2014-12-15
Josh Fergeus
This year Senator Rachel Siewert successfully moved for a national inquiry into out-of-home care. Her work, and the work of our spokespeople at a State and Territory level, is well regarded by many key stakeholders.
We have the potential to claim this issue as one of our own, but we are not quite there yet. In all probability this is due to the complexities of the problems and the seeming ambiguities of potential solutions, but then again when have we ever shied away from complex policy?
In the 2012-13 financial year there were close to 300,000 notifications to statutory child protection services across Australia. While the number of investigations has almost halved – mostly due to increased thresholds of risk required to commence an investigation - abuse is more and more often substantiated when investigations do take place, with increases recorded in the rates of neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse and sexual abuse across the last five years. Among Indigenous children, almost 1 in 20 are the subject of substantiated abuse.
At any given time there are over 40,000 children in out-of-home care around Australia, a number which increased by 16% over the four years to 2013. These children have, overwhelmingly, been removed from the care of their birth parents by the state and placed with volunteer foster carers, extended family (kinship care), or in residential care – customised facilities designed to house up to four or five children at a time, operated by paid agency staff on a roster basis. 13,146 children were placed on care and protection orders during the 2012-13 financial year, almost half of these aged between 0 and 4 years of age. 0.8% of all Australian children are on care and protection orders on any given day, including a whopping 6% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
The outcomes for children who have experienced out-of-home care are persistently sub-standard. Studies have consistently shown a disproportionate link between state care and youth homelessness, with some research suggesting up to 41% of homeless young people have spent time in foster care. They are also hugely over-represented in the criminal justice system. Numerous studies show links between care experiences and drug and alcohol abuse, chronic health problems, and suicide and self-harm. Up to 18% of children in care are not attending any form of schooling, and are four times more likely to have mental health problems than their mainstream peers, with as many as one in six suffering from chronic mental illness.
Currently, State and Territory Governments around the nation would be hard pressed to argue that the vast majority of children exiting out-of-home care are any better off than when they were removed from their parents. We remove children in the name of protection, and then leave them to languish in under-resourced, under-supported, and often inappropriate care environments, with little or no evidence base to support an all too high number of case planning decisions. While clearly failing to discharge our duty to care for the most vulnerable among us, the resultant chaos also results in enormous, avoidable costs to the taxpayer as our systems and processes do not provide adequate intervention to divert children from juvenile justice involvement, unplanned hospital admissions, and other expensive tertiary services.
More than ever research points the way to improved outcomes for these children, their families, and their carers. Investing in a strong and diverse pool of foster carers reduces the need for hugely cost-intensive group home style residential facilities, which consistently produce sub-standard outcomes for children. Embracing and properly resourcing therapeutic models of care increases stability, health and wellbeing, and reunification rates with parents, while reducing rates of carer burnout, involvement with juvenile justice, and exclusion from school. Most importantly, supporting vulnerable families to stay together and grow strong through the use of intensive family support services can divert many children from out-of-home care altogether.
Caring for these children is our shared social responsibility, but most of all the responsibility of our elected representatives. Both the moral and economic costs of continued failure to provide appropriate and well-resourced care for these children are immense. Solving these entrenched problems requires foresight, commitment, and long-term thinking. These are our specialities — let's build on the progress we have made to date and put them to use.
Josh Fergeus is Acting Chief Executive Officer of the Foster Care Association of Victoria and a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne.