Unsafe protection system faces judgment day
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- Category: Uncategorised
- Created: Tuesday, 09 August 2016 19:40
- Written by Verity Edwards and Michael Owen - The Australian
When police found four-year-old James sitting in a locked room surrounded by faeces, rubbish and dirty plates, they removed the “extremely skinny” child from his parents immediately.
It was October, 2013, and officers investigating an abuse notification instantly met with “an overpowering smell of rubbish and rotting food” upon arrival.
“I observed every surface to be covered in rubbish, including the floors, bench tops and sink,” an officer reported. “I turned right down a corridor and continued to step on and over piles of rubbish. Several times I almost fell due to the depth of the rubbish.
The officer took off his jacket and wrapped the child in it, picking him up. “The child was cold to touch and was dirty. His eyes were sunken and he was unable to move without trembling.”
James’ parents had been the subject of several notifications to the South Australian government’s child protection agency Families SA. Ms F and Mr G were later jailed for neglect.
The tragic case of James, who was developmentally delayed because of neglect, was highlighted by South Australia’s Child Protection Systems Royal Commission.
Its 850-page final report, The Life They Deserve, by former Supreme Court judge Margaret Nyland was released yesterday by Premier Jay Weatherill, who spent the weekend considering a response. Yesterday he apologised for his government’s failings and accepted the report’s findings, of a “system in disarray”, promising a full response to its 260 recommendations by December 31.
Nyland says in her report that the child welfare system “lacked the capacity to respond appropriately to children in need of care and protection”.
“The commission’s investigations reveal deficiencies across many parts of the child protection system,” she says.
“Under-investment over many years has hindered much service provision. Efforts to grapple with increasingly complex problems with increasingly limited resources have not worked.”
The royal commission, largely conducted in secret during the past two years, heard from more than 70 witnesses who gave evidence over several months.
The final report identifies five case studies that highlight the abject failures of Families SA, including the failure of the kinship care of baby Abby, who was removed from her indigenous drug-addicted mother when she was two months old and placed in a revolving cycle of care because of abuse concerns.
“South Australia has an extraordinarily high rate of placement instability compared to other Australian jurisdictions,” the report notes.
Nyland examines how Families SA failed youths transitioning into independence. Hannah, 18, struggled through nine years of foster care, barely helped to learn how to live independently, while she was physically and sexually abused. She turned to crime.
“Very few young people received any support from the Agency after they turned 18,” Nyland says.
The former Supreme Court judge highlights system failures in dealing with children with complex needs, behaviours and psychological disorders, including Nathan, placed in therapeutic foster care when aged eight because of behavioural problems at the many schools that could not deal with him. By 11 he was repeatedly running away, being arrested and restrained while in care because of his aggression, which was “almost like a wild animal being caged”.
“He did not know what to do,” Nyland says.
According to Nyland, the department failed to consider how the revolving door of placements and schools unable to deal with Nathan affected his psychological health and development.
Her fifth study focuses on Shannon McCoole, whose sexual abuse of children in residential care was the catalyst for the royal commission, although its terms of reference were later widened as “the problems besetting Families SA and the child protection system proved to be far greater than anyone had initially envisaged”.
McCoole, revealed as an administrator of an international porn ring who was found with thousands of images of child porn, is serving a 35-year jail term for child sex offences against children in his care at residential facilities.
Families SA remains in crisis, It struggles to recruit enough social workers to investigate cases that are deemed not to be the worst of the worst; as up to 60 per cent of calls to the Child Abuse Report Line go unanswered; and as the number of children in state care has almost doubled in the past five years to more than 3300.
“From the outset of this commission it was obvious that workers undertaking the difficult business of child protection felt undervalued, under-resourced and overwhelmed,” Nyland says.
With more than 120 social worker vacancies in Families SA, the Public Service Association accuses the Weatherill government of deliberately leaving roles vacant to save more than $20 million. This has contributed to a failure to reduce the number of children in care and fewer cases of child abuse being investigated than targeted.
Stressed Families SA contractors tell The Australian social workers and other staff are under so much pressure trying to keep up with caseloads and dealing with horrific abuse matters that some have discussed suicide.
One worker whose contract was cut this year and declines to be named, says hundreds of Tier 2 case files — children whose lives are not at risk — were closed as staff do not have the resources to investigate. “It’s a bloody circus in there, people are dropping like flies because of the cases they’re dealing with,” she says.
“Social workers are leaving because of the frustrations in not covering some cases, and people are about to have a nervous breakdown because of the stuff they’re reading.”
She says many staff are underqualified and inexperienced, but Families SA struggles to retain employees and is repeatedly replacing those who leave with casuals and short-term contractors.
Public Service Association secretary Neville Kitchin says the government has been promising to employ 200 additional social workers for two years but is using the vacancies to cut costs.
“We’re arguing that a number of positions are being deliberately left vacant to save money,” Kitchin says. “It was admitted by the department that there were 128 vacancies, we suspect that it was up to 200.”
Kitchin says keeping the roles vacant to save money during budget constraints raises “grave concerns” about Families SA’s operations and there would be ongoing consequences, such as even fewer abuse notifications being investigated.
The government is committed to spending $200m over the next five years to fix the crisis-ridden system, which will include more CARL phone operators to reduce waiting times, appointing a long-awaited children’s commissioner, introducing a system to review the department’s operations, and recruiting more foster families to ensure fewer children are placed in emergency or residential care.
Nyland highlights the department’s failure to put children at the centre of investigations, placing too much reliance on dysfunctional parents, and its inability to listen to vulnerable children either at risk of or suffering abuse.
Opposition child protection spokeswoman Rachel Sanderson says one social worker contacted her recently and said there were 250 open cases at the Elizabeth office in Adelaide’s disadvantaged northern suburbs — which is slated to be merged into a super office — and only 15 social workers to manage the load. The worker says that did not include daily lower priority matters at Elizabeth.
Despite three previous state investigations into child neglect and protection, including last year’s coronial inquest into the death of Chloe Valentine, who was four when she died of massive head injuries after her drug addict mother forced her to repeatedly ride a motorbike, the system continues to fail families.
Janet Wells blames Families SA for the death of her grandchildren, Amber Rigney, six, and Korey Mitchell, five. The agency failed to adequately investigate neglect notifications because social workers were too busy, she claims. Wells says a letter from Families SA reveals that despite several notifications about their mother’s ice addiction, the children were not fed and suffered neglect. Their case was closed three months before their deaths in May.
“Unfortunately this Tier 2 intake was also ‘closed no action’ due to full case loads of social work staff,” an April 11 departmental letter stated.
The letter went on to note, “in that week Families SA had received eight Tier 1 intakes and effectively had no staffing capacity to allocate for investigation”.
Like Belinda Valentine, who had made numerous notifications to CARL and had wanted her granddaughter to live with her before her death, Wells had sought for the children to live with her and was devastated she could not save them before they were murdered along with their mother, Adeline Yvette Rigney-Wilson, 29, on May 30. Rigney-Wilson’s partner Steven Graham Peet, 30, is charged with the triple murder.
“I would never, ever trust Families SA and should have just taken them and gone and hid out,” Wells says. “I’m so angry with Families SA. It’s destroyed our lives, we knew those kids needed help.”
She last saw the children six days before they died on a visit with their elder brother, who was living with her and their grandfather Steven Egberts.
“They all deserved something better, we could have saved the other two,” she says. “You’ve got no idea the guilt we feel every day. We expected the place they call Families SA to help in these situations. They refused to engage.”
In a second letter written less than three weeks before their death, obtained by The Australian, Families SA responded to further notifications about Rigney-Wilson’s daily drug use and committed to speak to her, and assess the children’s living conditions.
Social workers reportedly visited the home just three hours before the triple murder.
A Department for Education and Child Development spokesman says social workers were in active contact with the mother and children.
But it would be “inappropriate and disrespectful to the deceased” to elaborate on that support, he says.
Yesterday, the Premier promised to fix the system through greater early intervention and increased involvement with the non-government sector to triage abuse notifications.
He praised Nyland for her work and said some changes will be made immediately, including the drafting of new child protection legislation.
But other recommendations, such as phasing out care by commercial carers in all but genuine emergency circumstances, will take time and require considerable investment, including the capacity of the residential care workforce in the agency.
Weatherill says a failure to listen to children and an inability to understand the grooming behaviours of people who preyed on the vulnerable demonstrated the state’s “unsafe” child protection system, which he once presided over as a former families minister.
“Now, after all that we’ve seen over so many reports, we have to accept that where there are vulnerable people there are going to be predators and sadly that might mean that we’re going to have to behave in different ways,” Weatherill says.
“But we have to be wise about those matters and while we can’t give guarantees what we can do is make our systems as safe as possible.”
Source : http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/inquirer/unsafe-protection-system-faces-judgment-day/news-story/a1efcc3fdc2f92c072294f1093e2f926
