Ward of the state, Alex, recounts her experience in Victoria’s broken state care system
Alex was only 12 years old when she entered Victoria’s state care system. It was supposed to protect her but instead it has left her traumatised, terrified and addicted to drugs.
The park is dark and quiet when two teenage girls shove a glass pipe into Alex’s* mouth.
Her only source of light is the flame glowing under the pipe’s bowl.
Terrified and completely unaware of what’s inside, Alex follows the older girls’ orders and inhales.
Only after her first drag do the teenagers tell her she’s just smoked crack-cocaine.
Alex is 12.
She’s never done drugs before.
She’s not a criminal.
It’s her first night as a ward of the state – the state government is her guardian now.
And under its watch, a pre-teen Alex gets hooked.
The crack is first, then it ramps up to ice.
Alex’s residential care living arrangements make it easy for her to get her hands on marijuana, too, whenever she wants.
At 12, she is the youngest of three housemates.
Child Protection has placed her in a house with the 16 and 17-year-old girls who first plied her with drugs, and those girls have already established reliable connections with local dealers.
Now Alex is 19-years-old, and despite unknowingly smoking crack that first time all those years ago, she can recall the horrific ordeal as if it were yesterday.
“When she told me what it was, I was honestly terrified … it was really scary,” Alex tells the Herald Sun.
“It’s traumatising when you’re in a house and all these girls are doing drugs and … you get peer pressured into doing it.
“Being forced into doing drugs is honestly terrifying.”
Alex remained in that house with those girls for another year before the revolving door of residential care placements began, the relationship with her mother too unstable to return home and no other family to look after her.
But by the time the Department of Families Fairness and Housing placed her somewhere else, it was too late – Alex was addicted.
At a quiet suburban park last week, Alex briefly closes her eyes and takes a deep breath as she slowly wrings her hands.
She lightly tugs on her red long sleeve top to cover them as she opens up about her addiction.
It followed her through the almost 20 different houses authorities placed her in, all while the vortex of her spiralling mental health grew.
Alex says one worker would hit her with sticks, while her housemates beat her if they felt she was making too much noise, being defiant or was behaving hysterically during a mental health episode.
She became the subject of numerous missing person reports after running away from her residential care homes, too afraid to return.
Despite being removed from her mother’s care, Alex claims it was the abuse she suffered at the hands of other youths and some workers in residential care that pushed her to breaking point.
Eventually, Alex says she was driven to consider taking her own life.
“I used to really want to do that because I felt like I couldn’t live in the life that I had to live, one where I got abused and not believed and I couldn’t feel safe in my own home,” she says.
In 2023 when Alex learned that a 12-year-old girl housed by the same questionable provider as her had killed a woman in Melbourne’s inner west, she understood why the child had been driven so far.
“I honestly thought it was going to be me to do that, they made me go that insane that I thought I was going to stab someone,” she says.
“DHS should be having some accountability in that.
“They (residential care provider) didn’t care at all about anyone that were kids that were traumatised.
“They just wanted the money and they just wanted all the funding they could get.”
The provider in question cannot be named because it is against the law in Victoria to identify children in state care, or to publish details that could lead to them being identified.
But Alex’s jaded views of the residential care provider are not unfounded.
In 2023, the Herald Sun had uncovered that as a ward of the state, the Allan government was responsible for the 12-year-old girl.
Further investigations by this newspaper revealed the company’s owners had fabricated their staff’s residential care qualifications.
Like that girl, other young residents, including Alex, had gone missing for days, sometimes weeks, on end.
They were left alone by understaffed workers for hours on end, sometimes without enough food to eat.
In other residential care units, young people’s own housemates had sexually abused them, threatened to kill them and set their belongings on fire.
Homicide detectives charged the 12-year-old girl with murder before a judge found she was too young to be held criminally responsible for the 37-year-old woman’s death and ruled she be kept in purpose-built secure housing run by the Department of Families Fairness and Housing.
Outgoing acting Principal Commissioner for Children and Young People Meena Singh wrote in the body’s most recent annual report that the inquiry into that girl’s case “sadly highlighted how Victoria’s most vulnerable children can be failed by the systems designed to protect and support them”.
Alex says it was common for children in residential care to wind up with a criminal record and behind bars.
She was no exception, and was briefly remanded at the age of 14.
Being kept in a holding cell on her own overnight ignited a fear so great, Alex was begging to return to her familiar surroundings of violent housemates and drug abuse, or to be locked away by her own carers.
“It’s really f---ing scary … I was crying, I begged the officers to let me go back to secure (care),” she says.
“I probably stayed up all night and just stared out the window all day, all night. I don’t know, I was just terrified. I didn’t know what to do.”
Alex says secure care, a specialised form of highly supervised accommodation for 10-17-year-olds who are at high risk of hurting themselves and others, felt like her only escape for years until she turned 18.
She became so mentally unstable and scared of the various youths she had been housed with in units across Melbourne, she says she preferred secure care’s “detox” style management.
“You’re locked everywhere you go, like you need a worker to swipe you in and out of the kitchen, the bedrooms, and you don’t have your phone, you don’t have anything with you,” she says.
“That’s better than actually being at home.”
Alex says her start in life could be described as unstable at best, but she blames the system that was supposed to protect her for most of her trauma, and for its ripple effects on the Victorian public.
“Everyone’s on Facebook and Instagram going: ‘where are your parents?’ But it’s just like, we don’t have any,” she says.
“We have nowhere to go. We don’t have the support of our parents half the time. We don’t have family.
“Our parents are the government, the government that’s supposed to be protecting everyone – they can’t even protect the children, like us kids, and they’re not even protecting the community with that, too.
“We’re all traumatised.”
Alex is still addicted to drugs, mainly marijuana, and has not yet found the right therapist to help her work through her trauma.
She says she has come a long way from that night in the park all those years ago.
She wants to use her traumatic residential care experience for good one day, to stop other children from being led down the same road to addiction and trauma that state care led her down.
“I want to go into politics because the way that the government’s going about CPS kids and how people get treated, the system is not made for the kids … it’s not made to protect children.”
*Alex is a pseudonym the Herald Sun has used to protect the girl’s identity.
Duty of care
Last month, a major Herald Sun investigation revealed the horrific reality faced by children who are removed from their homes and placed under the legal guardianship of the Allan government.
It exposed troubled youths’ claims of being raped, receiving death threats, ongoing physical and sexual abuse, and workers being injured so severely they needed surgery.
Today, we reveal the fast-track to addiction, beatings and jail that our most vulnerable youths find themselves on once authorities place them in residential care.
About 500 Victorian children aged between 10 and 17 years old without a legal guardian are in residential care – a specialist type of housing where they live largely independently under supervision from overworked and understaffed workers.
They make up just five per cent of the state’s entire out-of-home care population, but 81 per cent of reported incidents are in residential care.
The Department of Families Fairness and Housing is their legal guardian, and the state government has allocated $548m in funding to the state’s troubled Child Protection sector in recent years.
But under their care, children are being introduced to hard drugs by older teens, being abused, committing crimes all while their mental health is spiralling as their pleas for help fall on deaf ears.
If the government determines it should intervene in their already troubled homes and become their parents, then it is their duty to make sure those kids grow up safely in environments that allow them to flourish.
Originally published as Ward of the state, Alex, recounts her experience in Victoria’s broken state care system
