Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made an emotional apology yesterday to half-a-million “Forgotten Australians” who faced sexual abuse, violence and forced labor in childcare homes over a period of decades.
Victims among the 1,000 people who packed Parliament House for the address burst into tears as Rudd detailed heart-rending cases of neglect in Australia’s orphanages and institutions from 1930 to 1970.
“We come together today to offer our nation’s apology. To say to you, the Forgotten Australians, and those who were sent to our shores as children without their consent, that we are sorry,” he said.
“Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care,” he said.
“Sorry for the tragedy, the absolute tragedy, of childhoods lost. Childhoods spent instead in austere and authoritarian places where names were replaced by numbers, spontaneous play by regimented routine, the joy of learning by the repetitive drudgery of menial work,” Rudd said.
Hundreds of thousands of disadvantaged children, including some 7,000 sent from Britain, were ripped from their homes to live in poorly monitored state and Church institutions where many were abused, ignored or forced into unpaid labor.
The statement echoes Rudd’s historic apology in February last year to Australia’s downtrodden Aboriginal population for their mistreatment since white settlement in 1788.
A 2004 Senate inquiry recommended the apology after unearthing hundreds of disturbing stories from children placed in care after their families broke down, their mothers were unmarried or they were considered uncontrollable.
“The truth is, this is an ugly story. The truth is great evil has been done,” Rudd said.
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