Nyland Royal Commission into South Australian child protection system: reaction from three agencies
ROYAL Commissioner Margaret Nyland’s mammoth report found the state’s child protection system in disarray. Here, three different agencies share their views on what the report means - and what it missed.
ROYAL Commissioner Margaret Nyland’s mammoth report found the state’s child protection system in disarray. Here, three different agencies share their views on what the report means - and what it missed.
NYLAND REPORT WILL REINVENT SYSTEM THAT FAILED CHLOE
Dr Jeremy Sammut
THE Nyland Royal Commission has squandered the opportunity for South Australia to lead the nation on child protection and open adoption reform.
The Commission’s report — The Life They Deserve — is basically a blueprint for reinventing the existing flawed system that failed Chloe Valentine. Chloe died because Families SA was obsessively focused on ‘‘family preservation’’ at all costs and did everything it could to keep Chloe with her dysfunctional mother.
It therefore defies belief that the Nyland Report has recommended the government set up a supposedly new department dedicated to doing even more so-called ‘‘early intervention and prevention’’ to help bad parents — which will simply mean that children keep staying with abusive and neglectful families.
The report tells us that the system is overwhelmed by the number of reports of child harm received — but this is because too many children are re-reported time and again because they have been left in shocking homes.
The report also tells us that there are large numbers of ‘‘high needs’’ children in care who have been profoundly damaged by parental mistreatment due to family preservation policies — and then are further damaged by being churned in and out of the crumbling foster care system as family restorations break down.
This vicious cycle won’t stop until the focus of the system is on the needs of children not on the needs of parents demonstrable incapable of looking after children properly.
Many children would be saved for lifelong disadvantage if they were removed earlier and permanently.
More adoptions are needed because (as the report reveals) there simply aren’t enough people willing to act as foster carers — particularly when this means taking on damaged children with difficult behaviours and other problems.
Commissioner Nyland is incorrect to claim advocates for adoption don’t understand that many damaged children are unsuitable for adoption.
The recommendation that instead these children be shunted into long-term guardianship arrangements is worse than a panacea. This is not only unaffordable — given the numbers of kids needing removal into care — it also amounts to creating a dumping ground for the children the system has failed.
Advocates for adoption have long argued that greater use of adoption must occur in conjunction with dramatic changes to frontline child protection practices.
Scrapping family preservation, and more timely open adoptions to give children safe and stable families they need, is the only way to give these kids ‘‘the life they deserve’’ – and the only way that departments like Families SA will no longer be responsible for failing children like Chloe.
Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Senior Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies and author of The Madness of Australian Child Protection.
TIME TO FOCUS ON ROOT CAUSES OF WIDESPREAD CHILD ABUSE
Ross Womersley
CONGRATULATIONS to Justice Margaret Nyland and her team for their terrific examination of some of the uglier parts of our community. Her report should be required reading for anyone wanting to deepen their understanding of human services, and the protection of vulnerable children.
But today I am left contemplating why we always seem to wait for something horrific to occur before we finally attend to things we should have been doing years ago.
What annoys me is that it takes a Royal Commission and report to focus the minds of governments — no matter of what persuasion — on investing in the leadership and resources required to ensure proper protection of our children.
While Justice Nyland’s analysis is erudite and helpful, many of the issues that plague our system of care and protection have been well known for years.
It is regrettable that we were only jolted into action by the widespread public attention to horrendous instances of abuse.
We are now seeing something similar in the Northern Territory with the announcement of a Royal Commission following the 4 Corners program and the shocking images of kids being maltreated in detention.
Again, the issues of maltreatment and abuse, as well as the terrible over-representation of young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander kids in our detention centres nationwide is something we have known for many years.
There is, of course, a broader context to all of this. One thing that is missing and was beyond the scope of the Nyland analysis is a detailed discussion about the social conditions that result in kids needing protection and an alternative system of care at all.
We know for example that a lack of family income and extended experiences of impoverishment sometimes result in unavoidable neglect. We know that poor parenting skills, mental health issues, addictions, family violence, unemployment, lack of purpose and self-worth, and poor education are some of the key drivers behind the arrival of kids in child protection.
And please let’s not fall into the trap of thinking this is just an issue for people who are poor. Rich families can equally harbour instances of child abuse and neglect, as they too live with the challenges of mental health issues, family violence and dysfunction, and alcohol and drug addictions which are out of control.
But unlike many people on very low incomes, they often have direct access to a whole range of resources that they can bring to support them which can often mask from public review, the deep turmoil within.
In the end these life preconditions are the ones we really need to address if we are serious about wanting to prevent kids from coming into our systems of care.
This is still the biggest piece of work we need to be undertaking while at the same time working to give life to the wide ranging set of recommendations Margaret Nyland has made that aim to fix the child protection system itself.
We will need our justice, health, education, childcare and welfare systems to work in concert. And as individual members of the community, as police officers, as health workers, as educators, as neighbours, it’s up to all of us to step up and share the responsibility.
Ross Womersley is the CEO of South Australian Council of Social Service.
COMMISSIONER FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG PEOPLE CAN EASE NIGHTMARES
Dr Janice Fletcher
FAILINGS in our child protection system in recent years are the stuff of nightmares. Awful stories in our newspapers have accompanied our toast and coffee in the mornings, but the more awful truth is that these nightmares have been a matter of everyday life for those who have been directly affected.
There will be no easy answers and no quick solutions. These are the cliches we will hear and repeat, and they are true. But what is also true is that while there is no magic wand to make our system quickly better, many of the solutions speak for themselves.
They are contained in the insightful and lengthy report from Royal Commissioner Margaret Nyland, containing 260 recommendations.
While there may be debate on some of the finer details, the principles are straightforward; prevention, adequate resourcing, training, and looking to the evidence of what works, need no arguments.
It goes without saying that our most vulnerable children should not need to be protected from the very system that is supposed to be protecting them. But we need more than a safe child protection system. We need a safety culture that goes across the board.
The endorsement of establishing a Commissioner for Children and Young People — as recommended 13 years ago in the earlier Layton review — has long been advocated by the AMA (SA), and other health leaders.
The good news is that the concept of a Commissioner already has bipartisan support — if the Government and Opposition can just agree on a model. Step two, of course, will be seeing the office adequately funded to do its job.
The Commissioner for Children must be independent of government, and should have investigative powers, for the Commissioner to use at their discretion. Sometimes a light cast on one case can expose a system, and bring light for the rest.
We have seen this in recent cases, with the shame being in just what that light has shown us, and shown us too late for too many.
A Commissioner won’t fix our child protection systems but would bring — we hope — a power and an office to cut across the current ‘‘silos’’ which can mean that everyone has their own slice of the problem, and no one is looking at the larger picture.
When a child is failed, usually no single part of the system is the sole problem. There are often questions, problems and errors at multiple points. Each of these points represents an opportunity, and every opportunity lost is its own failure.
There is much wisdom in the Nyland recommendations, but we have seen wisdom in reports before, and we have also seen it fail to go very far after an initial hue and cry, and some reorganising. There needs to be sufficient funding or this report, too, will languish and fail to achieve its objective.
The Premier has said the Government’s response will be measured — some recommendations will be implemented immediately and others will take more time. The Government’s detailed response will be handed down by year’s end.
A measured response has its merits — we do not want to see a hasty hash job. But we will also be measuring the days in which vulnerable children are not benefiting from the safer system we should be offering them today, yesterday, and before this sorry and tragic mess arose.
Dr Janice Fletcher is president of the AMA (South Australia).