 Media Releases Coming apart at the seams
Published on The Weekend Australian 19-20 April, 2008
By Elizabeth Wynhausen  | One of the lucky ones: K. C. Weir is grateful to Queensland’s Department of Child Safety Picture: David Sproule |
THE boy was just five when he was taken from his family for his protection. But there wasn’t anywhere for him and his siblings to go. So the three children were taken to a motel on a main road in West Brisbane, where workers from Queensland’s Department of Child Safety minded them around the clock, until a carer could be found. Department of Community Services officials in NSW also pile young people into motels if there’s nowhere else for them to go, says Jacqui Reed, chief executive of the Create Foundation, which works on behalf of children in care. ‘‘If they don’t use motels, they crowd them into foster carers’ homes. I’ve heard of cases where up to 10 children have been left in a carers’ home because there was no other place for them to go.’’ The system of child protection is coming apart at the seams. The Weekend Australian today reveals that a month-old baby died after a case worker in South Australia returned the child to her heroin-addicted mother. Behind the headlines about the case is the overwhelming reality for those working in the field: a sense of impending
crisis grips a department when the death of a child known to child protection workers hits the headlines. The process is self-perpetuating. The tragic, isolated cases become part of a cycle spinning out of control as departments cast the net ever wider in case a child slips hrough. In South Australia in the past 18 years, one in every four children under 16 has been ‘‘notified’’. In NSW so many children have been swept into the net that Neil Shepherd, the previous director-general of the state’s department of community services, says: ‘‘The statistical probability is now that one in every five children in NSW will be reported to DOCS . . .before they turn 18.’’ ‘‘It can’t go on like this,’’ says Dorothy Scott, the director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection at the University of South Australia. In the past 10 years the number of children in Australia in out-of-home care has doubled. Substantiated cases of abuse and neglect of children more than doubled. Reports of suspected abuse and neglect more than trebled. Scott says there is such fear of a child dying that the entire child protection system has become highly defensive. '‘The protection of children has become increasingly bureaucratic. '‘People are preoccupied with shifting risk, rather than reducing the risk to children,’’ she says. Some consequences have emerged at the Special Commission of Inquiry into Child Protection Services in NSW. The inquiry, conducted by James Wood QC, mostly behind closed doors, was called following the shocking deaths of two young children ‘‘known to DOCS’’. Those cases are before the courts. But being reported to DOCS isn’t unusual. In 2006-07, 123,690 children joined the throng known to DOCS. There were 286,033 calls to the department’s child protection helpline in the same 12 months. That translated into an average 785 calls a day: one every two minutes. Rather than revealing sudden, unprecedented levels of family breakdown and family violence in NSW, the alarming figures reflect official policy and practice. ‘‘The data measures the activity of the child protection system . . . not the extent of the problem in the wider community,’’ Scott says. In NSW, where damage control is the default style of government, the threshold for mandatory reporting of risk of harm has been set lower than in other states. In a joint submission to the Wood inquiry, Scott, University of Sydney associate law professor Judy Cashmore and NSW Commissioner for Children and Young People Gillian Calvert, note that the process is unsustainable. ‘‘No statutory child protection services can cope with the level of demand which DOCS reported in late 2007.’’ And whatever its organisational failures, in attempting to meet the unrealistic expectation that it can prevent child death (and the depravity and viciousness some inflict on children), the department is expected to do it alone. The wider community washes its hands of the problem, even as it imposes impossible standards on child protection officials. But something similar is happening in most Australian states. And in the US, Britain, New Zealand and Canada, according to Scott, ashmore and Calvert. The child protection systems in these countries ‘‘have become increasingly absorbed by receiving, recording and investigating reports . . . and consequently have insufficient resources to help or support children and families that come to their attention’’. Most experts agree that the exaggerated focus on forensic child protection is misdirected. ‘‘You’re going to be more likely to screen children into the child protection system than to refer them to voluntary services,’’ says Leah Bromfield, manager of the National Child Protection Clearinghouse at the Australian Institute of Family Studies. Only one in five cases is substantiated, on average. ‘‘That says that upon assessment, four times out of five we’re finding out that it’s not a child protection case. That seems to me to be a very big problem about what door people are coming through for services,’’ Bromfield says. If it’s the one door, so to speak, troubled families will be suspicious of the very organisation that is also supposed to be helping them. Barnardos Australia has a contract with DOCS to do ‘‘early intervention’’ with NSW families that need support, says Barnardos chief executive Louise Voigt. Referrals follow calls to the DOCS helpline (and the subsequent assessment that the children are not at risk, but the family can do with some support). Half her clients don’t want any help: they’re hostile the moment they hear they’ve been reported for child abuse, Voigt says. She is one of many executives of nongovernment organisations to suggest that state governments need to separate the apparatus of child protection from the services for families that are not abusing or neglecting children but may be at risk of doing so because everything else is piling up on top of them. ‘‘If it’s a neighbour or a childcare centre, they’re happy to have the help,’’ Voigt says. ‘‘You need to find ways to help people in ways they can use.’’ This is what Victoria has done and the results have quickly become evident. Rather than restructuring its Department of Human Services again and again or adding layers and layers of management in the hope of insulating an intractable problem, the Victorian Government instituted reforms that would see the number of notifications of abuse and neglect hold fairly steady. Substantiated cases of abuse and neglect fell between 1999-2000 and 2006-07, even as they rose six-fold in NSW. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s annual report on child protection reveals that while the number of substantiated cases of abuse and neglect rose to 37,094 in NSW, it fell to 6828 in Victoria. And that was despite the fact that Victoria started off the eight-year period with more substantiated cases of abuse and neglect than NSW, Bromfield says. ‘‘They took what they called their killer statistics to
Treasury and said we need to turn our system around now.’’ Five years of consultations between the government and the nongovernment sector have resulted in what most regard as a model system. The Victorian Department of Human Services deals with the forensic side of child protection. Community organisations deliver the services at the local level, much as happened in days gone by. But the processes are more painstakingly structured now. Following referrals from maternal health nurses, teachers, mental health workers or doctors concerned about the children in a particular family, the nearest Child First team decides which support services are required or whether child protection officers should be involved. From then on, representatives of the agencies and child protection staff regularly meet to discuss what’s going on with that family and that child: one way of ensuring that information is passed back and forth rather than sitting in a file, as occasionally proves to be the case where children previously reported to child protection have died. In the more commonplace situations, those meeting around the table may comment on the signs that a child is neglected, rather than waiting until the neglect has reached the level where child protection has to intervene. ‘‘It’s bringing services in earlier . . .with an agency coming in to help rather than the state coming in,’’ Victorian Child Youth and Family Services executive director Paul McDonald tells Inquirer . Child First sites have been set up in some of the most impoverished parts of the state. As it happens, Victoria already has one of the best maternal and child health services in the world, Scott says. But in her view it is imperative that the commonwealth involves itself with child protection rather than leaving it all to the states. ‘‘First of all the federal Government needs to tackle alcohol addiction, the single greatest cause of all forms of child abuse and neglect. It starts with fetal alcohol syndrome and goes right through to children witnessing alcoholfuelled family violence or being subjected to physical and sexual abuse because of it.’’ Alcohol and drug abuse are generally implicated in about twothirds of cases where children are
removed from their families. While media headlines usually concern children who should have been removed for their own safety, so many children are removed by understandably nervous officials that the numbers in out-of-home care have doubled in a decade, according to the AIHW report on child protection. That number has gone up from about 14,000 to about 28,000, while the ranks of foster carers have been rapidly diminishing, which is one reason why child protection officials resort to warehousing the children in motels. Those are temporary measures, of course, but for the children in care, much in life may be temporary. They have multiple placements, leaving some unable to settle down. ‘‘I developed a taste for things changing,’’ 21-year-old K. C. Weir says down the line from Brisbane. From the time she was six, Weir was in and out of care. Her father, a lone parent, was often too ill to look after her, her brother and two sisters. They moved around a lot, she says, freely confessing that she added to the instability, causing enough havoc now and then to force the authorities to move her on. Things changed when she came into contact with the Create Foundation at 14, says Weir, who went on to complete high school and do youth work, but has a job delivering pizzas at the moment. '‘I don’t feel as if I got to live as a teenager; that’s pretty much what I’m doing now: holding down that dead-end job and enjoying life.’’ In Queensland the Department of Child Safety is no longer responsible for children in care when they turn 18 (in some states it’s 21 or 25). Rather than suddenly abandoning her, as happens to many young people in care, the department ‘‘set me up with everything I needed’’, says Weir, who regards herself as one of the lucky ones. Others aren’t as lucky. ‘‘We now have research showing how many children are harmed by being brought into state care,’’ Scott says. ‘‘In another 10 years, I fear we will be having another inquiry as to why we removed so many children from their families.’’ |
