Opinion & Commentary
Neglect the champers, not the children in 2010
The end of the year concentrates the mind on areas of life in which we have failed during the previous 12 months. But resolutions are pointless unless we commit to keeping them. Unfortunately, the will to solve seemingly intractable problems often fades as other issues consume our attention.
Like what keeps happening in the vexed area of child protection. A spate of shocking headlines prompts public outrage, a batch of government media releases full of empty promises about doing better, and a rapid decline in interest until the cycle inevitably repeats itself.
In keeping with the new year spirit of breaking bad habits, we should pause to remember the Dantean images of child abuse and neglect that have haunted our minds, temporarily at least, throughout this year as a result of the successful prosecution of parents who have killed their children.
Recall the seven-year-old autistic girl starved to death by her parents in Hawks Nest. When her body was discovered, in the faeces-ridden bedroom in which she had lived and died a prisoner, ‘Ebony’ weighed nine kilograms. (The average weight of a newborn baby is 3.5 kilograms.) Black vomit and bull ants ran from her mouth and nose.
Remember the details of the court case involving two-year-old Dean Shillingsworth, who longed to be nurtured by his violent mother.
When Dean ‘clung’ to the woman who bore him, she responded not with a mother’s love but with murderous rage – she choked him to death, shoved his corpse into a suitcase and threw it into a lake.
These images remind us that the system fails even those vulnerable children who are ‘known’ to child protection authorities. Yet the least horrific image of the year (relatively speaking) is the most important because it reveals the truth of the child protection crisis.
In 2004, Dean’s elder sister was hit and kicked by her mother’s boyfriend. The girl, aged three, walked more than a kilometre, unaccompanied, to the home of a relative.
This elemental tale of human instinct and survival is detailed in the recently published report into Dean’s death by the NSW Ombudsman. Dean’s sister knew that her family situation was abnormal, that she was in danger and needed a safe haven.
Her story is the modern-day equivalent of Rabbit-Proof Fence. It tells us that even a three-year-old knows the current approach to child protection – family preservation – is flawed.
Statutory removal of at-risk children has become a last resort in recent decades. The standard practice in all Australian jurisdictions is to leave children in the custody of their parents and instead provide dysfunctional families with support services that target such hard-to-resolve problems as drug abuse, mental illness and domestic violence. The parents of Dean and Ebony had a long history of involvement with the NSW Department of Community Services. Despite receiving numerous reports from concerned relatives, neighbours, police and health and education professionals, DOCS did not adequately investigate the reports. No one even saw Ebony and Dean to check on their welfare; consequently, no action was taken to remove either child from obviously unsafe environments.
In Dean’s case, a taxpayer-funded ‘charity’ did all it could to ensure his mother kept custody of children she was unfit to care for. This is typical of the way other kinds of social work with parents has marginalised frontline child-protection work.
In the response to the report of the Wood special commission into child protection services, the NSW Government is going further down the same path: it has committed an additional $300 million to provide dysfunctional families with more parenting programs and other community services.
This will not address the hit-and-miss approach to investigating reports that is the real problem. Excuses about lack of resources are a myth. The DOCS budget was in excess of $1 billion last financial year and less than one-third of this money was spent on the department’s core statutory responsibilities.
Ensuring that reports of suspected abuse and neglect are properly investigated by skilled child protection officers is a resolution worth keeping. State and territory governments must ensure that all reports of child abuse and neglect are properly followed up, including a home visit. The creation of stand-alone child protection departments that focus solely on investigating reports is long overdue.
The entire community also has to accept that many children who are living in danger right now need to be removed from their families to be safe – and that in many cases the earlier that statutory intervention occurs, the better for the long-term development of the child.
Unless we start rescuing more children, this won’t be the last New Year’s haunted by memories of unwanted and unloved children who should have been saved.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at CIS and author of Fatally Flawed: The Child Protection Crisis in Australia.
