MEDIA RELEASE: Nyland Report will re-invent system that failed Chloe - The Centre for Independent Studies
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MEDIA RELEASE: Nyland Report will re-invent system that failed Chloe

cis logo 640x360The Nyland Royal Commission has squandered the opportunity for South Australia to lead the nation on child protection and open adoption reform, according to The Centre for Independent Studies Senior Research Fellow and author of The Madness of Australian Child Protection, Dr Jeremy Sammut.

“The Commission’s report – The Life They Deserve — is basically a blueprint for re-inventing the existing flawed system that failed Chloe Valentine,” Dr Sammut says.

“Chloe died because Families SA was obsessively focused on ‘family preservation’ at all costs and did everything it could to keep Chloe with her dysfunctional mother.

“It therefore defies belief that the Nyland Report has recommended the government set up a supposedly new department dedicated to doing even more so-called ‘early intervention and prevention’ to help bad parents — which will simply mean that children keep staying with abusive and neglectful families.”

“The report tells us that the system is overwhelmed by the number of reports of child harm received — but this is because too many children are re-reported time and again because they have been left in shocking homes.”

“The report also tells us that there is large numbers of ‘high needs’ children in care who have been profoundly damaged by parental mistreatment due to family preservation policies — and then are further damaged by being churned in and out of the crumbling foster care system as family restorations breakdown.”

“This vicious cycle won’t stop until the focus of the system is on the needs of children not on the needs of parents demonstrable incapable of looking after children properly.”

Dr Sammut says many children would be saved for lifelong disadvantage if they were removed earlier and permanently.

“More adoptions are needed because (as the report reveals) there simply aren’t enough people willing to act as foster carers — particularly when this means taking on damaged children with difficult behaviours and other problems,” he says.

“Commissioner Nyland is wrong to claim that advocates for adoption don’t understand that many damaged children are unsuitable for adoption.

“The recommendation that instead these children be shunted into long-term guardianship arrangements is worse than a panacea. This is not only unaffordable — given the numbers of kids needing removal into care — it also amounts to creating a dumping ground for the children the system has failed.

“Advocates for adoption have long argued that greater use of adoption must occur in conjunction with dramatic changes to frontline child protection practices.

“Scrapping family preservation, and more timely open adoptions to give children safe and stable families they need, is the only way to give these kids ‘the life they deserve’ — and the only way that departments like Families SA will no longer be responsible for failing children like Chloe.”