Getting them back
Transforming child protection organisation, culture and practice to close the gap for Indigenous Australian children and their families
On August 3, 2021, Paige Taylor Indigenous Affairs Reporter for The Australian published an important in-depth article, Figures foster hope, but children still suffering, about the current situation of Indigenous Australian children in care focused particularly on Western Australia. The article identified the percentage of Indigenous children in the West Australian care system had risen to 57% by July 1, 2020, up from 22% in 1996. In the past year this number has decreased by 0.8%.
The article draws upon Professor Megan Davis’s critique of the NSW care system that she says is steeped in ‘the comfort of ritualism’, driving compliance over common sense and propelling the dramatic over-representation of Indigenous children in care across Australia. The article identifies the intensive holistic family and community-based work of Wungening Aboriginal Corporation as being an important part of the 0.8 percent reduction. Wungening has demonstrated high rates of success in safely reuniting children in care with their families and in working with the families of children close to entering care to ensure those children stay with their families. The article draws upon two brief case examples that highlight the tensions that often emerge not just in Western Australia but also around the world, between foster carers and the child protection agency when children are reunited.
The problem of the escalating over-representation and increasing duration of time in care of children from First Nations, minority and traditional cultures is found in almost all western child protection systems. In Canada, 52% of that country’s children in care are Indigenous. In the USA, First Nations and children of colour comprise 56% of the foster care population. In Ireland, over one third of the children in care are traveller children though their community make up only one percent of the population. In New Zealand, Māori children make up about 65% of children in state care.
Child protection systems and field staff are overwhelmed, proceduralised and often defensive driven by an inability to lift their heads above the urgency of now, rushing from one immediate crisis to the next while wanting to believe what they are doing is indeed in the ‘best interests of the child’. The fundamental problem is one of culture — the dominant defining motif of child protection and child welfare services has always been one of ‘child rescue’. This mentality was the underlying logic that created the Stolen Generations and sadly it continues apace. This is demonstrated in the fact that only ten years after Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations, the number of Indigenous children in care across Australia had doubled.
Given these are entrenched problems of social and organisational culture, training and policy changes won’t get the job done; solutions require whole system transformation of how care, support and protection services think about and approach their work with vulnerable children and their families. The new Close the Gap agreements and targets are an essential foundation for the required whole system changes. However, like all high-level targets and aspirations, without a grounded vision detailing how these targets will and can be achieved commensurate to the complexity of the task, nothing will change. This is where the work of Wungening, undertaken in partnership with and significant funding from the Western Australian Department of Communities is so important. This Western Australian effort is a tangible demonstration of the Makarrata of Indigenous and non-Indigenous collaboration sought in the Uluru statement from the Heart:
When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country . . . Makarrata is the culmination of our agenda: the coming together after a struggle. It captures our aspirations for a fair and truthful relationship with the people of Australia and a better future for our children based on justice and self-determination.
Around the world, organisations like Wungening are emerging, led and organised by the marginalised communities that are the recipients of most child protection services. Like Wungening many are seeing good results including this US Washington State example. As well as being community run and delivered these services are holistic and restorative; involving a naturally connected village around the child and parents, addressing broader issues that create conditions of child abuse and neglect such as housing, income, poor parenting skills, addictions, and violence. Very often these services are provided in residential setting where the whole family can live together and continue to be connected to their community and culture as they make changes.
To genuinely close the gap for Indigenous children in Australia, whole system child protection transformation is required, that ensures:
There is full involvement of family and all those with natural connections to the child and family network in the assessment, planning and action from the very first contact by child protection agencies till the last, so that everything is done to keep the child within their community and their immediate or extended family
Whether the child lives within or at worst case scenario outside their immediate family, kin or community, child protection systems demonstrate that they are doing everything possible to sustain and deepen the child’s lifelong connection with their family, culture, community and country of origin. The key arbiters of this standard must be the community the child belongs to.
The entrenched and largely unquestioned belief in the idea of ‘child rescue’ must be undone since this remains the statutory care system’s motive force that sees more than 46,000 children in care across Australia. While it’s completely natural for any caring adult to want to save a vulnerable child, the longer you are involved in child protection work at any level the more this is not at all a simple proposition. In the end you find that blood is always thicker than social services.
In reality, the state is a poor parent. English Commissioner for Children Anne Longfield recently observed that the state’s parenting is too often so poor that if a biological parent was to provide such care, the children subject to that care would be immediately removed.
The child rescue myth means that our systems consistently frame foster carers as ‘good’ and the parents and their extended family as ‘bad’. This entrenches practices where our systems turn foster care into stranger care and the children are torn between their loyalties to their family, culture and community and the family they are living with. The two stories from the foster carers described in Paige Taylor’s article have been manufactured by this polarisation of carers and family. This is a system that though its policies pursues connection, it too often isolates and hides children from their family of origin allowing only occasional and usually closely supervised access.
Our systems need to prioritise investment in comprehensive search for extended family and community wherever they are in Australia, and this is best led by Aboriginal people inside the statutory agencies and by organisations like Wungening. Alongside this, our child protection systems need to completely reset care arrangements when children need to be placed outside kin and community so that foster carers are recruited, trained and supported to work as a team together with the child’s immediate and extended family and their community while the children are in care. Though a massive paradigm shift from current practice this is simply common sense; it’s achievable and will return our system to practice that was much more common forty years ago. There are certainly a very small handful of cases where children need to be kept separate for a time from family and kin but this needs to become the absolute exception rather than the norm as it currently is.
One Australian jurisdiction is leading the way in showing that it is possible to transform statutory child protection responses. Over the past three years, Territory Families has reduced the number of children in care from 1067 on June 30, 2018, to 953 at the same date this year. The vast majority of these are Indigenous children. At first glance this 10.6 percent reduction may seem insignificant. Over the past 40 years, all the data trends have been upwards, and this is the first time any state or territory has achieved any significant out-of-home care reduction over a succession of years since Australia began gathering nationally comparable data in the 1990s.
When any care system achieves any sort of reduction of children in care numbers or its rates are lower than other equivalent jurisdictions, it is crucial to ask has this occurred because of naïve practice that leaves children in unsafe circumstances? The internationally recognised standard for assessing the safety of child protection decision making is found in renotification rates: this being the percentage of cases that are re-referred within 12 months following case closure. Single figure renotification rates are regarded as good. In the same 2018 to 2021 period Territory Families has seen renotifications decline from 16 to 8 percent.
Alongside these improvements Territory Families has also achieved:
A reduction in placements of Indigenous children with non-Indigenous families
Increased staff retention and significantly increased staff morale (second highest across all levels of NT Government service)
Rapid response processes that prioritise the involvement of naturally connected networks around the immediate family whenever the agency intervenes in their children’s life.
The changes in the Territory have come about through a purposive whole system change effort that includes:
Leadership consistently demonstrating their direct connection with practice
Clearly defined measurable improvement goals
An ongoing leadership development programme
An Aboriginal leadership group established and supported — grounded in an explicit cultural security framework and Aboriginal practice principles
Explicit programme to stabilise staff churn
Fully resourced implementation of a commonly understood participatory practice model
Resetting the primary purpose of the children in care system as sustaining and deepening children’s connection to culture, country, community and family as the foundation for providing placement stability and ongoing child development
Focus on learning not just training. Building the organisation’s learning culture around success in strong participatory practice with families and communities; constructive leadership and positive organisational cultural change
Redesigning the case management system and processes focused first and foremost on practitioner experience and desired practice rather than just KPIs
Directing more resources to Indigenous family support agencies.
There continues to be much work to do and improvements in child protection systems are always vulnerable to being overtaken by a return to the dominating culture of anxiety and defensiveness. However, given it is only very recently that the Royal Commission into the Detention and Protection of Children in the Northern Territory completed its work, these constructive changes should be recognised and drawn upon as one means to assist in Australia finding its path to genuinely closing the gap for Indigenous children.
Further information Professor Andrew Turnell: +61 412 249 552 or andrew.turnell@elia.ngo
Andrew Turnell is based in Perth and over the past 30 years has worked closely with child protection systems across Europe, UK, North America, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, Cambodia and Uzbekistan. Since 2016, Andrew’s primary focus has been on whole system transformation in Ireland, the Northern Territory, Uzbekistan and Cambodia.
Andrew is Social Work Professor of Practice at Cumbria University, principal co-creator of the Signs of Safety, and founding CEO of Elia International. Andrew is well known internationally for his ground-breaking work in researching, developing and applying safety-organised whole system methods to promote the transformation of statutory child protection practice and organisation to deliver participatory safety organised services. Andrew works closely with Professor Eileen Munro from the London School of Economics who led the 2010-11 UK government review of the English Children’s Services. Professors Munro and Turnell work together to assist governments and statutory children’s services agencies to align child protection organisation with the delivery of collaborative safety organised practice that relocates children, parents and all those with natural connections to the child at the centre of the child protection endeavour. More information at www.signsofsafety.net and www.munroturnellmurphy.com