We must separate family services from child protection

Child Protection authorities around Australia have been engulfed in controversy this year. This has followed a number of high profile cases where children have failed to be removed from abusive homes with fatal consequences. Doing their best to ignore this, speakers at the Child Welfare Association conference in Sydney this week argued that it’s already too easy for children to be removed from their families. They argue that it should be even harder for child protection agencies to separate children from their parents.

Today, child protection authorities have been transformed into de-facto providers of family services. Having to wade through unconfirmed cases of abuse and assist ‘in need’ families is consuming vast amounts of case workers time. This is seriously compromising the ability of Child Protection authorities to carry out their most important work, which is to intervene as soon as possible in the most serious cases of abuse.

Child protection regimes were established to provide a crisis intervention in only the most serious cases involving severe abuse. The original purpose was to deal with cases where children were in dire need of protection by the state. The conference would have served a better purpose had it exposed the real problems which are impeding the work of child protection authorities.

Following numerous commissions of inquiry, the definition of child abuse and neglect has gradually been widened. Health and educational professionals, and members of the public, have been encouraged to report families they have concerns about. As a result, more and more cases are being brought to the attention of child protection authorities. But once investigated, approximately 80% of notifications of child abuse are found to be unsubstantiated. These reports can include minor incidences such as an anonymous complaint about a mother smacking a child in a shopping centre.

The distinction between families which are ‘in crisis’, and families that are simply ‘in need’ has been blurred. While many of the families reported to child protection authorities fall below the threshold for state intervention, a large proportion of these are typically classified as ‘in need’. These families have serious problems, and parents may be neglecting, as opposed to abusing children. They need to be guided to appropriate early intervention services to prevent escalation.

The critical issue, then, is what to do about families that are ‘in need’. Part of the problem is that child protection authorities are often the first point of contact for families requiring counselling and other early intervention services. But, many of these families fail to qualify for these services.

 In NSW, for example, if a child is over the age of nine they are ineligible for assistance from early intervention services, even though they may be at risk. Because they are not considered to be in imminent danger of harm, their case in closed.

When a family receives no assistance, their home situation is in danger of running completely out of control. Appallingly, in many instances, a child’s case is reopened after their neglect or abuse has escalated.

Unsurprisingly, greater funding is channelled into child protection rather than preventative services, despite the vast majority of clients requiring just early intervention and family support.

To ease the pressure on child protection services, a better child welfare system would have multiple entry points, and would clearly delineate between child protection and family services cases. The existing reporting regime could be bypassed.  The bottlenecks this system creates could be eliminated if families were directly referred to local, non-government community services equipped to deal with their specific requirements.

Baseline data in NSW indicates that in September 2007, 975 families had participated in the DOCS’ funded early intervention program. Of these families, only 39 per cent were managed by DoCS, with 61per cent managed by DoCS funded NGO’s and Community-based organisations. This is despite the fact that these non-government service providers receive only a fraction of the funding DOCS allocates for its own in-house programs.

Greater outsourcing of family services makes sense on a number of levels. Non-government providers are already out performing government-operated services. At a lower cost, they are delivering more services and helping higher numbers of families from spiralling into crisis and abuse.

Out-sourcing the provision of family services would also clarify the role of child protection authorities and allow them to target resources where they are most needed. Case workers would be able to concentrate on their primary task – securing the safety and wellbeing of the most vulnerable children in the community.

Toby O’Brien, a Policy Analyst at the Centre for Independent Studies, was until recently a child protection case worker with the NSW Department of Community Services.