Child welfare IT trumps fears for family privacy

Child welfare workers in the Northern Territory will be handed a tablet device to track the welfare of vulnerable children.

NT Children's Commissioner Colleen Gwynne. Picture: Justin Kennedy

Child welfare workers in the Northern Territory will be handed a tablet device on which they can access more than 20 different data systems to track the welfare of vulnerable children.

Workers will be able to see what nurses, teachers or police ­officers have written about their concerns for specific children, with the tablet linked to a new $67.9 million data-sharing platform that pulls content from across government.

NT Child Commissioner Colleen Gwynne has criticised the NT government for being unwilling to share information and sacrifice family privacy in favour of protecting children. She was investi­gating the case of a two-year-old Tennant Creek toddler who was sexually assaulted in February.

In a scathing report she released this month into the child, known as C1, the commissioner found that child-protection workers had made 52 notifications about C1 and her siblings over 16 years. There was ample evidence on record of child neglect, sexual and physical abuse, school ­truancy, parental drug use and 35 domestic violence incidents ­reported to police.

Yet C1 was removed from her family and placed in care only after the alleged rape, which required the girl to undergo surgery in Adelaide for her injuries, a blood transfusion and anti-HIV treatment.

Ms Gwynne said Territory Families and police had a “silo” mentality in which they failed to share details critical to the child’s welfare. “There is not enough focus on the victims,” she said.

The sharing of personal and sensitive information is restricted under privacy laws, and confidentiality provisions apply to workers in the child welfare sector. Information can already be shared between the NT police and Territory Families but greater sharing with non-government agencies is under review.

The commissioner said repeated failures to share information across agencies “still represents a barrier to a holistic response to vulnerable children”.

“While the NT government has argued that the need to protect children and keep them safe supersedes their right to privacy, there is still no real change …­ ­despite the rhetoric,” she said.

NT Families Minister Dale Wakefield has told The Australian the government will amend three laws — the Youth Justice Act, Care and Protection of Children Act and Bail Act — to ensure a “brighter future” for children and greater disclosure.

The changes are a part-­response to the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the NT.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse also identified ­information-sharing as needing immediate reform.

WA Children’s Commissioner, Colin Pettit, who met with the NT commissioner in Perth last week, said he agreed with Ms Gwynne’s call for greater information-­sharing. “Her report needs to be taken seriously by every state and territory in Australia,” he said.

Child sexual abuse researcher Rosemary Cant, from the University of Western Australia, said the inability or incapacity to share information between services had been flagged in multiple reviews of child deaths in recent years.