Across Australia, Aboriginal children are being disappeared by the carceral state.

They are transferred without notice. Moved in secret. Taken from their families, their Country, their lawyers, and their communities.

When families ask where their children are, the answer is often silence, or worse, ridicule. This is not an administrative oversight or a system under strain. It is a deliberate exercise of power, and it is happening across jurisdictions.

Tasmania: Secrecy as state practice

In Tasmania, the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) has condemned the government's secret decision to transfer Aboriginal children from Ashley Youth Detention Centre into an adult prison facility. Some of the children identified for transfer are unsentenced.

This fact alone should stop everything.

Unsentenced children, presumed innocent under the law, are being placed in adult prisons. The decision was made without informing the children or their families, denying them the opportunity to seek legal advice or advocacy at the very moment their liberty and safety are most at risk.

TAC chief executive Rebecca Digney has been clear: this is not a minor procedural issue. It goes to the heart of fairness and due process. If young people are not told what decisions are being made about them, they cannot challenge those decisions or protect their rights.

The timing of the decision only deepens the harm. Acting just before the Christmas shutdown, when access to lawyers and advocates is most limited, suggests a cynical calculation, one that prioritises administrative convenience over children's rights.

Tasmanian law requires that decisions affecting Aboriginal children in the youth justice system involve Aboriginal community input. This reflects a long-standing recognition that culturally informed decision-making is essential to children's wellbeing and "rehabilitation." No such consultation occurred.

The decision breaches the Youth Justice Act and Australia's obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which requires that children be treated with dignity and separated from adults unless doing otherwise is demonstrably in their best interests.

There is nothing in secret transfers to adult prisons that serves a child's best interests. There is only what is easiest for the state.

Western Australia: Punishment rebranded as "safety"

Tasmania is not an outlier.

In Western Australia, children have repeatedly been transferred from Banksia Hill Detention Centre into adult prisons under the language of safety and necessity.

In 2022, 17 boys aged 14 to 17 were moved to an isolated unit within Casuarina Prison, a maximum-security adult facility, following unrest at Banksia Hill.

The state described the move as temporary. Authorities claimed the boys would be separated from adult prisoners. But advocates who visited the unit were unequivocal: it was not a child-focused environment. It was an adult prison, designed for control and punishment, not care or as slated, rehabilitation.

Aboriginal leaders and community organisations described the move as shocking, particularly given the over-representation of Aboriginal children in prison. Shade cloth may block sightlines, but it does not block sound, fear, or the psychological impact of placing children in a maximum-security prison complex.

This has happened before. It happened in 2013, and involved 73 child prisoners. It happened again this year, following a 17-hour rooftop protest by children at Banksia Hill, an act of desperation in response to conditions that have long been condemned and repeatedly recommended for closure. The response was not care or consideration of their complaints. It was punishment through transfer to adult prisons, despite explicit warnings from advocates that this would cause further harm.

This is not crisis management. It is state violence.

Northern Territory: When children "vanish"

In the Northern Territory, the disappearance of children is openly defended.

Children have been transferred from Alice Springs to Darwin without their families being informed. When this was raised in Parliament, it was reportedly met with laughter. The Corrections Minister acknowledged the transfers but emphasised that there is no legal requirement to notify guardians.

This is the logic laid bare: parents and families have no right to know where their children are.

At the same time, those same parents and communities are routinely blamed for their children's criminalisation. The contradiction could not be clearer. The state removes parents' rights, withholds information, severs connection, and then lectures families about "personal responsibility".

You cannot deny families knowledge of where their children are and then blame them for failing to intervene. You cannot disappear children into the system and then accuse communities of neglect.

That is not accountability. It is cruelty, dressed up as governance.

Queensland and the national pattern

In Queensland, Aboriginal children from North Queensland are regularly transferred to Brisbane, thousands of kilometres from their families and communities, often without consultation or consent. Similar practices occur across Australia.

This is not a collection of isolated decisions made under pressure. It is a national pattern.

Children are moved to manage the harm produced by the system itself. Transferred to reduce visibility. Removed to make crises someone else's problem.

In the process, they disappear.

Removal as colonial violence

Removing children from their families and Country is not a neutral act. For Aboriginal children, it echoes the most violent chapters of Australia's history.

This is another Stolen Generation, carried out through court orders, transport schedules, and policy settings instead of welfare files and missions.

Prisons function as a colonial frontier. They sever connection to land, kin, language, and culture. When children are taken far from home and placed in adult prison environments, the harm is not incidental, it is structural.

The state frames these decisions as operational necessity. As safety. As order. But safety for whom?

Not for children who are isolated, frightened, and punished for surviving conditions the state itself created. Not for families desperately trying to locate their kids. Not for communities who have warned, again and again, that disconnection breeds harm.

Disappearance is the point

What we are witnessing is not the failure of youth justice systems. It is their function.

Disappearance limits scrutiny. Distance weakens advocacy. Secrecy protects the state.

When children are transferred without notice or consent, the state consolidates power, not just over bodies, but over information itself. Once children disappeared, it becomes easier to deny responsibility for what happens next.

This must end

Children are not logistical problems to be relocated. They are not risks to be managed through isolation. They are not expendable.

If governments were serious about safety and wellbeing, they would invest in community-led, culturally grounded alternatives, many of which already exist and have proven effective. They would keep children close to family, to Country, to care.

Instead, they are choosing secrecy, punishment, and removal. That choice is political. And it is violent.

The disappearing of Aboriginal children must be named for what it is: a profound breach of human rights, a continuation of colonial violence, and a failure of duty that this country can no longer pretend not to see.

Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy coordinate the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls.