WELLINGTON, Sept 29 (Reuters) - New Zealand said on Wednesday it will put a virtual halt to the practice of taking at-risk children away from their families, a care policy that has long angered its indigenous Maori community.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Thousands of Maori took to the streets in 2019 in protest after media reports that the children's ministry tried to take a newnew-born baby away from her mother in hospital.<\/p>\n
Children's Minister Kelvin Davis said on Wednesday the government has 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.<\/p>\n
\"This report will end uplifts as we have known them,\" Davis said in a statement, adding that future efforts would focus on community-led prevention.<\/p>\n
In 2019-2020, 1,334 children entered state care, according to documents on the ministry's website, of which about 60% were Maori.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. read more <\/p>\n
Reporting by Praveen Menon; editing by Richard Pullin<\/p>\n
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.<\/p>\n
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New Zealand to halt removal of 'at risk' children from families - Reuters<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" WELLINGTON, Sept 29 (Reuters) - New Zealand said on Wednesday it will put a virtual halt to the practice of taking at-risk children away from their families, a care policy that has long angered its indigenous Maori community. Continue reading