THE ‘STOLEN GENERATIONS’ AND CULTURAL GENOCIDE The forced removal of Australian Indigenous children from their families and its implications for the sociology of childhood 297 Modernity legitimizes itself as a ‘civilizing process’ – as an ongoing process of making the coarse gentle, the cruel benign, the uncouth refined. Like most legit- imations, however, this one is more an advertising copy than an account of real- ity . . . what it hides is that only through the coercion they perpetrate can the agencies keep out of bounds the coercion they swore to annihilate; that one per- son’s civilizing process is another person’s forceful incapacitation. The civiliz- ing process is not about the uprooting, but about the redistribution of violence. (Bauman, 1995: 141) Deficiencies in the treatment of children are almost always understood as somehow ‘external’ to European culture and civilization, as flaws in the social fabric which have been, and continue to be, rectified. Such deficien- cies, whatever form they take, might be seen as errors of judgement or inter- pretation, but always as alien to European civilization itself. It is generally taken for granted that the 20th century is the ‘century of the child’ (Key, ROBERT VAN KRIEKEN University of Sydney Key words: Aborigines, Australia, childhood, genocide, stolen generation Mailing address: Robert van Krieken Department of Social Work, Social Policy and Sociology, University of Sydney, Australia 2006 Childhood [0907-5682(199908)6:3] Copyright © 1999 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi) Vol. 6(3): 297–311; 009009 From around the turn of 20th century up to the 1970s, Australian government authorities assumed legal guardianship of all Indigenous children and removed large numbers of them from their families in order to ‘assimilate’ them into European society and culture. This policy has been described as ‘cultural genocide’, even though at the time it was presented by state and church authorities as being ‘in the best interests’ of Aboriginal children. This article outlines the results of a study of the development of the policy of forced child removal, its antecedents, its surrounding philosophy and politics and the emergence of a more critical understanding of it in recent years, as well as examining the more general implications of this history for the sociology of childhood.