During the National Apology to Stolen Generations, the words "The First Step" were written in giant letters on the lawn of Parliament House. The decade that has followed could perhaps be summed up as "one step forward, two steps back".

Ten years ago today, then prime minister Kevin Rudd made the apology, fulfilling one part of the third recommendation of the 1997 Bringing Them Home report, which stated that "reparation be made in recognition of the history of gross violations of human rights".

In the report, this was broken down to five key components: acknowledgment and apology, guarantees against repetition, measures of restitution, measures of rehabilitation, and monetary compensation.

To date, New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia and South Australia have introduced some form of reparation scheme for members of the Stolen Generations. The Northern Territory, Queensland and Victoria are still yet to do so.

There have also been calls for the implementation of a national scheme, but the Federal Government has not as yet indicated that it intends to introduce one.

In the years since, members of the Stolen Generations have continued their calls for healing, justice, recognition, and guarantees against repeat, while their numbers have dwindled through the inevitable passage of time, exacerbated by the lower life expectancy that plagues Indigenous peoples across the nation.

The idea of compensation for victims of the Stolen Generations has long been a contentious issue.

"It's part of the justice system, when a wrong is done to somebody they can be compensated for it," Richard Weston, chief executive officer of The Healing Foundation, told Awaye!

"What amount can you give that would give someone back their childhood? But it's a gesture that can be made by a nation."

The foundation was formed on the first anniversary of the Apology, to address the harmful legacy of colonisation and child removal.

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"[We need to] learn from what they've been through, to learn about how trauma impacts on people and changes their lives forever and what we need to do to heal it," Mr Weston said.

Perhaps even more contentious 10 years on is the report's recommendation of a 'guarantee against repetition'.

The past 10 years have been a rollercoaster in Australian politics, but nowhere more so than in the area of Indigenous Affairs.

In that time, we have seen the Indigenous Affairs portfolio absorbed into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet followed by a funding cut of over $500 million.

The aftermath of the NT intervention has made it difficult to have a reasonable discussion about issues of community cohesion, family support, and child removal. Some in the media have actually gone so far as to explicitly call for another Stolen Generation.

But perhaps such calls are redundant.

Kevin Rudd applauds members of Australia's Stolen Generation. ( Getty Images: Mark Baker-Pool )

Today in Australia one in three children in out-of-home care is Indigenous, and rates of children in out-of-home care are 9.8 times higher for Indigenous children than their non-Indigenous counterparts.

If the rate of child removal stays on its current trajectory, the number of children in out-of-home care will triple by 2035.

Yet there has been far too little attention paid to why children are removed, what happens to them after they are removed, and what strategies are in place to return children, where possible, to their families.

The treatment of children in juvenile detention centres has grabbed headlines recently, but this issue is not unrelated. Research suggests many young people who are in the justice system have had previous contact with child protection services.

Such a drastic and continuing increase in child removals should constitute a national crisis. Greater scrutiny of these practices and a focus on the trauma experienced by removed children is needed.

And as for the surviving members of the original Stolen Generations, many are still calling for justice after the apology.

Many are still fighting battles about the removal of their own children and grandchildren.

"The answer to why there are so many kids in care and increasing numbers of Aboriginal children going into care are multifaceted," says Labor MP Linda Burney in the upcoming documentary After The Apology, directed by the ABC's Larissa Behrendt.

Labor's Linda Burney says many Indigenous children in care are there because of neglect ( ABC News: Mark Moore )

"The three main components of a child's story in care, is that the home is violent, there is mental illness, and there is alcohol and drug abuse. Often, children in care have all of those three factors as part of their story.

"You combine that with poverty, extreme poverty, then you have a very toxic recipe for a child to be deemed to be living in a dangerous situation … most Aboriginal children in care are there because of neglect, not necessarily what we might think as being beaten up or being sexually abused."

There have long been calls to add justice and child removal targets to Closing the Gap, and it appears these are being considered as part of the government's current Closing the Gap Refresh.

However, the majority of the existing Closing the Gap measures are falling short of their target, so this does not fill everyone with hope.