Checks, cheques and balances imperative for child safety

IT is clear the Territory’s child protection system is overwhelmed and failing the children it is meant to protect, and there are three core reasons behind the systematic failings, writes Save the Children NT director NOELENE SWANSON.

It is clear the Territory’s child protection system is overwhelmed and failing the children it is meant to protect, and there are three core reasons behind the systematic failings, writes Noelene Swanson. Picture: iStock

LIKE many of you I was dismayed by the NT Children’s Commissioner’s recent report highlighting the systemic failings of the Northern Territory’s child protection system , and the abuse and harm experienced by 12 Aboriginal children placed in out-of-home care or foster care over the course of 16 years.

It is clear the Territory’s child protection system is overwhelmed and failing the children it is meant to protect.

These children bravely spoke up about what was happening to them, but the system turned them away. This is a major alarm bell and something that a Royal Commission spent years and millions of dollars trying to change in this country.

There are three core reasons behind the systematic failings.

First, there is a lack of independent rigour when it comes to the assessment of a carers’ ability to provide care — when they first sign up to be a carer and ongoing.

Second, there is a lack of resourcing to enable thorough, independent wellbeing checks to be carried out on all children placed in care.

And third, there is no independent party checking the safety and wellbeing of children in the place they are removed to, and no one to ensure children’s views about their own safety and wellbeing is listened to or factored into decision-making.

In other places in Australia, independent child advocates take on this role and are a key part of the child protection system.

MORE NT CHILD PROTECTION NEWS

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The reality right now is the demand on the system is so great and resources so stretched that case managers are having to triage their clients — children — based on how vulnerable they are, because they cannot support them all.

The overwhelmed resources also mean children are staying in the care system longer than they need to.

This out-of-home-care ­effect comes at huge cost to the child, government and taxpayer.

Too often this first contact with child protection, and removal from the family home, becomes the turning point in a child’s life in which they may fall into a negative pathway that includes poorer health and wellbeing outcomes and greater reliance on the welfare system.

Research shows that these children are also more likely to interact with youth justice agencies than those who are known to child protection services but remain at home.

With the Northern Territory election just weeks away, the major parties have an opportunity to present their policy to fix the out-of-home-care and foster care systems.

A policy that invests more resources upfront and outsources the monitoring and assessment of care arrangements to an independent child rights organisation or the Office of the Children’s Commissioner.

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We need to ensure the best interests and rights of every child are met every time, without fail. This needs to be set in legislation.

Save the Children stands ready to help if requested, in partnership with Aboriginal Community Controlled Organisations, which is critical given 90 per cent of children in out-of-home-care in the Territory are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

Yes, the system is broken. But there is a solution. All that’s required is the political will to address it.

Noelene Swanson is Save the Children’s Northern Territory director