Past and present wrongs in Australian out-of-home care: Establishing standards

Abstract

Three Australian apologies have been made for past practices in out-of-home care and adoption that perpetuated a series of rights violations and false assurances. Commitments to not repeating past practices that caused profound and long-term, negative effects on the wellbeing of children and adults were given. Regarding these wrongs as past, ignores the reality that history does repeat when there is a failure to remain cognizant of them. In this paper, the basis of these apologies and current practices are discussed and standards for assessing the extent to which past wrongs are present in contemporary child protection systems are proposed.