New Zealand's government has vowed to halt the practice of taking at-risk children away from their families, a care policy that has long angered its Indigenous Maori community, unless it's a last resort.
Children deemed to be facing harm have been moved into state care for decades despite Maori criticism that the process is racially skewed and a legacy of colonisation.
A vast majority of the children taken, a process known locally as uplifting, are Maori.
Thousands of Maori took to the streets in 2019 in protest after media reports that the Children's Ministry tried to take a newborn baby away from her mother in hospital.
Children's Minister Kelvin Davis said on Wednesday the government had accepted all recommendations of a ministerial advisory board on how to fix the child care and the protection system.
The ministry had been told that removing children should be used only as a last resort.
"This report will end uplifts as we have known them," Mr Davis said in a statement, adding that future efforts would focus on community-led prevention.
The report, Kahu Aroha, recommended the government work through the community to tackle family issues.
"In order to lead prevention of harm to tamariki [children] and their whānau [extended family], collective Māori and community responsibility and authority must be strengthened and restored in a way that is fit for purpose within a modern and future context," the report said.
To do this, the government was told to share resources and authorities with the Maori community, who could take over many of the services and support currently delivered by the state so that social workers could then on responding to emergency situations.
Disproportionate number of Maori children taken into care
In 2019-2020, according to documents on the ministry's website, 1,334 children entered state care, about 60 per cent of them Maori.
Maori have called children taken into state care as New Zealand's "stolen generation" — a reference to Indigenous Australians forcibly taken from their families as children under an official policy of assimilation.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, seen as a global figure on issues of woman's rights and social justice, launched a Royal Commission of Inquiry in 2018 into the abuse of young people in state care, saying the country needed to confront "a dark chapter" in its history.
The inquiry revealed in December that up to a quarter of a million children, young people and vulnerable adults were physically and sexually abused in faith-based and state care institutions from the 1960s to the early 2000s.
ABC/Reuters
