Child Protection: too few adoptions mean too much of everything else

It is National Adoption Awareness Week and, thankfully, there is some progress to report in addressing Australia's child protection crisis.

The Abbott Government's new initiative to make overseas adoption more accessible for Australian families is helping lift the 'taboo' that has long surrounded adoption in this country. National leadership, sending the signal that adoption is a good for overseas children, will help encourage adoption for Australian children in need as well.

Australia, by international standards, has a pitifully low number of 'local' adoptions despite more than 40,000 children languishing in foster care throughout the states and territories. In 2012-13, there were just 81 children adopted from care nationally – 78 in NSW and just 3 in the rest of the country.

In the United States, by comparison, more than 50,000 children are adopted from care each year. If Australian children in care were adopted at the same rate as in the United States, there would be around 5,000 annual adoptions nationally.

The constructive role the federal government has played in promoting overseas adoption has encouraged the children's charity, Barnardos, to call for the inclusion of local adoption targets in the national standards for 'out-of-home' care – an adoption policy I proposed back in April.

This comes as the pro-adoption reforms of the NSW government are being bedded down, and follows the Victorian government's introduction of new permanent care laws designed to ensure more foster children find safe and stable homes.

Yet before other states follow suit, there is still work to be done to dispel the standard myths that surround child protection.

In response to a horrifying account of the squalor and dysfunction rife in the worst underclass families in the community, the South Australian minister responsible for child protection argued that more needs to be done to support families through 'early intervention' services.

The allegation is that the child protection system is unbalanced due to too heavy a focus on investigating child safety reports and on providing foster care for removed children, and not enough attention paid to preventing child abuse and neglect.

This analysis is flawed for the reasons I have argued at length.

Child protection authorities already practice 'family preservation' and provide extensive support to keep children with parents who have even the most serious and entrenched (usually drug and alcohol, domestic violence, and mental health) problems. This results in children suffering prolonged maltreatment and being reported numerous times before they are finally removed as a 'last resort'. Children then linger in care while attempts are made to reunify them with their families; after reunifications break down when parental problems inevitably reoccur, children re-enter care – a highly damaging cycle of instability that in many cases consumes the whole of their childhood.

Rather than not doing enough early intervention, the problem with the child protection system is that we have too much of everything. We have too much family support, too many reports, and too much foster care, because we don't do enough of the right thing. We do not remove children from 'unfixable' families in a timely fashion, and we do not provide these children with safe and stable adoptive families.

Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies.