Forgotten Australians

Forgotten Australians, also called care leavers, is a term for an estimated 500,000 children who grew up in institutional or out-of-home care in Australia during the twentieth century, a population that includes child migrants and Indigenous Australians. The term followed a 1995 Senate inquiry that focused on Aboriginal children, after which non-Indigenous survivors of the care system adopted the label to seek comparable recognition. Of the roughly 500,000 affected, more than 450,000 were Australian-born and non-Indigenous, between 30,000 and 50,000 were Indigenous children removed as part of the Stolen Generations, and about 7,000 were former child migrants sent from Britain, Ireland, and Malta. Most of these children were not orphans and had living parents or relatives; they entered care because of poverty, family breakdown, a parent's death, or government policy toward Indigenous and migrant populations, and in 2009 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered a formal national apology acknowledging the harsh treatment and ongoing trauma many of them experienced. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/