Kids in crisis slip through cracks

CASEWORKERS are fighting hard to keep neglected children safe.

A Queensland couple who stepped in to take care of their step-granddaughter when she was removed from her mother's care are appalled at the lack of support they received. Picture:Paul Beutel

CASEWORKERS are fighting hard to keep neglected children safe.

LATE on a Friday afternoon, at an understaffed and overworked child protection office of the Victorian Department of Human Services, a manager addressed her exhausted staff.

"I need 17 cases closed by this afternoon," she says. "It has to be done so we can meet our target."

The caseworkers were appalled, as was the union representative who was in the office at the time. Close 17 cases of substantiated abuse in a couple of hours? How could they possibly do that? According to workers and foster carers, this is just one example of what is happening in the department responsible for keeping the state's children safe.

They say there is a chronic shortage of funding, a lack of staff to deal with the caseloads and pressure from management to close cases of abused children to get them "off the books".

But the state's child protection workers are not alone in their complaints against the DHS. In the past two years, the department has been slammed for its performance in various annual reviews and reports. Its most damning assessment was by Victorian Ombudsman George Brouwer, who tabled two reports in parliament, one in November last year and one earlier this year, and found abused children in the department's care and foster care had been raped and seriously assaulted, and were working as prostitutes.

Brouwer uncovered cases where children had their limbs broken, had seen their guardians selling drugs to other children and were being kept with families despite evidence of abuse.

He found an under-resourced department had not been screening carers properly and failed to follow procedure.

"The state has a responsibility to ensure that the trauma already suffered by these children is not compounded by further abuse," Brouwer wrote.

"An unacceptable number of children do not experience out-of-home care placements as the secure and safe environment they should be. Rather, they are subject to further abuse and neglect."

The report last year also revealed 22.6 per cent of all child-protection cases in Victoria, 2197 cases, were not allocated to a caseworker as of the end of the 2009 financial year.

Since these revelations and the public outcry, the department has been at pains to state that it has invested an extra $77.2 million in the system and has accepted most of the recommendations made by the Ombudsman. It says it has halved the numbers on the "unallocated cases" list to 1350.

But just last month deputy ombudsman John Taylor again expressed concern, saying there were 42,000 mandatory reports made last year to authorities and 22 per cent of those had not been visited by a caseworker.

"If you don't get visited, no one is going to know," he told a parliamentary inquiry. "We are looking at the safety and welfare of vulnerable children in Victoria who don't have a voice."

According to one worker, who spoke to The Australian on the condition of anonymity, staff levels in the DHS are so dismal that some offices are only half occupied. He believes the department cannot retain anyone because child protection workers get "burned out" trying to manage the huge caseloads.

"The reality is [the government] keeps [saying] $77 million has been put into the department, but in most teams 35 per cent of clients are not allocated," he says.

"And some of these clients include high-risk infants."

The staff member says his biggest concern is caseworkers not being able to do their job properly.

"The fact is we are not able to give quality care to the clients we are dealing with," he says. "The clients don't get enough attention."

The Community and Public Sector Union, which represents child protection workers, say hundreds of poorly paid staff are leaving the department because they simply cannot cope with the never-ending caseloads.

Victorian Community Services Minister Lisa Neville denies child protection staff are being pressured to close cases, saying the government has put tens of millions of dollars more into the department since the Ombudsman's report and is implementing measures to retain and support staff.

But CPSU industrial officer Mandy Coulson says the area has never been given sufficient funding to deal with the influx of cases after the mandatory reporting and other preventative reforms were introduced. She believes management has become preoccupied with reducing the numbers of "unallocated cases" and that takes precedence over everything. Coulson says there is pressure to reduce the number of cases coming into the department - and ending up on the unallocated list - by any way they can.

This includes instructing staff to close 17 cases on a Friday afternoon or decreasing the number of children entering the system in the first place by raising the threshold for abuse.

Coulson says child neglect cases are no longer considered serious enough by management to get through the doors, despite neglect being a predictor of abuse. She says staff who once "checked cupboards" as part of their visits do not have time to do it any more.

"They have to choose between cases and that is destroying them," Coulson says. "Can you imagine if you were looking after two kids, if you knew both of them were at risk of being abused and you can only help one, how would you feel?"

One Queensland couple experienced what they claim is the DHS trying to get a child off the books. The elderly couple - who cannot be named for legal reasons - were telephoned one night by their former stepdaughter-in-law in Victoria to see if they could look after her teenage daughter.

The teenager had been taken away from the mother after she alleged the mother's boyfriend was abusing her. The woman asked if her daughter, who also cannot be named, could come to live with them in Queensland because she did not want the teenager to go into foster care. The couple, who had known the girl since she was little and were considered almost her grandparents, agreed. Forty-eight hours later, the DHS called to confirm a time to pick up the teenager from the airport.

The girl turned up with nothing: no clothes, money or paperwork. The next day the Queensland grandmother had to go out and buy the girl new underwear because the department "did not even have the decency to make sure she had clean underwear, it was absolutely disgusting".

Not having been foster carers before, the couple rang the Queensland Department of Communities for help.

"Children services had no knowledge at all and they could not help us because Victoria had not notified them," the grandmother says.

"The DHS had just put her on a plane and sent her up here."

The couple, through assistance from a foster-carers group, discovered they had none of the required court orders, paperwork or formal agreements required to look after the teenager.

The DHS documentation the grandparents did receive - seen by The Australian and called a "private arrangement" by the department - includes a DHS authorisation and a handwritten note signed by the girl's mother saying she was giving her permission for her daughter to go live with the grandparents on a "long-term basis".

"If a scribbled handwritten note and one phone call is all it takes for the DHS to hand over a child as part of a special deal, that is just appalling," the grandmother says.

"They just wanted to put her on a plane, forget about her and get her out of the system."

The family struggled over the next 12 months, trying to cope with the troubled teenager, and despite getting her counselling, the girl kept getting suspended from school.

They tried repeatedly to get more information from the DHS about what happened to the girl, including going to their local member of parliament and putting in a Freedom of Information request, only to be told it was "none of their business".

"We couldn't get any help from Victoria or children's services here so we thought the best thing was to take her to her father," the grandmother says.

"But we don't think things are going well for her there either. If we could have got more help from the DHS, she may have been able to stay with us. I think they have well and truly failed her."

But the department has vehemently denied it did not fulfil its duties to the girl, saying it simply assisted with a "private and voluntary agreement" that was made within the child's family for her to move to live with her step-grandparents in Queensland and it provided all the information required. The nature of the arrangement meant that no paperwork was required.

"We provided information about the child's history to the Queensland department whenever they have sought it," a department spokesman says.

Neville also rejects the suggestion the department failed in this case and is failing children across the state. She says the Ombudsman found the DHS was a leader in "policy reform" and the "vast majority of children" in care were being looked after.

The government has also increased funding by 163 per cent since it came to office in 1999, from $215.8m to $568.2m. But Neville concedes workload continues to be a pressure-point for staff. The government is spending money recruiting workers to offset this and the issue of falling staff retention. She denies any cases would have been closed prematurely or that thresholds of abuse have been increased to cut the "unallocated list". Neville says it is important to note that if an abused child is on that unallocated list, it does not mean the cases are completely unsupervised because they are looked after by team leaders.

"That is something that has not been raised [with me]," she says of the allegations. "Our focus is getting more staff to relieve that pressure . . . there is no hidden pressure or undue pressure being put on.

"[And] I don't think the figures bear that out at all. All of those breakdowns between neglect and emotional and physical abuse are remaining pretty stable."

Neville maintains the reasons the DHS has such a high staff turnover rate is mostly because of the difficult nature of the work, not because of poor pay or conditions.

"Of course, there is always more to be done [with the child protection system]," she says. "But over the last decade there has been a major boost in funding that we haven't seen before but we need to keep doing that."

But Neville's responses provide little consolation to the child protection workers in the field, with many saying they cannot sleep at night because of choices they have to make in an understaffed, overstretched system. One worker, when asked by The Australian if he has problems sleeping, sighs and replies: "I get medical assistance."