Child protection: the invisible pandemic

A wretched soul bruised with adversity,

We bid be quiet when we hear it cry;

But were we burdened with like weight of pain,

As much, or more, we should ourselves complain.

Comedy of Errors, Act 2, scene 1

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare recently released their report Child protection Australia 2018–19 (link here). I have not had a chance to make a close examination, but even a cursory scan makes for devastating reading.

This national snapshot comes in the wake of multiple reports and reviews over many years. To take just one of the many, in October 2019, Professor Megan Davis finalised a comprehensive report (link here) for the NSW Government. Family is Culture: Independent review of Aboriginal children and young people in out of home care is the most wide-ranging and comprehensive report on Indigenous child protection issues in Australia for at least a decade. It is full of detailed analysis and statistics, along with suggestions for reform. Professor Davis makes 125 recommendations. A particular focus of Davis’ analysis is the need to address the structural issues underpinning what is widely acknowledged to be a dysfunctional child protection system seeking to address widespread issues of neglect, abuse and violence within many Indigenous families. I have not had a chance to review implementation progress, however it seems unlikely that there has been adequate time for a considered NSW response to date. The risk that the NSW Government will do nothing, or very little, appears very high, as along with so many of these reports, the Davis report gained very little media coverage and has had very little public impact. Moreover, it has been overtaken by emergencies such as the bush fires and now the Covid 19 pandemic that inevitably consume all the available political oxygen.

The Davis report came hard on the heels of a report by former Commonwealth public servant David Tune into the mainstream child protection system in NSW. Neil Westbury and I made a detailed study of the Tune Report in our Policy Insights Paper published by CAEPR in March 2019, Overcoming Indigenous exclusion: very hard, plenty humbug; see pages 55-57 (link here).

I don’t wish to attempt to make a detailed assessment of the core issues arising from these reports here; interested readers should go to the publications themselves. I do however wish to make an important policy point: the extraordinary levels of out of home care in NSW (and other urban and regional jurisdictions) is demonstrable proof that structural exclusion is an issue for Indigenous citizens across the whole nation, and not just in remote regions.

Rather than seek to re-analyse and regurgitate insights proposed by others over time, I thought I would merely reproduce some selected quotations from the AIHW Report before drawing some very high level conclusions. I make no claim to comprehensiveness in doing this, my purpose is merely to bring home to readers just how dire is the situation of First Nations children in this country.

Selected extracts of the AIHW report

From the Summary:

• 1 in 6 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children received child protection services. 12,600 Indigenous children were the subject of a substantiation in 2018–19. The most common type of substantiated abuse was emotional abuse (47%) followed by neglect (31%).

• 1 in 18 Indigenous children (around 18,000) were in out-of-home care at 30 June 2019, two-thirds (64%) of whom were living with relatives, kin or other Indigenous caregivers.

Page 15: In 2018–19, 51,500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children received child protection services, a rate of 156 per 1,000 Indigenous children. This was almost 8 times the rate for non-Indigenous children (21 per 1,000 non-Indigenous children).

Page 17: The number of Indigenous children receiving child protection services rose between 2014–15 and 2018–19, from 42,900 to 51,500. This was reflected in the rate, which rose from 134 to 156 per 1,000 Indigenous children in the same period. For non-Indigenous children the rates have remained relatively steady at 21 per 1,000 non-Indigenous children between 2014–15 and 2018–19, with minor fluctuations during the period.

Page 25: Children from geographically remote areas had the highest rates of substantiations—children from Very remote areas (20 per 1,000 children) were almost 3 times as likely as those from Major cities (7 per 1,000) to be the subject of a substantiation (Figure 3.6). Of the children who were the subject of a substantiation from Remote and Very Remote areas, 88% were Indigenous. In Major cities only 16% of children subject to substantiations were Indigenous.

Page 27: In 2018–19, 12,600 Indigenous children were the subject of a substantiation. This is a rate of 38 per 1,000—6 times the rate of non-Indigenous children (6 per 1,000). This is consistent with findings for previous years.

Page 41: At 30 June 2019, 37% (21,900) of children on care and protection orders were Indigenous. Of these children, 70% (15,300) were on guardianship or custody orders. The rate of Indigenous children on orders was 66 per 1,000 Indigenous children, 9 times the rate for non-Indigenous children (7 per 1,000). The rate of Indigenous children on orders was higher than that for non-Indigenous children across all jurisdictions, with rate ratios varying across jurisdictions.

Page 43: From 30 June 2015 to 30 June 2019, the rate of children aged 0–17 on care and protection orders rose from 9 to 11 per 1,000 children. Over the 5-year period, the number of Indigenous children on care and protection orders rose steadily, from 16,900 on 30 June 2015 to 21,900 on 30 June 2019, with rates rising from 53 to 66 per 1,000 Indigenous children.

Page 49: In 2018–19, about 4,300 Indigenous children were admitted to out-of-home care at a rate of 13 per 1,000 Indigenous children, nearly 9 times the rate for non-Indigenous children (1.5 per 1,000 non‑Indigenous children). Similar differences in rates of admission to out-of-home care for Indigenous and non-Indigenous children were evident across all age groups.

Page 52: At 30 June 2019, more than half (54%) of the children in out-of-home care lived in Major cities, and 42% lived in Inner regional and Outer regional areas (based on postcode of living arrangement).

The rates for children in Remote and Very remote areas were twice that of those in Major cities for children living in out-of-home care at 30 June 2019. The rates of Indigenous children in out-of-home care were much higher across all remoteness areas than the rates for non-Indigenous children.

Indigenous children living in Major cities were 14 times as likely as non-Indigenous children in Major cities to be in out-of-home care at 30 June—62 per 1,000 Indigenous children compared with 4 per 1,000 non-Indigenous children.

Indigenous children living in Remote and Very remote areas were 10 times as likely as non-Indigenous children to be in out-of-home care.

Page 53: At 30 June 2019, about 18,000 Indigenous children were in out-of-home care—a rate of 54 per 1,000 Indigenous children, which was nearly 11 times the rate for non-Indigenous children. This difference between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children was evident across all age groups.

Policy Implications

There are a range of potential responses to this information by policymakers. The first approach, perhaps the most likely, and the easiest in the short term, is to just ignore this situation and hope a political scandal or media revelation does not emerge in the near future.

A second possible approach would be to seek to ascertain the underlying causes of the extraordinary rates of out of home care and then adopt policies and programs designed to mitigate and ameliorate those causes. Such an approach is not as straightforward as might be imagined, since the potential causes are multiple, are potentially legacies of previous policies , and are potentially subject to debate and  argument (even within the policymaking community). Moreover, the potential political support of the measures required to address those causes is often non-existent (either out of ignorance or self-interest), and even were it to exist, the implementation capacity of governments in these complex cross-cultural domains is weak and problematic.

A third approach, that I find intuitively attractive, but is likely to be the least likely approach of policymakers, is to ramp up considerable the policy focus and attention on the issue, allocate substantially more resources including to supporting foster families and, and give the issue more profile in policy contexts. This would require political leadership and commitment, and would necessarily be guided by the broad thrust of the Indigenous community’s insights and concerns, for which Professor Davis’ analysis and recommendations including her calls for greater Indigenous involvement in the child protection system might be considered a proxy. Of course, she correctly articulated the case for broader contextual reforms in the Indigenous policy space, and this too will be essential. My point is that there is a case for a crisis response to the child protection pandemic that will be contingent on wider reforms, but should be pursued on its own terms nevertheless.

I have made a very direct link to the need for a pandemic response not merely as a rhetorical device. It is worth thinking about the child protection statistics, and then making the imaginative leap to try to understand what they mean for real children and families. Their worlds are in turmoil before the child protection system is engaged, but that turmoil continues both during and afterwards. Moreover, the levels of need for child protection services are extraordinary, suggesting that the reverberations of poor policy will spread far and wide. Like the operation of the health system in a pandemic, the effectiveness of the operation of the child protection system in mitigating family violence, rebalancing lives, and creating a foundation upon which children can build a future life will have life and death consequences. Future rates of drug use, domestic violence, incarceration, psychological health, and employment are all impacted by individuals’ experience in their childhood years. Let me repeat: the child protection policy domain has life and death consequences for First Nations peoples.

Of course, it is instructive that when a health crisis such as Covid 19 hits the wider community, creating an associated economic crisis, governments are prepared to adopt the third approach above, focussed on moving quickly to acknowledge the crisis and throw untold resources (‘whatever it takes’) at mitigating it including across the health, finance, immigration and social security sectors. As I write this, the media is reporting that the Government is preparing a massive second stage economic stimulus package in excess of $50bn. Yet Governments have been unwilling to adopt an equivalent approach to the long standing, and ongoing child protection crisis engulfing Indigenous Australia. The answer to the question: ‘why this continues to be so?’ would provide the most persuasive insight into the underlying structural causes of the longstanding child protection crisis in Indigenous Australia.