A Northern Territory girl who was placed in child protection more than 40 times has told a royal commission she missed years of school, went to the dentist just once and wasn't treated for scabies.
The woman, known as AH, was first put into a foster home when she was 11-months-old, at 13 she stopped going to school but case managers did nothing about her truancy.
"I haven't been to school for four years and I feel really let down," she said in an interview heard by the inquiry on Monday.
"No-one actually cares about you emotionally. You're a case file, you're just a number."
AH said she's had a dozen family support workers, who downplayed her requests for medical attention.
"A whole six years I've been in care, I've been to the dentist once," she said.
The girl contracted scabies after moving into a new foster home and sleeping in unwashed bedsheets left by another child but her case manager told her "it was pimples and not to worry about it".
Twenty years after the landmark Bringing Them Home report into the Stolen Generation was released, the rise in the rate of removal of Aboriginal kids from their families has continued, counsel assisting the commission Tony McAvoy SC said.
"The most egregious act the state can inflict upon a person is the removal, by force, of their children," he told the inquiry's Alice Springs hearing.
He said it's shameful that Territory kids receive child protection services at three times the national rate.
Territory Families is underfunded and understaffed, and the child protection system has "many, many failings", he said.
The inquiry will hear evidence that there is no structured engagement with the Aboriginal community about child protection, leaving a profound sense of disempowerment.
Chair of Indigenous Research at the University of Technology Sydney, Larissa Behrendt said it costs $100,000 per year to place an NT child in care, and the rates of removal are projected to equal those of the Stolen Generation period by 2024.
"More indigenous children are being removed today than any other time in Australian history and they are ten times more likely to be in care than their non-indigenous peers," Professor Behrendt said.
She said the links to youth offending are undeniable, with 60 per cent of the young people in NT detention in child protection as at August 2016.
