"Hardly Fair to Vulnerable Children"
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- Category: Uncategorised
- Created: Thursday, 01 March 2012 16:08
- Written by Jeremy Sammut
For the last three years, I have been arguing that Australia’s failing child protection system is being run in the interests of social service providers and not ‘at risk’ children.
In the name of ‘family preservation,’ state community service departments are leaving children for far too long with highly dysfunctional families and only remove them as a last resort when they have been damaged, often permanently, by parental neglect and abuse.
While the childhoods and life opportunities of children ebb away into intergenerational disadvantage, social workers employed in the public sector and non-government ‘charitable’ organisations receive taxpayer funding to provide an array of support services that try and fail to do the impossible – fix broken families with serious drug and alcohol, domestic violence, and mental health problems that can’t be fixed.
The Fair Work Australia decision on Wednesday to award ‘equal pay’ to more than 150,000 community sector workers at a cost of $2 billion to taxpayers is indecent in its illustration of the political problems in the child protection system.
Forget that the decision is based on dodgy comparisons – why should someone with a three-year social work degree have income parity with a trained economist or scientist? Sadly, the federal government was not only willing to support the claim but also provided the $2 billion additional funding to foot the higher wage bill at a time of looming economic woes.
Many commentators are justifying the pay rise by saying those who choose to work with the poor are saints. The real question is why is failure being rewarded? Public choice, dear reader. I just wish vulnerable children had a public sector union to advocate on their behalf, replete with tame factional serfs in the Labor caucus.
That feathering their own nests has been the priority at a time when the child protection system is crumbling all around us and stumbling from one crisis to another means that social workers have surrendered any pretensions to their ‘professional’ status.
This sorry episode has reinforced my belief that the answer to the perpetual crisis engulfing child protection is to restore citizen-control over the system by re-establishing decentralised, community-governed child protection agencies.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of Do Not Damage and Disturb: On Child Protection Failures and the Crisis in Out of Home Care in Australia.
Comments
Dr Sammut's continual and repeated assertions that family intervention and support does not work is false as there are a number of published articles showing they do work when implemented correctly and used in appropriate circumstances.
In most cases where children suffer there is no, inadequate or inappropriate supports. In fact the NSW Ombudsman's report into Ebony and Dean showed that DoCS failed to support the families of high needs children using "competing priorities" as their excuse. The recent death of a child at Wamberal was after 20 reports to DoCS without ANY family support at all. The Victorian Ombudsman recently found that Child Protection was falsifying records to claim they were providing supports when they were not. DoCS in NSW also has this practice and Dr Sammut has seen evidence of this.
Any normal person cannot reasonably believe "family support" to work when it is fabricated. If the medical fraternity fabricated evidence to claim they were providing treatments to sick people they would be charged with medical fraud and bared from practice. But there is no accountability when DoCS fabricate evidence of interventions.
In the medical fraternity it is acknowledged that people are complex and a "one size fits all" solution is not appropriate. If we go to hospital with a heart attack we do not expect our leg to be amputated just because "that's what surgeons do". We expect the most important step to be the evaluation of the problem and selection of the appropriate response. We also expect Doctors to provide appropriate documentation and real therapies - instead of fabricated ones.
Families are also complex but instead of taking a similar approach of evaluation then response Dr Sammut pushes for his referred response without finding out what the problem is to start with.
Lets aim for a Child Protection system that is designed to protect the interests, rights and welfare of the children - not those of the state or Dr Sammut.
Dr Sammut has provided no evidence that his approach has worked to improve outcomes for the majority of children anywhere in the world. There is nothing in anything he has published that suggests wide scale removal of children after child protection reports is beneficial for children. In fact our own "experiments" with the Aboriginal 'stolen generation' proved disastrous.
Lets argue for legislation that makes Child Protection staff accountable to the child and focuses on proper evaluation and then appropriate, evidence based, intervention. The laws about falsification of evidence in the Child Protection and Crimes Acts should be used instead of ignored when DoCS fabricates evidence.