Social Effects Of Assimilation

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This paper considers the policy of assimilation and outlines how it has affected Aboriginal people. These effects include the loss of cultural heritage, broken families and communities and the undermining of parental skills. It then discusses the effect of assimilation on Aboriginal education, at the time of the policy and its effects today. Those effects include lower levels of attendance at school and generational impacts of lack of education. This paper is confined to discussion of the policy at the Federal and South Australian state level and focuses on the official policy of assimilation, not its various predecessors.
Assimilation
Assimilation was policy in South Australia between 1951 and 1962 (Australian Human Rights Commission 2012e, …show more content…

28). When forcibly displaced, Aboriginal people lost this culture and identity (‘Dispute resolution in traditional and contemporary Aboriginal society’ 1995, p. 23).
Child Removals accelerated loss of cultural heritage. Between 1910 and the 1970s, between one third to one tenth of all Aboriginal and “half-caste” children were removed and put into foster/adoptive care or into institutions far from home (Australian Human Rights Commission 2012b, p. 31). Typically, they were aged less than five years - too young to retain their own culture and language. They could not be taught the Dreaming Stories by Elders and traditional culture was lost (‘Dispute resolution in traditional and contemporary Aboriginal society’ 1995, p. …show more content…

When children were removed from their primary caregivers and put into institutions, as many were, they became one of many children. Therefore, their new caregivers could not dedicate the same time to the child as could a parent. Consequently, the child could not learn how to be a parent. The institutions were also not equipped to tend to each child’s emotional and intellectual development. These placements also introduced the children to a new culture for which they had no frame of reference. Unlike in Aboriginal communities, Non-Aboriginal society does not usually offer an extended support network for raising children. Consequently, when these children left the institutions, they had learnt the Non-Aboriginal value of self-sufficiency, but had no parenting role model to rely and many (have) struggled to parent

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