Fostering trouble
The knee-jerk use of foster care as a response to child abuse can harm those children it’s meant to protect.
Caroline Overington
Latest
It’s the quality that counts in foster care
WELFARE agencies should stop the practice of heaping awards onfoster carers who have taken 50 or 100 children over the years, and instead celebrate those who have a small number of settled kids.
Cash to care for problem children
STATE governments are increasingly outsourcing the care of the most difficult abused and neglected children to private operators.
Bigger issue is men who don’t pay
SOMEWHERE in Australia tonight, an angry man is going to creep into a little girl’s bedroom and pull a chunk of hair out of her head.
Child welfare is ‘not working’
THE vast majority of child protection workers are young women straight out of university with limited life experience.
Celebrations of life, not death
CLINT Thompson was a larrikin and a ladies’ man. He played rugby league with Sydney’s Coogee Dolphins and really liked a beer.
Kids lose out as foster carers cash in
THE business of providing shelter to children who cannot live with their parents has become an industry worth more than $1 billion a year, with the profits shared by carers who admit to taking children into their homes for the money.
Foster kids medicated ‘for mental health’
FOSTER children are being medicated with psychotropic drugs at 10 times the rate of other children because as many as half have mental health problems, according to NSW Community Services Minister Linda Burney.
Children in care drugged
ONE in four children removed from the care of their parents and placed in foster homes are being medicated to control their emotions.
Cancer-stricken Einfeld facing jail
FORMER judge Marcus Einfeld, who is facing jail time after pleading guilty to perjury and perverting the course of justice, has cancer.
Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/author/caroline-overington/page/158