Opinion & Commentary
Care system still abusing forgotten children.
In 2009 the federal parliament apologised to the Forgotten Australians who were physically, sexually, and emotionally abused in state and charitable-run orphanages between the 1920s and 1970s. The national apology was accompanied by solemn pledges to never again allow child abuse to go unchecked.
It followed the closure in the 1980s and 1990s of virtually all large-scale orphanages because of the detrimental impact of institutionalised care on children. Yet 30 years later, state governments are quietly re-opening the institutions to house the children who are again being abused by the system that should protect them.
In the last decade the number of children nation-wide who are unable to live safely with their parents, and are subsequently placed in ‘residential’ out of home care has increased by 56%. Decades of declining use has been reversed with the number of children in residential facilities falling to 939 in 2004–05 and then doubling to more than 1,800 in 2009–10.
Residential institutions are these days generally smaller-scale group homes operated by state-funded charities where multiple non-related children are cared for by paid staff. But they have a strong psychiatric care focus and include secure facilities. These are the modern-day asylums for children whose behaviour poses a threat to themselves and to others.
The greater use of residential care is a result of the systemic problems besetting Australia’s child protection system, which is damaging thousands of children in the name of family preservation.
Standard policy and practice in all states is to keep vulnerable children with their underclass families and work with dysfunctional parents to try to fix problems such as substance abuse, mental illness and domestic violence. For many children efforts to prevent maltreatment and entries into care, including extensive contact with early intervention and other support services, does more harm than good because removal from the family home as a last resort occurs too late. Hence most of the nearly 36,000 children currently in out of home care have high and complex needs (serious emotional, psychological, and behavioural problems) because they have been harmed, sometimes irreparably, by prolonged exposure to significant parental abuse and chronic neglect.
Family preservation is also the reason the $1.7 billion out of home care system is increasingly costly and overwhelmed by demand. Rising numbers of children are lingering, often indefinitely, in temporary foster or kinship care while waiting for parents to be rehabilitated so reunions can be attempted. When finally returned home, unrealistic reunions break down and re-damaged children re-enter care after entrenched and hard-to-resolve parental problems re-emerge.
Foster placements involving ‘difficult’ children are also more likely to break down. The instability experienced by those who bounce in and out of care, in and out of multiple placements, and in and out of failed family reunions, is an additional cause of harm that exacerbates behavioural and other problems.
By the time adolescence is reached, the children most severely damaged by abuse at home and unstable living arrangements are uncontrollable, violent and self-destructive. Due to their disruptive childhoods, these disturbed teens can no longer live safely with their biological parents or in normal foster homes, and the only suitable placement option is very high cost residential facilities.
Compared to kin and foster care, residential care is substantially more costly per child and is absorbing an increasing and disproportionate amount of funding, between a third and up to half of total out of home care spending in some states. This is in part because the full cost of full-time care is borne by overstretched state budgets government. But growth in the real cost of residential services has also been driven by expanded provision of specialist support and other therapeutic services for children and young people with high needs.
Policymakers should realise that a child welfare system that has to employ armies of taxpayer-funded professionals (psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, and counsellors) to try to fix the children the system itself has helped damage is a failed system. Most of these children will never recovery from childhood trauma and will experience lifelong disadvantage.
A fundamental rethink is essential. The best way to protect children from dysfunctional parents who are demonstrably incapable of properly caring for them is early and permanent removal by means of adoption by suitable families.
Only 61 Australian children were adopted by non-relatives and 53 by foster carers in 2009–10, despite almost 23,000 children being in care continuously for more than two years. Many of these children should have found permanent homes years ago but for the official taboo placed on adoption by family preservation-obsessed child protection services, which are unwilling to take legal action to free children for adoption no matter how inadequate their parents.
Strong political leadership is needed to make the system function in children’s best interests. Until then, national apologies for past failings ring hollow. The tragic irony is that a new generation of forgotten children is being harmed to whom a national apology will one day be owed.
Jeremy Sammut is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. His report, Do Not Damage and Disturb: On Child Protection Failures and the Crisis in Out of Home Care in Australia was released by the CIS on Thursday 3 November 2011.
