and control of Indigenous families and children in Australia shifted over time from "welfare" to "cultural genocide," and how that shift can be better understood by drawing on Norbert Elias’s understanding of civilizing and decivilizing processes. Policies and practices which were understood from the 19th century onwards to be aimed at promoting the welfare of Indigenous children in the interests of increasing civilization came to be regarded from the 1980s onwards as essentially violent and indeed barbaric. This was due to them being a social engineering project for the gradual and systematic annihilation of Aboriginal cultural identity, to the point of being consistent with the definition of genocide in the UN Genocide Convention, albeit as "cultural genocide." However, the term remains heavily contested, with views divided between those who think genocide should be restricted to deliberate physical killing, and those arguing for a more expansive conception of what constitutes the destruction of human life. I will argue that a turn to Elias's conception of civilizing and decivilizing processes helps to clarify what underpins the opposition between these two approaches. After examining the concepts underpinning the legal mechanisms used first to intervene into Australian Indigenous family life and then to pursue holding the responsible authorities to account through "Stolen Generations" litigation, the paper argues for a more nuanced conception of the ways in which civilizing and decivilizing processes interweave with each other in changing ways over time, generating a need to engage with the concept of a "meta-civilizing process."