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A Senate inquiry on Wednesday called for the Australian government to apologize and compensate thousands of unwed mothers who were forced to give up their babies for adoption in the mid-20th century.

Around 100 mothers who gave up babies and adults who had been adopted sat in the Senate public gallery, applauding and weeping as the report was presented.

Unwed mothers were pressured, deceived and threatened into giving up their babies from World War II until the early 1970s so they could be adopted by married couples, which was perceived to be in the children's best interests, the Senate committee report found.

"If it wasn't illegal, it was unethical," committee chairwoman Sen. Rachel Siewert said.

"The evidence ... tells the accounts of mothers and fathers who were pressured into giving up their babies by their families, by institutions — both state and territory and private institutions — by social workers, doctors, nurses and those who they rightly expected to have helped them," she said.

One of the mothers in attendance, Robin Turner, 61, only wanted public recognition of the injustice she suffered when her newborn son was taken from her at a Melbourne hospital in 1967.

"Acknowledgment. I want the Australian public to know what happened to us," she told The Associated Press.

Turner said she was 17 when her baby was taken without her consent while she was drugged. Weeks later, she was told he had died. They were reunited in 2008.

She has a copy of the adoption release form which she said is a fraud, with both her typed name and supposed signature misspelt "Robyn."

"No matter how many sleeping pills they gave me, I would never forget how to spell my own name," she said.

The seven-member Senate committee began investigating the federal government's role in forced adoption in 2010 after the Western Australian state parliament apologized to mothers and children for the flawed practices in that state from the 1940s until the 1980s.

Roman Catholic hospitals in Australia apologized in July for forcing unmarried mothers to give up babies for adoption and urged state governments to accept financial responsibility.

Catholic Health Australia, the largest nongovernment hospital operator in Australia and which provides 10 percent of the nation's hospital beds, said the practice of adopting out illegitimate children to married couples was "regrettably common" from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Adoption in Australia is mostly controlled by state laws, but the report found that the federal government had contributed to forced adoption by failing to provide unwed mothers with full welfare benefits to which a widow or deserted wife would have been entitled until 1973.

Australian adoptions peaked at almost 10,000 a year in 1972, before rapidly declining. The report found that decline could reflect the availability of welfare, the growing popularity of oral contraceptives and the legalization of abortion.

Among unwed mothers, adoption rates were as high as 60 percent in the late 1960s, the report said.

The committee could not estimate how many adoptions were forced but said they numbered in the thousands.

The committee recommended that the federal government make an apology that identifies the actions and policies that resulted in forced adoptions, and that state governments and nongovernment institutions that administered adoptions should issue formal statements of apology.

The report also recommended that the federal government initiate discussions with the states on compensating the separated mothers and children for the harm caused. Siewert said the committee had no advice on how much compensation should be paid.

The government had yet to respond by late Wednesday.

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:

You know what's even worse ?

Despite the land down under finally owning up and considering it an old shame, over here in america the fuckin GOP trolls are TRYING to go here.

Wisconsin Senator wants to make Single parenting = child abuse.
http://ohellnawlblog.com/newohnblog/2012/03/02/wisconsin-senator-wants
-to-make-single-parenting-child-abuse/

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Child Sexual Abuse More Likely in Single-Parent Homes

THURSDAY, March 15 (HealthDay News) -- Adult men who grew up in single-parent households are twice as likely as other men to have been sexually abused during childhood, a U.S. study found.

That's because parental absences in single-parent homes provide more opportunities for sexual predators to abuse children, the researchers said.

"Children being raised by one parent are at a greater risk for many things as they grow up, including health risks such as poorly controlled diabetes and asthma. We now must add childhood sexual abuse to part of this risk picture," study author Dr. William C. Holmes, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, said in a prepared statement.

His team published the findings in the March 13 issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors, the study found that children in single-parent families had a higher overall risk of being sexually abused than children with two parents. The risk was higher in one-parent homes with lower incomes than in one-parent homes with higher incomes.

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The rate of child abuse in single parent households is 27.3 children per 1,000, which is nearly twice the rate of child abuse in two parent households (15.5 children per 1,000).
An analysis of child abuse cases in a nationally representative sample of 42 counties found that children from single parent families are more likely to be victims of physical and sexual abuse than children who live with both biological parents. Compared to their peers living with both parents, children in single parent homes had:
77 percent greater risk of being physically abused
87 percent greater risk of being harmed by physical neglect
165 percent greater risk of experiencing notable physical neglect
74 percent greater risk of suffering from emotional neglect
80 percent greater risk of suffering serious injury as a result of abuse
120 percent greater risk of experiencing some type of maltreatment overall.
A national survey of nearly 1,000 parents found that 7.4 percent of children who lived with one parent had been sexually abused, compared to only 4.2 percent of children who lived with both biological parents.
Using data from 1,000 students tracked from seventh or eighth grade in 1988 through high school in 1992, researchers determined that only 3.2 percent of the boys and girls who were raised with both biological parents had a history of maltreatment. However, a full 18.6 percent of those in other family situations had been maltreated.
A study of 156 victims of child sexual abuse found that the majority of the children came from disrupted or single-parent homes; only 31 percent of the children lived with both biological parents. Although stepfamilies make up only about 10 percent of all families, 27 percent of the abused children in this study lived with either a stepfather or the mother's boyfriend.49

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Originally posted by Geezer:
Wanted to check this to prove the guy wrong. Unfortunately, the statement quoted appears to turn out to be true.

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