Ideas@TheCentre
Living victims to drive child protection change
The unexplained disappearance of Kiesha Abrahams from her mother’s Mount Druitt home has once more put the spotlight on NSW child protection services.
The NSW Ombudsman will conduct an independent inquiry into the tragically familiar circumstances surrounding the case and will investigate the role played by government agencies.
Apologists for the Department of Community Services have already trotted out the standard excuses about no child protection system ‘ever being able to save every child.’
This glib phrase glosses over the truth. We aren’t speculating about some hypothetical ‘every child.’ We are deploring the fate of ‘known’ children from dysfunctional families who, like ‘Ebony’ and Dean Shillingsworth, aren’t rescued despite a long history of well-founded safety concerns.
Apologists also argue that these are extreme cases. It is true that not all these type of cases end in child death. But this is hardly reassuring when thousands of children throughout Australia are not being protected from the cumulative harm caused by prolonged parental neglect and abuse.
The Victorian Child Death Review Committee drew attention to this issue by noting the growing problem of ‘hard to help’ adolescents. The reason why increasing numbers of young people are hard to help – and are at risk of suicide, mental illness, substance abuse, and death by misadventure – is the trauma they experience in the family home as a result of child protection services failing to appropriately intervene in their cases.
By the time these children reach their teens, the damage is done. They have been left for too long in the custody of inadequate parents, and have been subjected to multiple temporary foster placements and failed family reunions, based on the misguided idea that ‘family preservation’ is in the best interests of the child. Personal development has been delayed, significant problems have emerged, and the prospects for recovery are bleak.
The poor outcomes for these children illustrate the need for a new approach to child protection. Early and permanent removal to foster or adoptive care is essential in order to provide the proper parenting all children need to thrive.
It is not unrealistic to expect agencies like DoCS to fulfil the statutory responsibilities that are as old as the original child welfare laws of the late-nineteenth century. In the litigious twenty-first century, it is the living victims of departmental neglect and abuse who will help drive change.
Sooner rather than later, state governments are sure to be sued for the child protection failures that permanently damage vulnerable children.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and author of Fatally Flawed: The Child Protection Crisis in Australia.
