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Throwing money at child abuse won’t make it go away

Helen Kroger

by Helen Kroger

08 Feb 05:35am

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Filed under: Child Abuse, Child Protection, Children, Families, Health, Parliament, Society

31 comments

Abused kids deserve better than spin.

Illustration: Joe Benke

As the Federal Convenor of Parliamentarians Against Child Abuse and Neglect, I applaud the Baillieu Coalition Government for making the welfare of all Victorian children a priority in 2011. 

The announcement last week of an inquiry into the systemic problems in Victoria’s child protection system is overdue and welcome.  Such an inquiry is much needed not only for all those who work in the child protection system but more importantly, for those who are living with abuse. 

If you are not directly affected, this is one of those issues that is easier swept under the carpet.  The social and economic consequences of this human evil is difficult to comprehend let alone measure.

The facts speak for themselves.  In the last year some 46,187 cases of ‘substantiated’ child abuse in Australia were reported – the size of a capacity crowd at Etihad Stadium. 

It was encouraging to read a new report released last month by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, entitled Child Protection Australia 2009 -10, indicating that the number of ‘substantiated’ cases of child abuse in Australia has declined by 15 per cent. 

While the statistics show a decline, they raise more questions than answers. 

Of the 286,437 notifications or reports of child abuse, only 16 per cent were ‘substantiated’.  This means that some 240,607 cases were not ‘substantiated’ and it begs the question, why?  Were these reports comprehensively investigated, assigned case workers with visits being made to the individuals and families concerned or was another bureaucratic and administrative measure applied to test the validity of the claim? 

While I am hopeful that not every claim of child abuse when reported is valid, the statistics just don’t add up.

In my home state of Victoria, the report documents that 71.3 per cent of the 48,369 notifications of child abuse were ‘dealt with by other means’.  The definition of this provided in the report is spurious to say the least. “(Dealt with by other means)…includes notifications that were responded to by means other than an investigation…”. 

Any concerned mother or father, grandparent or carer would be reasonable in interpreting this as code for a department in crisis. 

After two damning Ombudsman’s Reports, the former Premier Brumby committed an additional $77 million in extra funding.  Yet concerns continue about huge caseloads on too few case workers causing inevitable “burnout”. 

Merely throwing money at a complex situation like this won’t make it go away. 

A report in The Australian newspaper last year highlighted this fact.  The story included first hand accounts of Department Heads wanting numbers of cases closed by Friday afternoons so that bureaucratic targets could be reached.

The National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children, announced by former Prime Minister Rudd and agreed to by COAG in April 2009, should be considered in this Inquiry. 

The politics of spin does nothing to protect vulnerable children in our society and frankly, these kids deserve so much better than that.

A comprehensive Inquiry is a good start in untangling the mess left by the previous Victorian State Government.  Any solution must be reached in a spirit of cooperation and bipartisanship. 

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31 comments

Show oldest | newest first

    • deb says:

      06:32am | 08/02/11

      i agree chidren should be protected.can i raise a point here?
      What about doing something about the families of how can i put it nicely?mentally retarded,
      i have seen generations of these people having child after child all with the same or worse degree of retardation. Shouldnt our gov. be doing something to stop them from breeding? Call me callous if you will but we all bear the cost of looking after these children.They grow adult bodies but never adult minds.

      Reply

    • TChong says:

      07:18am | 08/02/11

      Stopping people , who you so delicately decide are “mentally retarded” , should not be allowed to “breed”? ( Nice wording, often associated with cattle).
      But, surely , you can apply your suitability test to those whose parents have a history of cancers, or heart conditions, or any other hereditary based disease.
      Now, where, and when, in the past, did such sentiments have alot of fans?
      Deb, no doubt your observation is well intentioned, but, who would decide who should and shouldnt be allowed to have kids?
      If some one is deemed as inappropriate to have kids, should they be sterilized, against their will?
      Who should perform such procedures?
      Can you see where your line of reasoning would lead to ?

    • Stephy says:

      07:56am | 08/02/11

      Well, it’s not much in the way of preventing the spread of mental illness (mostly because it’s an opt-in thing) but there is a test done at 13 weeks pregnant that enables you to see if your child has a chemical imbalance in the brain. The downside is that if you go through with the test, there is a small chance of miscarriage. It would be terrible to find that your child was healthy, and that a week or two later you miscarried because of the test done.

    • Missy says:

      12:14pm | 08/02/11

      Deb have you by any chance heard of the word Eugenics? I suggest you do a little research into it and where it ends up before you post on any more forums…

    • TChong says:

      06:46am | 08/02/11

      Child protection is in crisis because of too few case workers being asked to process too many case- obvios.
      Solution - employ far more case workers- that will allow every case to be thoroughly investigated.
      The cost - to thoroughly investigate all claims would involve a greatly expanded and resorced dept. In money terms very expensive.
      Thats the realitys- services cost. A lot.
      PS - naturally, the cost of not intervening is a price beyond measure.

      Reply

    • Carer says:

      08:23am | 08/02/11

      I agree, the problem in SA is similar. There are some great case workers, who work very hard, but just have too many cases to deal with. Then they burn out and leave the job. What this means is the majority of case workers are very young, they often won’t stand up to their supervisors and are bullied into rushing assessments, that is if they even get to do the assessment at all. Many reports go unchecked just because the case workers have a huge case load and can’t get to them before those above them say to close the case out.

      Cases which are found to need intervention can be let down by lengthy court cases and judges who decide to give the parents another chance (to abuse the children again in many cases) Then the whole case starts again from scratch, previous evidence of abuse becomes inadmissible and workers have to wait for enough evidence of recent abuse to do anything further for the children involved.

      Intervention at early stages to prevent abuse is rare as the workers only have the time to deal with the very worst cases. Yet early intervention could prevent some of those cases from ever getting so bad.

      Sometimes judges take on the role of social worker as well, complicating cases further.

      The children in my care were removed from their parents three times and placed under 12 month protection orders twice, over several years, before coming to me. Then when they did come to me they faced an 11 month court case, basically keeping them in limbo for all that time before a permanent order of protection was put on them and they could finally have some stability. By this time they were so emotionally scarred that they may never recover fully. They’ve been moved from place to place, had there case workers changed too often for them to have any trust, been sent for all sorts of assessments, had their quite fair questions about what’s happening with them completely go unanswered. The process of saving them from abuse has done as much damage to their sense of security, self-confidence and sense of identity as the actual abuse.

      The two biggest problems with the system as it is are lack of workers and the focus on maintaining the family unit at almost any cost. The latter I put down to an over-reaction to the stolen generation. The system is almost frightened of removing children from abusive homes so they don’t get accused later of ‘stealing’ children. So the parents are given multiple drawn-out chances to have their children back, in the hopes that they won’t re-offend. Not only does it mean that the children are abused for longer (sometimes years longer) it also means that other cases are ignored while the active ones are dealt with.

      What I’d like to see is a separate department for early intervention (which could make greater use of charity workers) focusing on things like parenting classes and workers going into the homes to help the families. More focus on the needs of the children and less on ‘rights’ of abusive parents. And a lot more case workers.

    • Tom says:

      08:34am | 08/02/11

      “Moooree fuunnnddiinngg!”, cries the nanny state socialist.

    • TChong says:

      08:59am | 08/02/11

      Thats a clever reply Tommy.
      Whats your well thought out solution then?

    • Tom says:

      08:08am | 09/02/11

      @TChong, there are many solutions although none of them would ever be given a fair chance while nanny state parasites such as yourself see the victims as an opportunity to shore up their own finances.

    • acotrel says:

      06:59am | 08/02/11

      I suggest it’s important to treat the disease, and not just the symptom. Have look at our good old Aussie culture, the education system, the media influences on kid’s peer group, and the way we find partners.

      Reply

    • Stephy says:

      08:10am | 08/02/11

      My friend was a residential care worker in a residential unit for children who had been taken off their parents for abuse. She would tell me stories that would make me shudder. These kids would come into the unit nice and polite and within a few weeks turn absolutely feral. The other children in the house would encourage behaviour like breaking into cars and setting them alight, raping animals they found and smashing windows (and then using the broken glass to threaten the carers) when they didn’t get what they wanted. Holes in the walls would frequently need to be filled, from kicks and punches the kids made. I could go on in detail, but you get the idea. The kids learn they can do whatever they want, and the carers legally cannot stop them.

      These children, for some reason or another, could not be found foster homes*. Shouldn’t we be looking at the behaviour of the children in these units and the protocol the carers have to follow? Surely something can be done to help these children, not send them off the rails?

      *And that is a topic all on its own. Many children are fostered out with the intention of returning them to their parents. If the parents were so abusive they needed their children taken from them, what on earth makes DHS think that after a couple of months (sometimes years) the parents will be reformed and it will be safe for the children to return? What is the hang up with connecting children to their biological parents?

      Reply

    • Asrael says:

      08:17am | 08/02/11

      You will find that the Union (CPSU Vic) behind the Case Workers at DHS, has been fighting on behalf of its members (and their non-member colleagues, although there aren’t very many of them) to increase staffing and support for years. Looking after children at risk is time consuming. Case workers are expected to have too many cases on the go at once and people burn out. NG services like Berry Street keep their people for longer and often do a better job because their employees are supported better. Young, committed, newly qualified staff who are faced with the unrealistic workloads expected within Government services soon move on. While money won’t help, looking after the professionals who do this work will and that is expensive.

      Reply

    • NESLIHAN KUROSAWA says:

      09:19am | 08/02/11

      Hi Helen,

      No amount of money buy a child`s innocence and lost childhood years, most definitely.  Child abuse can go undetected for years,  I want to know “what makes these so called case workers experts when it comes to child abuse cases anyway”??  We just proved that DOCS was a total failure and a total waste of taxpayer`s hard earned cash!!

      I can personally detect an abused child from a hundred metres, because I am a mother, worked as nurse at the Children`s Hospital, I am NAATI accredited interpreter and I was empolyed at the Federal Government of Australia.  That still does not me an expert in anyway!!  I am only very passionate when it comes to children`s welfare and that is all.  The real question remains to be “are we all passionate enough to care about innocent little children in our society and community”??  Best regards to your editors.

      Reply

    • Punter says:

      09:58am | 08/02/11

      What is ‘DOCS’?

    • Rose says:

      10:25am | 08/02/11

      Department of Children’s Services

    • CB says:

      03:24pm | 08/02/11

      Department of Community Services (NSW), now known as Department of Human Services (Community Services).

    • Bruce says:

      09:19am | 08/02/11

      From the AIFS:

      “As the introduction of mandatory reporting requirements within a jurisdiction tends to increase the community’s awareness of child abuse, in many instances it also results in a substantial increase in the number of reports being made to child protection departments. If there are inadequate resources available to the responsible department to respond to the increased demand, then the increasing number of reports may result in services being overwhelmed with cases to investigate, and lacking sufficient staffing to do so.”

      Has mandatory reporting really helped? Has it swamped the responsible services with false positives? How many of them make up the 84% of unsubstantiated reports. I would suggest that a system with that high a failure rate is broken in a more fundamental way than lack of funding.

      Reply

    • HappyCynic says:

      10:06am | 08/02/11

      I got bounced back to my parents 3 times by community workers between the age of 10 and 13 before they finally took my case seriously.  After each time though my parents escalated the abuse because they thought they could get away with it.

      Based on that 75% of my claims of abuse would have been classified as “unsubstantiated” despite the fact no worker ever once investigated my parents.  I question how many of these “unsubstantiated claims” are like mine.  I don’t doubt there would be some fraudulent ones but those would not be in the majority.

    • James1 says:

      10:50am | 08/02/11

      “Yet concerns continue about huge caseloads on too few case workers causing inevitable “burnout”.”

      I can’t help but wonder how anyone can do that job, huge caseload or otherwise, and not burnout very, very quickly.  It must be one of the hardest jobs around, and my admiration for those doing it on the limited resources offered to them by governments could not be higher.

      Reply

    • persephone says:

      11:09am | 08/02/11

      But Helen, you haven’t explained how the problem can be solved without throwing more money at it.

      If you’re suggesting that more social workers will have to be employed, well, that will cost money.

      Not saying that that’s not necessary, just wondering why you haven’t spelt this out.

      Reply

    • Jim says:

      12:22pm | 08/02/11

      It’s a saying, persephone…one as learned as you should recognise that.

      “Providing funding with no accountability” may be more literally correct, but most of us got it.

      Governments (from all sides) see things like child abuse and mental health and shudder…then put them in the ‘too hard basket’. They then take a sum of money at budget time, give it to that department, and actually think they are doing good and the problem has been resolved.

    • Jeff says:

      12:34pm | 08/02/11

      This is one measure of the quality of civil society.  Protection of the vulnerable, those who can’t speak for themselves has to be our top order priority.

      Reply

    • Blair Barker says:

      01:07pm | 08/02/11

      Helen I applaud your common sense and compassion.  It is refreshing to see the libs cutting through the odious chanting of the ALP and Greens to focus on real social justice for our most vulnerable..persephone she isnt suggesting it is a simple problem, rather it will take a lot more than a token splash of cash to start solving

      Reply

    • philip says:

      02:49pm | 08/02/11

      I would love to see every single docs/ families sa or whatever they are called in each state worker lose their jobs to get rid of the zealots that kidnap children from new parents who are only trying to do the right thing, my nephew was stolen from his mother at the tender age of 2 days old because a nurse reported that he was lying on my sisters chest and that they weren’t bonding which was false as I was a frequent visitor to my sister in the time they spent in the millicent & district hospital we have a new stolen generation on our hands because of zealots in the child protection depts across the country sure I agree that if there is proof of abuse against a child they need to be removed from that situation but at the same time get rid of all the zealots by examining how many kids have been seized by them.

      Reply

    • TheRealDave says:

      03:53pm | 08/02/11

      What do you mean throwing money at a problem won’t make it go away???

      It worked for the aborigines didn’t it?!?!?

      Reply

    • Mik says:

      04:38pm | 08/02/11

      Child abuse includes physical, sexual and emotional abuse and neglect.There is NEVER an excuse for child abuse. All young people should attend compulsory life skills, personal responsibility, resilience and parenting lessons weekly in after school classes throughout their high school lives so that they have every chance of giving their own children and themselves a decent life. Hopefully those who’ve been abused will also get help there. There are many cases of intergenerational abuse (physical/sexual/emotional) so hopefully this will help to reduce the incidence of this malignant obscenity which destroys the lives of so many.

      Reply

    • JAX says:

      04:55pm | 08/02/11

      Or the ‘unsubstantiated’ ones were dobbed in by fear mongerers (forgive spelling it’s been a long day) who see a child smacked on their nappy and immediately call DOCS, or one raised voice (to be heard over the TV) quick call DOCS, that child is dirty call DOCS (never mind they were just out rough housing with their brother, *gasp* that child has a black eye call DOCS (sporting injury) this is why the child services are overworked, too many calls when there is nothing wrong and no evidence other than someone just knowing in their guts

      Reply

    • Likes Joining Dots says:

      06:35pm | 08/02/11

      I’ve worked with Child Protection workers previously (hey there to the Dandy crew in the SE suburbs) and they do a great job.

      The problem is definitely not the CP workers.

      True I don’t have an immediate solution, however I did want to give some credit to workers in the field where it was due.

      Reply

    • Coopers says:

      06:07pm | 15/02/11

      Referring to the question, “...some 240,607 cases were not ‘substantiated’ and it begs the question, why?”, cases are frequently settled in corridor negotiations.  Where it can’t be resolved, the matters are then booked for contests.   

      Unlike civil litigation, the Family Division of the Children’s Court of Victoria is not a black and white ‘win-lose’ jurisdiction; one party who wins the court case while the other party loses the case. 

      The Children’s Court works differently.  Here, the best interests of the child must always be paramount.  Which translates to, “Are the parents good enough?”, instead of “Are they the best parents?”  This means that if there is a strong likelihood of reunification with the parents, or if there are relatives who can be involved in the day-to-day care of the child, then as a model litigant, the Department supports taking that position.  Clearly, the obligation to act as a model litigant does not prevent the Department from acting firmly and properly to protect the interests of the child. 

      The question can perhaps be re-phrased as the primary issue, “Is the child in need of protection?”  If so, “what is in the best interests of the child?”

      Getting stuck into the numbers game is not moving the issues forward.

      Reply

    • Kristy says:

      12:20am | 14/07/11

      Our system needs a complete overhaul, too many children are being neglected and abused and seriously, it is DISGUSTING!! I was a victim of child abuse and DHS were involved and they did NOTHING! There is not a day that goes by that I do not think about what I was put through and wonder why the culprits still walk free and get to pretend they did nothing. Short and simple answer is that our system failed me as did my brother, sister and many thousands of other Australians. Our government needs to stop passing the ‘buck’ and deal with this problem. I went through it from the 80’s onward. And it is happening to so many innocent children still today. One word ‘DISGUSTING’.

      Reply
 
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