Bringing-Them-Home-Report-Web

Reliance on a view of culture as fixed rather than dynamic, and the tendency to stereotype whole groupsby virtue of their ethnicity are the drawbacks of the simple pluralist model. Its promotion in the late 1970sand through the 80s – a highly successful enterprise – was largely achieved via a decade of so called‘cultural awareness’ training, achieved through a ‘cultural differences’ approach. This is a processwhereby you come to understand different ethnic groups by learning how they behave, eat, celebrate, raisetheir children and bury their dead. All these practices are quaint, interesting or even unbelievable:ultimately however, they serve to underline distinctness. This approach encouraged, even depended for itssuccess, on the kind of generalisation that also leads to stereotyping of a negative kind (Kalowski 1992page 4).The single most significant change affecting welfare practice since the 1970s has beenthe acceptance of the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle.