Children shifted to violent families: Bath report

ABORIGINAL children in care are routinely being placed with relatives in remote communities where they are exposed to sexual abuse and alcohol-fuelled violence.

ABORIGINAL children in care are routinely being placed with relatives in remote communities where they are exposed to sexual abuse and alcohol-fuelled violence, a wide-ranging report on child protection - kept hidden by the Northern Territory government - has revealed.

The Bath report - compiled after an audit of scores of cases of children deemed at high risk who were in the care of the state - exposes the near-total breakdown of child protection systems in the Territory, where background checks on carers are rarely carried out, ministers regularly fail to review the progress of cases, and social services for troubled families are in critically short supply.

Howard Bath, who was appointed Children's Commissioner in the Territory after compiling the extensive report, documents case after case where children were failed by the system that was supposed to protect them.

The report - suppressed for more than two years by the NT government - found Aboriginal children were at particular risk, often consigned to carers who lived in violent or abusive homes in remote communities where standard case reviews rarely happened.

Barely any Aboriginal carers underwent a registration process, and the government's bureaucrats warned it that a "sense of complacency" governed the assessment, review and management of cases of children placed in the care of a relative.

Dr Bath found the Aboriginal child placement principle - which states that Aboriginal children should be placed with a relative or other Aboriginal carers if possible - sometimes took precedence over child safety, and that the standards applied to foster carers were followed with much greater rigour than with relative carers.

"'The present data suggests, as do some of the decisions in the case studies, that in some cases this principle appears to be given primacy over basic child protection considerations," he says. "It was never the intent of the principle that children should be placed in unsafe situations."

The NT government, which is under enormous pressure over its handling of child protection after recent damning coronial findings, has kept the full extent of the crisis racking the department of Families and Community Services hidden from the public for more than two years despite mounting evidence of a system on the brink.

Two years after his extensive report was suppressed, Dr Bath warned that child protection had "slipped off the radar" in the NT, as the devastating findings of the Little Children are Sacred report faded from public consciousness.

In late 2007, the Labor government released the Bath report's executive summary and recommendations, but refused to release the damning detail contained in the close to 200 pages of the full report.

The government is so sensitive about the contents of Dr Bath's report that it has even refused to release it to NT Ombudsman Carolyn Richards, who is investigating 35 complaints against child protection services. The Weekend Australian understands Ms Richards will be forced to issue a summons on Dr Bath to obtain the report.

The government said it feared the identities of children whose cases were detailed would be exposed if the report were tabled in parliament - but the report does not identify the children or any relatives by their actual names.

The Weekend Australian can reveal that urgent warning signs in multiple cases of children in the care of the state were ignored by FACS as it struggled to cope with its overwhelming workload.

In one of the cases that triggered the audit - that of an intellectually disabled 17-year-old Aboriginal boy who fatally stabbed his carer - case workers had failed to act on several serious incidents that clearly showed the boy was a danger to those around him.

Seven months before the fatal attack on his carer, the boy, given the pseudonym "Michael" in the Bath Report, was reported to be killing and dismembering dogs in his Aboriginal community.

In the same month, Michael stabbed a female relative twice and fractured her arm.

And just two months before his fatal attack on his carer, Michael attacked a young girl with a star picket, lacerating her scalp and partially severing one of her fingers.

Critical incident forms were filled out for each of these incidents and given to case workers in Aged and Disability, the Health Department program that was responsible for Michael's case, but Dr Bath's audit found they resulted in "no escalation through the hierarchy", and Michael received no supervision or support.

Another child, known as John, was burned with boiling liquid in 2007 so seriously he needed skin grafts after being effectively abandoned by FACS to the care of a relative who had frequently reported to police incidents of serious domestic violence. Doctors who treated the boy - whose carer did not seek medical aid for the boy for a fortnight - believed the boy had been burned deliberately, but police could not establish evidence to prove this.

In the case of another girl in state care, 16-year-old Joy, FACS repeatedly refused police entreaties to take the teenager - who was sniffing solvents, selling sex for money and drugs, and associating with criminals in her outback NT town - into care, deeming her "conditionally safe".

Dr Bath's report proves that the family tragedies unfolding under FACS' watch are not confined to two cases recently examined by NT Coroner Greg Cavanagh - that of neglected 12-year-old Deborah Melville who died in foster care and that of a seven-week-old baby who starved to death in his mother's care.

Dr Bath's report found that full danger assessments, compiled after an initial home visit to a child in relative or foster care, were completed in only 20 per cent of audited cases.

Of 45 out-of-home care cases audited, only five children had received the required three-weekly visits by case workers. Eighty per cent of the out-of-home cases involved indigenous children, largely in the care of relatives whose backgrounds and living circumstances had rarely been adequately investigated.

Less than two-thirds of cases received review by the child protection minister as required by legislation, Dr Bath found.

And when a child had been in care for more than 12 months, only 2 per cent of cases received the 12-monthly panel review required by the Child Welfare Act.

The NT government says it has made significant changes to the child protection system since the review was announced, including making foster and relative carer assessments consistent.

"The NT government has already made significant reforms to the system including tripling the budget to child protection since coming to office in 2001, strengthening legislation and establishing the Territory's first children's commissioner," said Child Protection Minister Kon Vatskalis. "The NT government has accepted and actioned all the recommendations of the 2007 Dr Bath audit."

But Dr Bath said in his Children's Commissioner annual report, released late last year, that many of the concerns highlighted in his audit were still current.

The NT government has called another public inquiry into child protection. It will begin public forums in Nhulunbuy on Thursday and Palmerston on Friday next week, before holding formal hearings next month.