Opinion & Commentary
Remove endangered children from their abusive parents
Ever since the ‘starved girl’ case hit the headlines in 2007, we have struggled to comprehend the incomprehensible. How is it that children live and sometimes die in the custody of obviously dysfunctional parents, despite these families having a long history of being ‘known’ to child protection agencies?
According to influential child protection academics, the problem is that DoCS doesn’t know who the most vulnerable children are. They claim that the centralised telephone reporting ‘Kids Helpline’ has been overwhelmed by growing numbers of allegedly ‘less serious’ reports of child abuse. The administrative burden involved in assessing these reports is presumed to be the reason an appalling 13% of reports of risk of harm receive an investigation that includes a face-to-face home visit by a DoCS caseworker.
These claims are an exercise in minimisation and denial of the real nature of the child protection crisis.
Since mandatory reporting was introduced in the 1990s there has been an enormous growth in child protection reports. But the increase in reports has not been concentrated in less serious categories. Over the last decade in NSW, there has been little change in the proportion of reports (around two-thirds) requiring further assessment and investigation.
Mandatory reporting has mass screened disadvantaged families capturing an increased level of parental dysfunction in Australia’s expanding underclass of welfare dependent families which have serious problems including domestic violence, parental drug abuse and mental illness.
The crucial point is that the most at risk children have been identified and re-identified, mostly by mandatory reporters. In a rare act of transparency, DoCS has let slip the fact that that 2100 dysfunctional, repeatedly reported families account for a quarter of the 300,000 reports made each year. It has also revealed that nearly half of all reports are accounted for by only 7,500 families.
Despite doctors, nurses, teachers and police re-reporting the same families, with serious child health and welfare concerns, ‘nothing happens.’ The children most at risk are hiding in plain sight. The real problem is that in too many cases children are not even seen and DoCS does nothing to rescue them.
This is the root cause of the crisis. A relatively small ‘hard core’ of dysfunctional parents retain custody of their children, and are re-reported ten and twenty times, because child protection agencies fail to take the appropriate statutory action in thousands of higher risk and potentially catastrophic cases. As a result, the most vulnerable children are exposed to increased likelihood of cumulative harm and extreme neglect and severe abuse due to lack of intervention or intervention that comes too late.
The staggering NSW statistics reflects a deeper malaise, which stems from the ideological shifts that have occurred in the field of child protection since the 1970s.
A radical family preservation-focused approach to child protection has become orthodox practice inside child protection agencies. According to this approach, the best way to protect vulnerable children is to defend parental rights, keep families intact, and try to prevent abuse and neglect by providing support services which attempt to address parent’s complex problems.
This has led child protection agencies, which in most states are sub-departments of much larger departments of community services, to become increasingly confused about their core responsibility to intervene in the best interest of children. Traditional child protection work has been crowded out by the provision of family support services and other forms of social work with parents, such as drug counselling.
The idea that family preservation combined with support services can fix parents entrenched problems and transform dysfunctional people into functional parents is unrealistic and unproven. This thinking has led to child removal being relegated to a last and reluctant resort. Permanent removal and adoption of children has been rendered virtually unacceptable. Many stakeholders, both in government departments and in the NGO community sector, now have a vested interest in keeping vulnerable children with dysfunctional parents so taxpayer funded support services can be provided.
If we are serious about better protecting children, the challenge for policy makers is to promote cultural and institutional change. The marginalisation of traditional child protection work must end. The first step in this process is to create stand-alone child protection departments, which are committed to fully investigating all risk of harm notifications.
The next step is to squarely face the unspoken truth of the crisis. In most hard core cases, early child removal and, better still, permanent adoption of children by suitable families is the best way to ensure the most vulnerable children are protected from parents incapable of providing the proper physical, emotional, and developmental support that all children have a right to receive.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies, and author of Fatally Flawed: The Child Protection Crisis in Australia, which is released by the CIS in June.
