The Social Work Experience with Aboriginals - Essay Example

The Social Workers’ Experience with Aboriginals

It is imperative that one understands the place and the origin as well as whom the aborigines are before embarking on their relationship with the social workers, which is a bit frosty and characterised with anger and mistrust. The aboriginals are the ancient people of Australia, and they have a close relationship with nature. To them, everything is natural, and they value their traditional cultures and traditions (Cooper, 1954). They came to Australia approximately 30,000 years ago, and they comprise of about 500-600 distinct communities with distinct cultural practices with some links though (Baglin & Mullins, 2008). The links unify them and have a basis on spiritual issues related to land, storytelling as well community art and of course, they all share in the pain of colonialism. The aboriginals were the major victims when the British colonised Australia in the 1800s as they suffered forced assimilation into the new cultures, which were different from their own, and loss of land in the process (Basedow & Welch, 2012). They faced marginalisation in almost all spheres of life and there was massive culture shock among them with many of them even losing their lives in the process.

In the 1960s there were new policies of the stolen generation and the scoop where some cultures were seen as degrading and people from the same forced into new cultures, children separated from parents and families alienated subject to cultural beliefs as well as poverty ravaging the aboriginals across the world not just in Australia (Australia., & Promotion Australia, 1987). The lost generation saw the end of some cultural beliefs for aboriginals. Things such as traditional medicines were illegal and traditional community schools became obsolete in the eyes of the government, thus denouncing the traditional forms of education among the aboriginals (Allen & Evans, 1978). The land that was initially for the aboriginals went to the government, and they became squatters in their own homes. This was the genesis of mistrust and anger towards the people perceived as ‘foreigners’ by the aboriginals (Thackrah, Scott, & Winch, 2011). The foreigners here include the social workers and human service workers. Therefore, to understand why Aboriginal community members might be distrustful of social workers and human services workers, it is important that this paper looks at the period during the lost generation era and what the same meant for the aboriginals.

The stolen generation era implies a period in the lives of the aboriginals when parents were separated from their children by the government on the pretext of preserving the future generation from the negative culture of the aboriginals. Many aboriginals lost their sons and daughters leading to a missing link between a generation and its ancestry. Culture loss and shock were common among the aboriginal children who got the slave-master treatment in their new homes (Bakker, 1965). Some grew up knowing that their parents were dead and others forced to believe that the foster families were actually their real parents. The situation was devastating and the people who were actually doing the sort of work of separating the families were the social workers and workers from humanitarian organisations under the instructions of the government and some international community organisations. This led to erasure of a culture among the aboriginals something that has made many aboriginals have mistrust towards the social workers to date as many perceive them as people out to destroy their culture and undermine their belief system (Bennett et. al., 2013).

The actions of the social and humanitarian workers at this period caused the aboriginals irrevocable damages to date. Families, individuals, and communities suffered from emotional, mental, and spiritual harm in the process of separation. The social workers had the duty to help the families to overcome their challenges at the time and fight issues such as diseases and poverty but instead they contributed to taking away the children like souvenirs to other ‘good parents,’ thus stereotyping the aboriginal women as unfit parents, and as people who were lacking knowledge in bringing up children. The damage was irrevocable and irreversible. This led to the destabilisation of the cultures of the first nations and their traditions, and implied that the aboriginal women were uncivilised in the land. The welfare agencies and workers did not follow up on the children in their new placements to ensure that the children lived a normal life that would accord them better futures, instead to them, the idea was just to get the children new homes to access civilisation and live in middle-class families. There was no follow up on the newly formed families or even support from the welfare agencies although they were well aware that trans-racial adoption has so many challenges. The children lacked enough counselling on how to fit into new settings neither were their former families helped to understand the new policy and how the same benefited them. Both the children and their families suffered from the loss of culture as a generation was actually facing erasure from their culture through the new system of adoption leading to the mental, emotional, and spiritual damage.

There was massive loss of identity and the search for the same became impossible because of the system, which saw to it that there was the total erasure of all information that could help one trace their ancestry. One’s root faced total estrangement in the process. Postal codes, aboriginal names and any other things that did signify the link with the aboriginals faced erasure. The adoptions became legal, and with that, the children lost their birth surnames with the adoption surnames taking centre stage. This led to the destruction of all former documents showing their biological parents and any link to their aboriginal culture, making repatriation very difficult (OShaughnessy, Inson, & Ward, 1979). In fact, the grieving families and the children did face total separation because of these actions. This means that some aboriginal communities would lose an entire generation to the social welfare programs, and thus, to them the blame would squarely fall on the role played by the social workers and humanitarian people on the ground who was overseeing the process. This led to total loss of identity with children unable to trace their history or background but forced to take up new surnames and adapt to new lifestyles. In reality, what was happening was the wiping away of cultural identities and children were facing culture shock and struggling with adoption issues. The relationship between the social workers and the aboriginals is, therefore, that of anger and fear because it took the hands of the same social workers to cause identity loss among the aboriginals during the lost generation era. Scattering the aboriginal children across the country led to the undermining of the identification with any close-knit aboriginal culture thus destroying kinship connection in totality (Read, 2000).

Many adoptions were not successful during the lost generation era. Children, at the height of alienation did run away from the adoption homes and became street children in the process leading a rise in street families. The overwhelming sense of identity loss led to social isolation, making most children anxious in their lives and unstable mentally. Having moved from remote areas in rural settings adopting in suburbs with middle-class families was a tall order as culture shock, language barrier as well as religious attributes, limited their growth and proper interaction, thus stunting their growth in the process (Danalis & Pryor, 2009). These children could not develop attachments with the new parents easily, they could not connect to the new environment, and even when they grew up, they were quite distrustful towards other people. These children grew up with some missing link and the blame was falling squarely on the social workers and the humanitarian groups advancing the issue of civilisation and child adoption for a better future. The future according to the aboriginals was denying them an opportunity to preserve their culture and maintain their unique beliefs, thus causing their children individual harm as some could go to the streets and without a history. There are even cases where adults who were adopted as children end up telling tales of abuse and molestation as well as being subject to domestic work and poor access to social amenities and education given their aboriginal status (Maddison, 2009).

In the face of all these mistrust, anger, and fear, social workers and human service workers have a duty to the aboriginals even today. The social worker has a duty to understand the nature and effects of the lost generation era on the aboriginals. When addressing issues concerning aboriginal clients, it is important that social workers incorporate social justice aspects in their actions because these people are still reeling from the effects of the lost generation era (Briskman, 2014). This makes them have reservations towards social workers and any intervention in their communities gets some sort of suspicious treatment given their experience with social welfare groups. All social workers have the ethical duty to go beyond the risk factors emanating from individuals and work around ways of changing the society amidst the constraints. One of the ways that social workers can approach the issue of suspicion from the aboriginals is to demystify the issue of power imbalance that exists between the aboriginals and the non-aboriginals by making use of the indigenous knowledge when implementing their activities (Nieto & Bode, 2012). Aboriginals value children and family, and are very protective of the same, thus when any social worker interacts with them, the focus should be to foster the same and to understand the traditional beliefs surrounding the same to avoid suspicion (Sykes, 1985). The idea is to respect and appreciate the worldview that the aboriginals hold on issues of culture and education, and at the same time, one should ensure that there are openness and sensitivity in all dealings. Therefore, communication skills and the realisation that there is a need to have individual self-awareness as well as the awareness towards the culture of the aboriginals are useful and vital in improving the relationship between the social workers and the social workers.