Former child protection officer says Department of Child Safety ‘under pressure, but far better than it was’

A CHILD safety officer for more than 40 years has defended the Department of Child Safety following the death of Mason Lee, saying ‘we only hear the worst and never the best’.

A LITTLE boy is dead, the community sickened by the pain and callous neglect he suffered, and Queensland’s embattled child safety system is once again under the spotlight.

Barely three years after the Carmody Inquiry identified more than 100 ways to improve child protection, Mason Jet Lee, aged 21 months, lay dead in a pool of vomit in his ­Caboolture South home, 44km north of Brisbane.

When emergency services were finally called on June 11 this year, his battered body was thrown over a locked gate “like a football” to paramedics, who were moved to tears by the terrible condition of the toddler. Mason had suffered ­horrific injuries, including a ruptured small intestine, likely caused by a kick or punch to the stomach, extensive bruising to his head, chest, abdomen and legs, and a separation of connective tissue on his skull – likely caused by having his hair pulled – and an anal tear.

FIGURES: Common factor in many child safety probes

Child safety officers visited Mason’s mother, Anne Marree Louise Lee, two days before his death – perhaps in time to save his life – but the toddler was not with her and they did not go to the house, only a few streets away, where he had been left with the mother’s boyfriend, William Andrew O’Sullivan. Mason had been referred to the Department of Child Safety several months earlier after he was admitted to ­hospital with a severely infected leg and other “neglect concerns”. An Intervention with Parental Agreement was put in place and Mason was sent home, but the case apparently stalled when the child protection officer was transferred.

The little boy died from the ruptured bowel after allegedly vomiting for several days.

Three separate investigations – into the departments of Health and Child Safety Services’ actions, as well as one by the government’s independent Child Death Case Review Panel – were launched after The Courier-Mail revealed Mason’s story. Three people – Mason’s mother Lee, 27, her boyfriend O’Sullivan, 35, and 17-year-old Ryan Robert Barry Hodson (who was living in O’Sullivan’s home at the time) – have been charged with manslaughter. Hodson has been ­granted bail but Lee and O’Sullivan remain in custody.

Child Safety Minister Shannon Fentiman has been criticised for failing to act on a severe backlog of cases. Picture: Claudia Baxter

Ultimate responsibility for Mason’s death will be decided by the courts in due course but time is not a luxury to be afforded to Queensland Child Safety Minister ­Shannon Fentiman, who has nearly 12,000 vulnerable ­children in the care of her department and many more families needing support.

Opposition child safety spokeswoman Ros Bates was quick to declare the state’s child safety system “in crisis”, ­revealing an average of almost one child a week known to the department died last year – some in violent circumstances – and citing 2016 Productivity Commission figures ­assessing Queensland’s child safety response times as the worst in the country. Fentiman, who in addition to her Child Safety portfolio is the Minister for Communities, Women and Youth and Minister for the Prevention of Domestic and Family Vio­lence, was also criticised for knowing about a ­severe backlog of cases in October and failing to act.

On the eve of the 30th Queensland Child Protection Week, Fentiman told Qweekend her devastation at Mason Lee’s death would drive her to continually improve and better resource a system that “could do better”, reiterating her commitment to implement the three new inquiries’ yet-to-be-announced recommendations.

Her hands cupping herbal tea in her George St corner office, Fentiman – a solicitor who worked with various southeast Queensland organisations to improve the lives of vulnerable women and children before entering parliament – pauses to reflect on her own happy childhood ­growing up with her parents, Chris and Eric, and younger sister Erin, 30, on the Gold Coast. “You’re reminded every day in this job just how privileged and fortunate you are,” she says. “Every child ­deserves to grow up in a safe, loving household and unfortunately that’s not always the case.

“There are always going to be bad people who do bad things, and we’ve got to make sure that if the department has to step in because the children’s parents aren’t able to (care for them) that we are the very best parent we can be. That’s all we can do.”

Fentiman, 32, who separated from her husband last ­December, is quick to pay tribute to her staff and their non-government colleagues working in a “really complex, tough, at times heartbreaking, policy area”.

“This is a tough job but (child services staff) have the toughest job in Queensland. They make incredibly tough decisions every day, working with families who are increasingly presenting with more complex challenges.”

Fentiman says real progress is being made to “stop the crisis-driven response” and shift the focus to early intervention and family support after several “tumultuous” ­decades of investigation and reform for the state’s child safety system, following the 1999 Forde Inquiry, the 2002 Crime and Misconduct Commission Inquiry into foster care abuses, and the 2013 inquiry headed by Tim Carmody QC. Carmody identified the biggest causes of systematic failures as “too little money spent on early intervention to support vulnerable families; a risk-averse culture that ­focuses too heavily on coercive, instead of supportive, strategies and overreacts to (or overcompensates for) ­hostile media and community scrutiny; and … a tendency from all parts of ­society to shift responsibility onto Child Safety”.

“Mason’s legacy will be that child protection is everyone’s responsibility,” Fentiman states firmly. “Everyone has a role to keep children safe. The police (allege) there were three adults who knew he needed medical attention and failed to act. To me that demonstrates we all have a ­responsibility to keep children safe, and my own respons­ibility as minister is to continue to ­implement the recommendations of the (2013 Queensland Child Protection) Commission of Inquiry that will overhaul the system.”

Specialist investigation teams charged with improving response times will be rolled out in the wake of Mason’s death. A groundbreaking partnership with the University of Melbourne, First 1000 Days, delivering co-ordinated ­services to vulnerable parents from a child’s conception until two years of age, is about to be announced, and the Walking with Dads program, helping men change violent behaviours to remain in their children’s lives, trialled in Caboolture, will be expanded to Gympie and Mount Isa.

Fentiman says her department’s annual report, to be ­tabled in Parliament on September 30, will “show we are on track with reforms”. To date, 120 of the 121 Carmody ­recommendations have commenced, 31 have been ­completed and the final recommendation – a review of the role of non-government organisations – will start in 2019.

The 2016-17 Queensland Budget states the operating ­expenditure for Child and Family Services will increase 8.2 per cent to $1.011 billion. As at March, departmental ­statistics revealed there were 11,535 children subject to ­ongoing ­intervention, of which 9103 were living away from home – both a slight increase on overall 2014-15 annual ­figures. “We have 166 more frontline and frontline support staff than we did two years ago; we’ve helped nearly 10,000 families with our new Family and Child Connect and ­Intensive Family Support; we’ve helped nearly 15,000 ­families get basic parenting skills through the Triple P ­Parenting Program; we’re seeing fewer substantiations for children in need of protection; more children placed with foster carers and, something I’m really pleased we’re seeing, there’s been a 12 per cent increase in children placed with kinship ­carers,” Fentiman says. “And (the report) will show there’s more work to do. There’s always more work to do.”

Tricia Smith, 65, worked as a child safety officer in Queensland for more than 40 years. Picture: Russell Shakespeare

Tricia Smith knows better than most the challenges and emotional toll child safety workers face every day. Her passion for children and families, demonstrated across more than 40 years working as a child safety officer in Queensland, was recognised with a Meritorious Public ­Service Medal in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours.

Smith, 65, who has just retired, says staff are working with more and more families, each with a range of increasingly complex issues, in a system “under pressure, but far better than it was” and demanding intense levels of ­accountability. She says child safety officers are regularly abused in the frontline role, which could mean “years of working with people who don’t want you in their lives”.

More staff are needed across the board but particularly in high-risk regions, Smith says, to enable individual ­officers’ caseloads to be reduced from 15 to eight families, and to ensure families don’t fall through the cracks when officers go on holidays or sick leave.

Still, Smith emphatically defends her “inspiring” child protection colleagues as the opposite of the hard, uncaring stereotype regularly portrayed in popular culture.

“I don’t think the child protection world is well understood. People criticise the department either for removing children or not removing children,” she says on the phone from her home in the South Burnett, about 230km northwest of Brisbane.

“We only hear the worst and absolutely almost never hear the best. That’s the truth. In my working life I would see stories in the paper about the ‘dreaded’ department, knowing very much the other side of the story, and ­thinking, God, I wish I could give some information to ­balance it up,” adds Smith, who retired in February to spend time with husband Doug, their three children and two grandchildren.

“You cannot have child safety officers or a neighbour or anyone in every home that’s going to ­prevent every ­horrible incident to children. That is unrealistic.

“I would not at any stage say, well, rest on your laurels. We have to keep trying to improve the system but I ­absolutely believe in it. There’s so much that goes right every day.”

Smith says it was the people who kept her in the job for so long, despite the challenges – the “delightful, positive and energetic” children, families with “great love for their children, who would work really hard to overcome their ­issues”, and her passionate colleagues.

“It’s never thankless, never thankless,” she says. “There are wonderful things happening with children in care. I had one young woman I worked with for a number of years, who told me at 15 she wanted to be a doctor. I remember feeling sad, but that young woman – even though she had to drop out of school at 16, because her emotional pain was significant – fulfilled her ambition.

“There are children who are school captains, we’ve had a few kids at state level in sporting teams, it could be little Johnny who is student of the week when six months ago he was being suspended every other day. There is lots of good news out there.”

Elisabeth Kobierski, too, knows there are many, many good outcomes in child protection. It’s a message she’ll be heavily promoting during her two-year tenure as chair of Queensland Child Protection Week. After all, she is a perfect example. A social worker for more than 20 years – the past 13 with YourTown (formerly BoysTown), ­Kobierski was raised in an orphanage and group home under the care of the NSW government.

She rarely shares her personal history but does so now to illustrate the fundamental truths she sees every day working with vulnerable children and families – daily ­successes far outweigh thankfully rare tragedies, families must be well supported to stay together where possible, and child safety has to be everybody’s business.

Queensland Child Protection Week chairwoman Elisabeth Kobierski, 60, was raised between ­domestic ­violence and institutionalised care. Picture: David Kelly

Dressed casually in dark tones and simple jewellery, ­Kobierski, 60, exudes unflappable calm and gentle ­curiosity as she shares her story of being raised between ­domestic ­violence and institutionalised care, and the ­impact of both on the lives of her and her four siblings.

Much of her family history remains a mystery. She knows that by the end of World War II, her Romanian mother, Anita Krokon, and her three-year-old daughter ended up in an American military hospital camp in ­Germany where she met Stan Kobierski, a young Polish soldier having a steel plate fitted for a severe head injury. No details of the toddler’s father are known.

Stan and Anita married, then boarded the first passenger ship leaving Europe, their families never to hear from them again. Stan was 25, Anita 23 and her daughter, four, when they arrived in Sydney in 1950 and were taken to the Cowra Migrant Camp, in NSW’s central west.

They then rented homes across Sydney’s northern beaches; Stan worked for the council, graduating to foreman, while Anita worked as a cook or a hairdresser. Four children, including youngest child Elisabeth, were born in quick succession in the Manly District Hospital, also on Sydney’s North Shore. (Kobierski prefers not to identify her three siblings or her stepsister.)

Severely traumatised by war, isolated from family and adjusting to a new life in a new country, the family was ­devastated by severe alcoholism and extreme domestic ­violence. The night Elisabeth was born, horrifying police reports reveal Stan was at home raping his 10-year-old stepdaughter. He also sexually abused his older daughters and physically abused his only son.

Anita left her abusive husband when Kobierski was three, but Stan refused to allow her to take their four youngest children with her. With Stan working fulltime, the children, aged three, four, five and seven, were taken to the Holy Family Children’s Home in Sydney’s west. Anita rarely visited and was never welcomed, seen as “a demon woman” by the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth for abandoning her family.

Elisabeth Kobierski’s father, Stan.

Still, Kobierski remembers this as a happy time – she was fed, housed, loved school. But the four children were returned home when they finished primary school and quickly fled Stan’s violence, abuse and alcoholism.

Kobierski’s brother changed his name, moved to Queensland and ultimately committed suicide at 22. The eldest sister lived with godparents, trained as a hairdresser and married happily, raising two children in Western ­Australia.

Kobierski was 14, her closest sister 15, when they ran away and were taken to the Bidura remand centre in Glebe, in Sydney’s inner west, “a mini-detention centre” ­described at the time (in 1970) as the central point of the NSW child welfare system. Charged with being in moral danger, the last time Kobierski saw her father, his anger palpable, was in the courtroom as the judge ordered his daughters be taken into care.

It was then, at the St Anne’s Orphanage run by the ­Sisters of Charity, in Liverpool, Greater Western Sydney, that an adult first asked Kobierski what she wanted to do with her life.

“I said I wanted to finish school, and Mother Maree (Bourke) looked at me, shocked. She said, ‘well, we’ll see about that’. But I did. I went through to Year 12, which was unusual in that era,” recalls Kobierski, adding she’s still in touch with Mother Maree, now in her 90s. Her sister left the orphanage after a short while, taking up residence in a hostel and working in retail, until she moved in with a friend’s family. She has lived there ever since.

Kobierski completed three years of nursing training, worked with intellectually disabled children for about a year and then briefly studied psychology. For the next 10 years she served as a Sister with the Holy Family of Naz­areth in Sydney and the US.

On her return to Australia, she enrolled in a Bachelor of Social Work at the University of Queensland and lived in the Stafford convent, in Brisbane’s north.

Kobierski left the order in the early 1990s and pursued a social work career, intent on finding ways to support ­families more effectively and to help as many as possible remain a cohesive, functioning unit.

Elisabeth Kobierski’s mother, Anita.

Anita died several years ago, and Stan is presumed dead. Anita’s eldest daughter’s traumatic childhood was ­compounded by several violent marriages from a young age, resulting in mental illness and long jail terms for killing two children, one of them her own.

Never married and with no children of her own, Kobierski is the glue binding the three sisters and the only one to maintain contact with their stepsister. Talking about this fraught relationship is the only time her composure cracks and tears begin to fall: “I just remember her saying one day, that she always felt like she had no family … We all have to belong somewhere.”

Blaming their parents for her own or her siblings’ life path is futile, in Kobierski’s opinion. “I don’t have any ­antagonism towards my parents, in that I know they were obviously young, had war experiences and then immig­ration experiences, alcoholism. They didn’t cope with war, it’s simple to me,” she says.

“There’s a Buddhist expression, to know is to understand and to understand is to forgive. People are people – that’s what I’ve learnt during my parents’ experience and my family’s experience. We’re all vulnerable, we’re all ­imperfect. We’re just people. We do the best we can do at the time, and that’s what’s helped me do this (social) work.

“We can’t change the way our parents have been, we can’t change what is now our family, but hopefully we can all make a difference to people we interact with.”

Kobierski characterises today’s child safety system as being in a state of flux, with government and non-government agencies trying to understand their roles in a rapidly changing environment. More training and more resources are certainly needed, she says.

“The expression that’s been around a long time in ­welfare is ‘we’re always going to be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff; when are we going to be at the top building the fence?’

“There’s a lot of work to be done, the bedding down and learning and training. It takes time. Have we made a change to some children’s lives? Yes.

“We need to have a sense that things can be better for people if the right supports are in place. With adequate family support – it doesn’t have to be specialist support – most families will make it. They will get through it.”

Be a child’s hero. Ask for help. Offer others support and understanding. Know your neighbours. Rebuild the village one connection at a time. If something doesn’t feel right, trust your instincts and act.

These are the fervent pleas of Kobierski, Smith and ­Fentiman. “Everyone has a role to play. The whole ­community has a role to play – whether it’s your own ­children or someone else’s, whether you’re a teacher, whether you’re a neighbour; wherever you are in the ­community, you have a role to play in keeping children safe,” says ­Fentiman.

“People think it’s a private matter, it’s not (their) business; it’s the same with trying to tackle domestic and family violence. It’s just about having that conversation with your neighbours or the parents in your kid’s soccer team or dance school – it is OK to ask for help, and there is support out there if families are struggling.

“The more we can normalise the fact that everyone struggles and parenting is the toughest job in the world, the more we can normalise reaching out for help, the safer we are going to keep our children.”

Kobierski says child protection research shows one ­significant, consistent, connected person in a child’s life is all he or she needs, even if contact is not daily but at key points in their life.

“We have to promote the value of children and that we all have to take responsibility for them,” she says. “We have to support the parents, support the carers.

“I enjoy children immensely, they’re fantastic and we can learn so much about ourselves. We should never forget to play. We should never forget there’s always an opportunity to learn. And they’re just so honest. Children need to be heard, they need time. Children crave adult company. Do things with them. Be their hero.” ■

* Child Protection Week, September 4-10, is supported by The Courier-Mail. childprotectionweek.org.au

* If you are worried about the immediate safety of a child, call Queensland Police Communications – 3364 6464 – to obtain a referral to your local QPS Child Protection Unit, or if urgent – 000.

* Child Safety Services, 1800 177 135

* More numbers available at childprotectionweek.org.au/help-and-advice/who-to-contact/