Sorting child protection facts from fiction

The South Australian government has kept to the standard 'crisis management' script in dealing with another horrific scandal in the state's child protection system by announcing a Royal Commission.

If the Royal Commission keeps to the script, it will follow the lead of the 2013 Carmody inquiry in Queensland by recommending greater 'investment' in family support services to prevent child abuse and neglect.

In that case, the Royal Commission will have to ignore the inconvenient findings of the 2012 Cummins inquiry in Victoria, which found that substantial increases in spending on family services failed to produce any 'marked change in Victoria in the incidence and impact of child abuse or neglect or overall outcomes for vulnerable children taken into out-of-home care.'

Nevertheless, doubling down on an unsuccessful policy is the outcome the usual suspects in the child protection debate are pushing for.

Leah Bromfield of Flinders University has claimed in a letter to the South Australian premier that 'our approach to child protection essentially remains a 1960s solution, of investigation and removal'. She claims that South Australia is a decade behind the 'early intervention' model that has been tried and failed in Victoria.

The reality is that since the 1970s all child protection services in Australia have practiced what is known as family preservation. Children suffering abuse and neglect are only removed from unsafe families as a last resort, and only after extensive social service interventions are provided to families.

The focus on family support ends up prolonging children's exposure to damaging maltreatment, which means that by the time removal and entry into care finally occurs children have developed 'high needs' – serious abuse- and neglect-related psychological, developmental, and behavioural problems.

This was the finding of a 2005 report by the National Child Protection Clearinghouse. Due to the 'shift in the "hard end" of child welfare practice [towards family support and early intervention] … children who enter out of home care are likely to have chronic child maltreatment and family disruption prior to entering care, and therefore have more complex needs than children entering such care in the past.'

The lead author of the report was Leah Bromfield.

Ideology and propaganda often gets in the way of a clear-eyed view of the problems in the child protection system. The first task for the South Australian Royal Commission will be to sort fact from fiction, in order to understand the way that children are being damaged and disturbed by family preservation policies.

Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. His latest report on the child protection crisis in Australia is Still Damaging and Disturbing: Australian Child Protection Data and the Need for National Adoption Targets.