According to this approach, the best way to protect vulnerable children is to defend parental rights, keep families intact, and try to prevent abuse and neglect by providing support services which attempt to address the parents’ complex problems.

VULNERABLE children in the care of dysfunctional or abusive families will be no better off under the Rudd government’s revamped child protection program because the reforms make it harder to remove minors from their parents.

The planned expansion of child abuse prevention programs could inadvertently lead to more children dying while in the custody of unfit family carers, according to a report by Centre for Independent Studies research fellow Jeremy Sammut.

“Fatally Flawed: the Child Protection Crisis in Australia”, argues that seven-year-old Ebony, who was starved to death in 2007 by her parents, could have been saved if not for the failed child protection ideologies that kept her with her dysfunctional parents.

“They (the government’s proposed reforms) are actually a plan to leave more children with dysfunctional parents for longer, at great risk of long-term harm, on the highly questionable basis that family support services will keep them safe,” Dr Sammut writes.

Under the umbrella of the recently released National Child Protection Framework the Rudd government has endorsed a multi-million-dollar expansion of programs to help struggling families. But Dr Sammut says there is no evidence this approach works.

“A radical family preservation-focused approach to child protection has become orthodox practice inside child protection agencies,” he writes.

“According to this approach, the best way to protect vulnerable children is to defend parental rights, keep families intact, and try to prevent abuse and neglect by providing support services which attempt to address the parents’ complex problems.

“This has led child protection agencies, which in most states are sub-departments of much larger departments of community services, to become increasingly confused about their core responsibility to intervene in the best interests of children.”

Dr Sammut said child protection academics routinely argue that mandatory reporting, introduced in the 1990s and making it compulsory for professionals and the public to report any suspicions of child abuse, has been responsible for overwhelming agencies and should be wound back. In NSW, only 13 per cent of complaints are followed up with a home visit.

But far from being a failure, Dr Sammut argues it has been a spectacular success.

“Mandatory reporting has mass-screened disadvantaged families, capturing an increased level of dysfunction in Australia’s expanding underclass of welfare-dependent families which have serious problems including domestic violence, parental drug abuse and mental illness,” he says. “The most at-risk children have been identified and re-identified, mostly by mandatory reporters.”

In NSW, a quarter of all the hundreds of thousands of child abuse reports are triggered by only 2100 families. Half of the reports are accounted for by only 7500 families.

“A relatively small hard core of dysfunctional parents retain custody of their children, and are re-reported 10 and 20 times, because child protection agencies fail to take the appropriate statutory action in thousands of high-risk and potentially catastrophic cases. This was the case for Ebony,” Dr Sammut says.

Despite a widespread belief that a lack of funding is crippling agencies such as DOCS, Dr Sammut says money “is not the problem”. According to his report, government spending on child welfare is at record levels, having quadrupled in a decade. At the same time, child abuse continues to soar, with substantiations of abuse having doubled since 2000.

Dr Sammut argues the only way forward is for state governments to establish child protection agencies separate from departments of community services.

“To do this job properly you need a whole range of skills, good assessment abilities, deep knowledge of child development, as well as the skills of a policeman. Instead, we unleash first-year graduates on the community.”

Credit: John Stapleton