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politics of child welfare

Interesting In the conclusion to his paper on the politics of child welfare under settler-colonialism Robert van Krieken says that:

"Liberal social policy and practice rests on a delicate balance between individual rights and some conception of 'the social', between the particular and the universal, and the way this balance is struck is central to the distinctions between differing forms of liberalism. The more that the history of liberalism's 'past wrongs' reveals various aspects of its underlying despotism, the more it seems that there is in fact a powerful tension at its heart between 'welfare' and 'government', and that if we simply assume that the two work in harmony, the former will tend to be defined in terms of the latter."

The past wrongs refer to the violence wrought on the indigenous people in the namer of welfare because they were seen as a brake on modernity. Aboriginality was not seen as a part of modernity. So part-Aboriginal children-- half-caste children---were taken from their indigneous mothers and bought up white to prevent their descent into barbarism and moral depravity.

That mode of governance is an assimilationist one.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 22, 2005 11:55 PM | TrackBack