Australia says it will give $55,000 to survivors of an old practice that took indigenous children from their families to live in white communities

• Australia announced it would give $55,000 to all indigenous people who were taken from their families.
• As recently as the 1970s, as many as 1 in 3 indigenous children were forced to move to white communities.
• They're dubbed the "Stolen Generations," and suffer from higher rates of trauma and criminal arrest.

Australia will give a one-off payment of $55,000 to victims of an old practice that forcibly took indigenous children from their families and placed them in white communities, Prime Minister Scott Morrison's office announced on Thursday.

According to the announcement, these survivors will receive an additional $5,000 in compensation to "facilitate healing" for themselves. They'll also get the opportunity to tell a senior government official the story of how their removal affected them, and get a written or face-to-face apology, it said.

As many as one in three Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander children were taken between 1910 and the 1970s, assuming that their lives would improve if they "assimilated" into white society, per a watershed 1997 report that sparked discussion on reparations for the victims.

Widely dubbed the "Stolen Generations," many survivors of this practice suffered various forms of trauma, including PTSD, and their struggles were chronicled in the report.

Victims interviewed by the researchers said they remembered screams as they were taken from their parents when they were 5 years old, while others detailed how their siblings were abducted as babies. Some said authorities told them their parents were dead or had rejected them. The majority were forced to abandon indigenous languages when in their foster homes.

Authorities sent many of these children to institutions and missions where there were numerous accounts of abuse and severe mistreatment, per the 1997 report.

It also highlighted a "direct association" between the children's removal and higher criminal offending and drug abuse rates when they got older. Victims were twice as prone to being arrested or using illicit substances, according to the report.

In 2008, then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made a formal national apology to the Stolen Generations, acknowledging the "profound grief, suffering, and loss" inflicted on them. Since then, the government has allocated funds to help the victims reunite with their original families.

The Australian government's recent announcement is part of a $738.2 million effort to close the gap in healthcare, education, justice, and employment between indigenous peoples and the rest of Australia's population. The plan seeks to improve their significantly lower rates of life expectancy, early childhood education attendance, and employment, among other targets, by 2031.

Elsewhere, in Canada, several former boarding schools have also come under the spotlight after the graves of hundreds of indigenous children were uncovered on their sites in May and June. Thousands of indigenous children in Canada were taken from their families for decades and placed in church-run schools in a bid to remove the children from the influence of their indigenous parents.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized for the schools and said they were part of "systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that indigenous peoples have faced."