Australia is facing a crisis in which 'child protection' services are reuniting a staggeringly low number of children with their families, writes Gerry Georgatos.
IF YOU ARE a descendant of the First Peoples in Western Australia, ten out of 11 children removed will not be returned to their parents by 18 years old. Many go in search of their parents when adults.
The official rate of reunification by child protection of the children of the First Peoples in Western Australia is recorded as 17%. This is an abominable rate of reunification. It is a humanitarian crisis not only in Western Australia but an escalating cataclysmic catastrophe across the continent.
Many of us have been screaming for decades. Governments that will be forlornly damned by the future, as we damn past governments, do everything they can to hide the diabolic grimness.
The 17% reunification claim, as horrific as it is – 1.7 out of each ten children reunited – is conservative. The real number is one in 11 — about 8%, tragically.
When I backgrounded reporters on deaths of children in the care of the Western Australian state, the Department stated to prominent journalists there had only been one death in the last ten years. I provided coronial transcripts and the recorded deaths of 12 children in “care” in the last eight years — in Western Australia.
Subsequently, the Department of Communities admitted to at least 14 deaths of children in care since 2020 including the suicide death of the 10-year-old earlier this year that tragically jostled to the nation’s lead story for a couple of days.
Nationally, since 2020, at least 70 children have died in “out-of-home care” and possibly closer to 100 children have died.
The veils of secrecies need to be shattered or more families will continue to be shredded.
I’ve been warning for decades of Australia as one of the world’s highest child removal rates — aggregated and disaggregated Black, Brown, White.
I challenged curious laws that made child removals easier and reunification increasingly difficult.
There was a cumulative swell of concern a few years ago about an amendment bill in front of the West Australian Parliament proposing changes to the Children and Community Services Act 2004. I railed against it.
The proposed powers may affect all Western Australian children who come to the attention of child protection authorities but, in effect, enable more powers over First Nations children, and then thereafter over Culturally and Language Diverse (CALD) children. This is racial discrimination.
The proposed amendment to Section 81 of the Bill allows for child protection authorities to place First Nations children away from their parents or carers, similarly so for CALD children, following consultation with only one of the child's family members.
This is a further erosion of children's rights and First Nations self-determination, and deserves robust scrutiny retrospectively.
I argue that for two decades, governments across this nation have been strengthening legislative powers to remove children.
From 1997, the year of the Bringing Them Home Report, to now, there has been an enormous increase in the number of First Nations children removed from their homes by child protection authorities.
There were just over 2,000 removed in 1997. Currently, there are over 24,000 First Nations children removed from their homes.
Western Australia is our country's second biggest remover of First Nations children, with the nation's highest representation rate of First Nations children in out-of-home care. Currently, 58% of children in out-of-home care in WA are First Nations, who are almost 20 times more likely to be placed in out-of-home care than Western Australian children.
In the nightmare horror show that is the Northern Territory, 88% of children removed are children of the First Peoples.
We work with many children at the National Suicide Prevention and Trauma Recovery Project (NSPTRP) who are in the care of the state but who have fled the state's arrangements.
Many of these children are homeless. Despite the lives of many children that have been improved by child protection authorities, thousands of young lives have fallen by the wayside or been abandoned.
The laws are not working in the interests of children. In fact, the laws are working against them.
Instead of an outcry over legislative amendments, there should be a relentless rallying to tear apart an obviously broken child protection system.
The system has degenerated into an institution focused on child removal. The media could shine a light on such an oppressive institution. I have given up on royal commissions.
Child protection authorities no longer serve to support or keep families together where possible. We need departments of social services to replace departments of child protection. Their very title, “child protection”, appears to be some type of policing entity rather than armies of social workers and counsellors committed to psychosocial support through a whole of family approach.
In terms of the proposed amendments, it is a dangerous precipice that promises an even higher rate of children in out-of-home care. Each year, on average, 400,000 calls are taken by child protection authorities where complaints about other people's families are lodged.
Nationally, funding to child protection authorities exceeds $9 billion but overall, it is estimated state and territory governments spend only 17% of this funding on family support services.
When we have a crisis to the magnitude of 50,000 children removed, 24,000 of them First Nations and one in 30 Australian children coming to the attention of child protection authorities, do we showpiece arguments on an amendment bill or do we call for the whole system to be dragged to reforms?
Governments must take responsibility for the catastrophic failure of child protection, for it is our governments that have legislated the powers one after another since the late 1990s, all the while reducing social services.
In only two decades, we have seen more children than ever before removed. Not just First Nations, but overall. Child protection workers must be freed up to become the social workers they aspire to be and not be defaulted to pseudo-police.
If we do not speak up about a crisis that, in terms of numbers, has outstripped past generations, the future will condemn our generation as we condemn the past.
We are only a decade away from more than 100,000 children removed and with well more than half to two-thirds expected to be First Nations children.
Until the public through the media can hear the thousands of untold stories from children who were failed, from families ripped apart, from social workers within child protection authorities and from social workers, psychologists and counsellors working to the bone to repair broken lives, there should be a freeze on any additional funding to child protection authorities.
No further amendments should be made enabling more brutal powers within child protection authorities.
First Nations kids account for more than a third of all children in out-of-home care in Australia. This is despite the fact that the youth of the First Peoples only make up around 6% of the general populace under the age of 17.
The 24,000 children of the First Peoples removed from their families right now is the highest number since invader-colonisation began. And many refer to this disproportionate representation as the ongoing stolen generation.
But, the tendency of government services to forcibly remove children from their families is affecting the entire population, with the rate of one in 32 Australian kids coming to the attention of child protection authorities, being the highest in the world.
Despite knowledge of the increasing rates of the removal of Australian children – and of the even worse removal rates of First Nations children – there’s an effective silence around it, including by the media. And this is due to “racism and classism”.
Australia has the highest rate of child removals in the world. But, when we look at Western Australia, the crisis of child removals is as horrific as it gets.
The peak body that represents First Nations families who have lost their children to child protection, the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC), in its 2019 Family Matters report on removals of First Nations children, found that Western Australian child protection authorities are 18 times more likely to remove the children of the First People compared to rest of Western Australia’s children. It’s now 20 times.
A decade and a half ago, there were 30,000 Australian children removed, including less than 10,000 First Nations children.
At that time, I estimated that by 2020 more than 50,000 Australian children would be removed into out-of-home care. I estimated that by 2020 more than 20,000 First Nations children would be removed.
We can’t go past the point I made at the time, which was that social support services to vulnerable families were being reduced or defunded and that in the absence of these services, enabling powers were being legislated to remove more children and place them elsewhere.
This explains how we went from 2,000 children of the First Peoples in out-of-home care in 1997 to 8,000 children removed by 2008 to now 24,000 children removed.
How many more families and children will we hurt, damage and destroy?
Today, systemically, child protection does not focus on supporting families, but as the statistics and budget tell us, they focus on what should be the last resort, not a first — removing children.
They want to find more options for placements, so they can remove more children. New laws enable powers to remove and place children, as when you increase the power to place you increase the potential for child removal traffic and that’s what it’s really all about.
The Western Australian amendment bill was a copy of a recent Queensland bill that proposed more powers disguised as consultation with families through singular individuals.
In Queensland, this led to more children being removed, instead of being supported by their families.
I have first-hand experience of families that only needed to be supported and instead, were betrayed by child protection authorities.
This bill represents more powers under the guise of “placements” to remove more children, rather than to support them in the first instance.
For me, in working with families that others would consider too hard to support, I have helped them to become healthier and stronger.
In the 100 years since the Stolen Generation began, we have now had five waves of generations of children removed. This fifth wave of removals today is the highest number of children of the First Peoples ever removed.
I’m watching families destroyed and devastated, of whom members – parents, brothers and sisters – take their lives.
I watch families whose meaning is lost, and they live their lives – whatever is left of them – without happiness or hope. Many finish up homeless and many more incarcerated. Western Australia is the mother of all gaolers. Disaggregating to racialised lens, Western Australia incarcerates its First Peoples at the world’s highest rate. Most had been in the care of the state.
Our service is contacted daily by families crying out to be reunited with their children, as well as by children who have fled out-of-home care – that is foster care or group homes – and who have finished up homeless.
There are children who are wards of the state, who instead of being in the so-called placements are homeless on our streets — children younger than ten years of age.
We work with some to house them, to support them and to love them.
The nation should read the story published in The West Australian newspaper on 16 December 2019. It’s the only time in Australian history that child protection has given permission for an out-of-home care child – aged 16 – to tell her story.
We need departments of social services to replace the departments of child protection.
Child protection appears to be some type of policing entity, rather than a service of social workers and counsellors, who should be supporting families.
We want to see most of the funding to child protection authorities – say, 60 to 70% of the $9 billion-plus, national – redirected to fund family support services.
We need the media to disprove the stereotype and the racial bias that perceives affected families of removed children as abysmally dysfunctional.
Instead, the blame for the high removal rates of First Nations children, the children of migrant-born families and all families, should be laid squarely on child protection services and our governments that have allowed and enabled this.
It is my view that until the media can report the thousands of untold stories of children failed and their families, everything will continue to get worse.
Child protection and family services should focus on assisting vulnerable families as opposed to removing children.
In early January of 2017, I reunited a 14-year-old girl with her biological mother. She had been removed from her mother at 12 months of age. Two months prior, she was found lying next to a tree nearby a Perth primary school. Students passing by saved her life.
The child had been under a protection order although she was a long-term runaway from both residential and foster carers.
Children removed from their biological parents are among the most elevated risk groups to serious aberrant behaviour and suicide.
On the day of her reunification, she called me to thank me. I was happy for the child and mother and, at the same time, sad in the knowledge that most children removed should not have been. Seven years, I am still in her life. That’s what support can look like.
In my work with suicide-affected families, I come across stories that the nation should hear. Nine years ago, two sisters under child protection orders ran away from their carer. The protection orders were not lifted. Next to no work was done to assist these girls with kin or other support. They were 11 and 13 years old and spent most years on the streets.
The 11-year-old took her life – on the streets – as a 17-year-old. So much more should have been done.
Child protection authorities and their personnel may think they are doing a good job, but overall, they are not. The majority are well-meaning, but that’s not good enough. There are prejudices, class and racist assumptions and horrid policies that betray. The tsunami of stories needs to be told to the nation.
Australia has to be brought to account for its high rate of child removals — of tearing families apart instead of the much-begged-for focus on working alongside families. Personnel defend their good intentions, but most child protection workers are from the sea of privilege. The future will condemn the present generations as the present condemns the past. But we should not wait for a mere condemnation from the future.
In my view, the best way to radically reduce the damage being done by child protection authorities is to reduce their funding, as I explained in October 2016.
The “child protection” monoliths right across the nation are vastly overfunded. It is not true they are underfunded and overstretched. Child protection budgets should be radically reduced to one-sixth to end the humanitarian crises they are generating. The child protection and “family services” monoliths are responsible for the record levels of child removals and directly responsible for the wilderness of grief, the multitudes of broken and ruined lives.
In 2014-15, 151,980 children – a rate of 28.6 per 1,000 children – received child protection services. Child protection authorities and family services across the nation are increasing the numbers of their personnel each year and, in turn, churning out more “services”. These workers may score the quid, but families are the victims. Child protection authorities need families to investigate, monitor and, in my view, harass.
These child protection monoliths have conjured up similarly monolithic investigation units and never-ending “care protection services”. A significant layer of these services is Kafkaesque. It is the poor who seem to be a target, albeit maybe inadvertently. The 2015-16 Department of Child Protection budget for Western Australia was $644 million.
Each year, there is a “cry poor” by child protection authorities, who need more funds to monitor “vulnerable” families. Each year, in every jurisdiction in the nation, the child protection budgets increase and, subsequently, the number of children removed increases.
In NSW, the child protection budget was $1.7 billion. These monies could be better spent on providing various assistance to struggling families instead of ripping apart families — instead of child protection authorities and “family services” deploying minimalist and reductionist policies that lead to children being removed.
In New South Wales, less than 2.5% of First Nations children are reunified with their parent(s). That’s worse than Western Australia. NSW has the nation’s lowest rate of reunification of First Nations children with their parent(s). The propensity of First Nations children removed in NSW is 12 times the rate of all other children.
When children are removed from their families because of alleged emotional abuse or various other reasons, they are seldom provided with adequate healing or restorative therapies. The removal of a child from his or her family is a significant psychosocial hit. It goes straight to the validity of the psychosocial identity – it hurts – and, for many, this pain is unbearable.
For many, the trauma of removal is unresolvable, inescapable and relentless. For some, this trauma is also compounded with multiple, composite traumas, which may degenerate into disordered thinking and aggressive complex behaviours.
For the most part, child protection and family services should reconsider how they allocate their budgets and, instead, focus on assisting vulnerable families, as opposed to the reductionist and minimalist approach of removing children. However, most child protection and family service workers are not skilled in any number of ways that should be requisite and are ill-qualified and inexperienced.
In my interfaces on behalf of families with child protection workers, I have been appalled by the low level of skills and low calibre understanding of the workers.
Governments have created a nightmare with these insatiable monolithic child protection authorities, with the consequence that families are degenerated by these workers to broken and, for many, ruined lives. Individuals removed as children from their biological families are the most elevated risk group for aberrant behaviour and suicidal ideation.
Most families investigated by child protection authorities can navigate acute socioeconomic pressures and even various asserted negative behaviours within their homes, including exposure to alcohol abuse, substance abuse and various psychological and psychiatric illnesses.
The involvement and over-involvement of under-skilled but overly judgmental child protection workers, in general, not only fail to assist but compound vulnerabilities and are trauma-inducing — there is generated constancy of trauma. People make mistakes and can wound each other but empathy and forgiveness are likely if families, for the most part, are left to themselves to work through their lot. Child protection workers majorly invalidate people, diminish them and most certainly traumatise every family member.
It is a grim reality that 15% of the Australian population lives below the Henderson Poverty Line and for the First Peoples it’s around 40%. Poverty should never be an excuse for the removal of children. It is a grim reality that, thereabouts, 10% of children live in families where there is substance misuse, but for most of these families, there is still no genuine reason to remove the children. We are accumulating more stressors on individuals and families — dumping upon them sanctimonious and unreasonable expectations.
Reduce the child protection budgets and the child removals. This is the solution to the child removal catastrophe. Nearly half the children removed were under five years of age when their form and content were in most need of their biological parents.
The child protection monolith is washing into society stereotypes of most parents of children removed as “drugged up”, “drunk”, “violent” and “incompetent”. Most of the parents are none of these.
Some children will need foster care, but most children should remain with their parents. The reductionist aspiration that relative or kinship care is the way to go for children removed is not a solution. Relative/kinship care is the best option for some children for a period or permanently but, for most children, it is a damaging experience because they should never have been removed from their nuclear families.
The removal of a child from his or her family is dangerous. It can invalidate the individual and not just disrupt them. The gaols are filling with individuals who as children were removed from their parents. They are the most elevated risk group for suicide. Unless we radically change policies to authentically work with families, instead of tearing them to pieces, the number of children removed and the suicides of these children as adults will increase.
Western Australia’s child protection has utterly failed, no excuses, when only one in 11 children of the First Peoples will be reunited before age 18 with their parent(s). Ten out of 11 won’t. More than one in ten – who knows how high – will finish up as young adults in one of Western Australia’s 17 prisons.
Only one in 11 reunited in WA! What an unforgivable disaster! And only one in 40 reunited in NSW! What a shitshow!
Gerry Georgatos is a suicide prevention and poverty researcher with an experiential focus on social justice.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
Support independent journalism Subscribe to IA.
