Commission must also address welfare of children in care

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has been asked to recommend ways to ensure that history does not repeat and children are better protected from abuse in the future.

The commission's primary focus is to finally tell the truth about past practices in churches, schools and other organisations including state-run orphanages that betrayed their duty of care to children by ignoring or covering up child abuse.

However, the work of the commission is also revealing the way that history is repeating itself today. In new and terrible ways with respect to the thorny issue of child protection, we are learning that children are again being harmed by the system that is meant to protect them.

Having heard testimony from victims including from former residents of state orphanages, the commission has turned its attention to the welfare of children who now live in residential care.

Contemporary residential care facilities are different to the large-scale children's homes that were closed down during the period of de-instutionalisation in the 1970s and '80s. Residential care now involves smaller ''group homes'' housing between four and six children and young people.

While this much has changed, other things have stayed the same.

Appearing before the royal commission, a senior bureaucrat from the NSW Department of Families and Community Services said she was aware of recent cases where young people in residential care had sexually abused each other.

Inadequate supervision and low staff-to-children ratios are said to explain child-on-child sexual and other forms of abuse. However, this does not scratch the surface of the part the child protection system plays in the harm being done to these and other children from dysfunctional families with serious child-welfare problems.

Residential care facilities primarily house children who have what is termed ''high and complex'' needs. These children have major emotional, psychological and behavioral problems because they have been damaged by the flawed family preservation-based policies and practices employed by child protection authorities.

When reports of suspected child maltreatment are received, standard procedure in all states and territories (in the words of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare) is to ''keep children with their families'' and work with struggling and highly troubled parents to try to fix entrenched and intractable problems such as substance abuse, mental illness and domestic violence. Because parents are given virtually limitless opportunities to try to address their problems, children are only removed as a ''last resort'', and this often occurs too late. Children end up being taken into foster care only after prolonged exposure to parental abuse and neglect.

Trauma suffered in the family home is then compounded by the harmful instability and the repeat occasions of care subsequently experienced when family reunions are attempted and break down. In many cases this cycle of delayed and multiple entries into care consumes a child's entire childhood.

By the time they reach adolescence, children have become severely damaged, disturbed and distressed.

So bad is the uncontrollable, threatening, violent and self-destructive behaviour of the worst ''high needs kids'' that it is unsafe for them to live in a normal foster home, and residential care (including ''secure facilities'' for the most anti-social) is the only option.

This group of children are also referred to as ''unfosterable''. The term particularly reflects the fact that these children cannot be placed with foster parents who have other foster or natural children because of the unacceptable danger they pose to other kids.

So into residential care they go – where they victimise each other.

The number of children placed in residential care throughout Australia declined substantially as a result of de-institutionalisation and hit a record low of less than 1000 in 2004-05. Since then, the residential population has more than doubled, increasing to 2193 children in 2012-13.

The fact that governments have been forced to ''re-institutionalise'' the care system to cater for the increasing number of children damaged by family preservation is an indictment of the state of child protection in this country.

A system that is failing the most vulnerable children in the community needs to be closely scrutinised if the royal commission is to fulfil the task of ensuring history never repeats. The fact is that many children would be much better off if they were removed earlier, and could be adopted by families able to provide a stable home.

Jeremy Sammut is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of Do Not Damage and Disturb: On Child Protection Failures and the Pressure on Out-Of-Home Care in Australia (2011).