ABSTRACT
Motherhood and caring for children is a fundamental locus of purpose and refuge for refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the region of Central Africa. What happens, however, when the connectedness between mother and child is severed? Although refugees assume that resettlement to Australia will provide a context of everyday life in which it is safe and secure to raise children, refugees do not account for government institutions in place to monitor family welfare and child protection that have the juridical power to permanently remove children from the care of their parents. In this chapter, Ramsay relays the experiences of refugees who have had their parental rights severed through the child protection system in Australia. Such interventions into family life are premised on good intentions to care and protect children. Nonetheless, such interventions often focus less on preventing violence and harm and more on policing and devastating families whose ways of living do not conform to the kinds of parenting that are implicitly valued in Australian society. Parenting can be seen as a vector of governmentality, which serves to form children into particular kinds of future citizens that reproduce neoliberal values. Ramsay describes how mothers from an African refugee background experience the removal of their children as an experience of such extreme existential displacement that it eclipses those related specifically to their experiences as refugees. Forced child removal is, for them, a threshold experience that propels them into a state of existential death in which they physically exist in the present toward a seemingly impossible future.
