‘Like a dog in a cage’: Desperate lives of kids in emergency care revealed

Children as young as 12 have reported being sexually assaulted and exposed to rampant drug use while in emergency accommodation, in a series of testimonies in which life in state care was described as like being a dog in a cage.

The Minns government will announce an urgent review of the state’s foster care system on Thursday after the Advocate for Children and Young People reported a litany of disturbing testimonies by kids living in state-funded emergency care.

Children placed in emergency care accommodation in NSW have given disturbing testimony about the sector, including reports of sexual assaults and being allowed to “go missing”.

The accounts, given by children as young as 10, are detailed in an interim report from the advocate’s ongoing special commission of inquiry into so-called alternative care arrangements (ACAs), a form of emergency accommodation designed as a last resort for at-risk children in NSW.

In a summary of the report, the children’s advocate, Zoe Robinson, said the testimonies were “necessarily personal, raw, and, at times, very confronting”.

The first-person accounts given by children during a series of private hearings across the state raise serious concerns about the level of care by the mostly for-profit providers.

Under emergency care, children are placed in hotels, motels, caravan parks and short-term rental accommodation where they are supervised by unaccredited staff from labour-hire companies.

One 14-year-old said they had been allowed to “roam off” for weeks without their disappearance being reported.

“They wouldn’t care. I’d go missing, they wouldn’t report me missing for sometimes two weeks, three weeks,” the child said.

Others reported allegations of sexual assault, drug use and being left alone in motel rooms without close supervision.

“I was in ACA from [age] 10 to 12, just in motels, caravan parks … I was put in like $99 [a] night rooms, and I’d be like in one room and then the workers would be like 10 rooms down,” one said.

Another reported being sexually assaulted while staying in emergency accommodation.

“[Not] by a worker but just by a person, another person. I was 12,” the witness said.

A third said they had been left “on my own around like full-grown adults on drugs, homeless people, people with mental illnesses, like it was disgusting”.

Although they are meant to be short-term arrangements, in practice, Robinson found, “what has developed is a practice of using ACAs for prolonged placements”, with the average stay about 120 days.

“However, there have also been clear instances where children and young people have been placed in ACAs for more than 600 days,” Robinson wrote.

In one first-person testimony, a 16-year-old boy who had been in emergency accommodation for more than 500 days told the inquiry he felt like a dog being moved from “cage to cage”.

“It feels frustrating, angry, and it just upsets me,” he said.

“[It was] kind of stressful because we had to move a lot. [They] just move me around like a doggy in the pound pretty much, moving cage to cage.”

Robinson said that the “overwhelming weight of the evidence” which had so far been provided to the inquiry suggested that emergency accommodation had “a detrimental impact on children and young people and “supports the proposition that the use of ACAs should cease”.

Robinson said despite efforts to seek “different placement options”, she remained concerned about the use of emergency accommodation.

“I continue to have significant concerns about where a number of these children and young people have since been placed and the standard of care provided,” she wrote.

The state’s Minister for Families and Communities, Kate Washington, has been critical of the use of emergency accommodation arrangements, telling The Sydney Morning Herald last year that the for-profit providers were “exploiting a broken system”. But while the government has begun stripping caring responsibilities from private providers who take too long to find permanent placements, she has continued to use them “because then where do those children go?”

However, ahead of the release of the report, Washington said the government has commissioned an urgent review of the foster care system, conceding the government had a “long road to travel to make sure we deliver the best outcomes for young people and taxpayers”.

“This report is heartbreaking; these kids’ stories are harrowing,” she said.

“As the minister and as a mum, I’m horrified to hear that there are children in the child protection system who feel like they’re animals, being moved from cage to cage.”

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