Leave those kids alone

ADOPTION may be out of favour with bureaucrats but it is a better solution than sending at-risk children back to their abusive parents.

The number of children in care has increased by 75 per cent Picture: John Tiedemann

HIS favourite treat was Chicken in a Biskit. He was so young when he died that he still said Biderman instead of Spider-Man. In one photograph he's wearing Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas and grinning at his new-found ability to toddle, his pants bulging over his nappy.

Dean Shillingsworth was killed some time last week. His body was folded into a suitcase and thrown in a duck pond. When local children fished it out they thought they'd found part of a dead pig.

The details are numbing, but they don't surprise Harry Quick, a retiring Tasmanian Labor MP who taught for 23 years in disadvantaged schools and who recently took testimony from foster carers and others at the coalface of child abuse and neglect, as part of a House of Representatives inquiry.

"I thought, poor little bugger, stuffed in a suitcase and discarded," Quick says. "But was I shocked? No. It's part of a pattern, where you've got so many kids, supposedly in care, in inverted commas, and they are not really protected, they die all the time. This is a very bad case, but there are lots of bad cases: we see it all the time."

Quick says lives could be saved and futures secured if courts and welfare workers were prepared to permanently remove children from violent homes and delinquent parents.

"I saw two kids in the local shopping centre where I have my electorate office, barefoot in the winter, demanding money from people, and they were six and four," he says. "I called the welfare people and they said: 'There is no sign of bruising or neglect', so they get sent back to their mothers."

Quick spent much of this year, his last in the House of Representatives, taking testimony from foster parents and welfare workers as part of an inquiry into the effect of drug abuse on families.

"We were looking at drug abuse, but one of the clearest things that came out of it was that kids are suffering like crazy and yet it doesn't really matter what parents do to their kids, the social workers won't take them away," he says. "There is an anti-adoption ethos where social workers and departmental heads are totally opposed to adoption, so the kids just get sent back."

Australian Childhood Foundation chief executive Joe Tucci says a "philosophical problem" pervades the child protection arena.

"We don't get involved when we should," he says. "The system has swung too far towards parents' rights. The policy of adoption is out of favour. There is no time limit for parents who are failing their children. There is no limit to the number of interventions or complaints that can be made about a family. You can take a child out of a family and put the same child back any number of times.

"You and I would think this child is in danger, at risk, and really needs to be permanently removed so they have a chance at a future. But the departments don't have that mentality."

Lorraine Rowe has been a foster parent for 24 years in South Australia, NSW and Western Australia. She gave harrowing evidence to Quick's committee, saying she had a three-year-old and a five-year-old in her care, two of six children born to a drug-addicted mother, one of whom had died of an accidental overdose after swallowing a capful of methadone left in the house. He was 18months old. Rowe told the committee that the mother "can petition the court again (to get custody of the children), which she plans on doing in November". But "when she is using drugs she is just so consumed with the drug use that she is just not able to meet their emotional needs. She focuses only on the drugs and how to obtain them. So those kids are left unfed, uncared for."

Rowe says she cannot understand "why our system allows them to go back and come back and go back. That is an abuse in itself: it is just more rejection." She has witnessed many parents get angry when children are removed from their care, "but they are not angry that the children have been taken. Sometimes they are a little bit relieved that the kids are gone but get angry because their payments are cut dramatically. The kids represent money coming back to them."

Rowe says adoption would "give the kids a chance. These are kids that have been with these foster carers for years" but have never been made available for adoption and probably never will.

Some have "one name on the Medicare card, a different one on the Centrelink card, a different one on the birth certificate".

"I think having a home and a name is so necessary. To be adopted and to be able to have a family and to know that 'this is my family' is important," Rowe says. "Why can't they have their name? Why can't they livethere?"

The local magistrate in her home town "seems to have the outlook 'that is their mother: they should go back'. They just think blood is thicker than water, that the kids should be with their parents. I think they need to know their history. It is not necessarily good. I cannot see that it is good for children to be with parents in a situation that means you do not know when you come home from school if you are going to be fed."

Quick detected a "nationwide anti-adoption ethos" among welfare workers, "and I suppose there's a real fear because of the stolen generation and what happened in the 1950s with the children born out of wedlock, and the Catholic Church and others took them away from the mothers. It has scared the pants off the department, and it'sdeveloped over the years, and now it's totally anti-adoption."

Practically the only adoption agency in Australia today is Barnardos, which has placed about 150 children in the past nine years. Chief executive Louise Voigt agrees adoption has been like a dirty word, although change is coming to NSW, where "permanency placement" is considered for children who will never return to their parents.

"One of the big issues is parental consent," Voigt says.

"Very few parents will consent (to adoption), but then very few of them actually go through the process of contesting it in court. They might not want to give consent, but they want the child to stay where they are happy."

Voigt has sympathy for welfare workers whose burdens are overwhelming. "All states have pursued the matter of mandatory reporting, which has itself created a problem because if you have an inordinate number of reports it becomes an incredibly difficult sorting problem, if there has been a loud argument between parents, and the neighbours have called the police, and it all has to be investigated," she says. "Then there are the mechanical sorting problems, the addresses aren't right, the names are misspelled."

Maree Walk, of the Benevolent Society, which works with at-risk children, agrees that stability, although not necessarily adoption, is important for children, but "the courts and workers in the system find it really difficult to work out what will be stable for the child".

"If adoption provides stability it can work, but in many cases the children do have families (other than parents) who do want to care for them and can if they have more support," she says.

In NSW, adoption remains a last resort. It will be years before a little girl known as Baby Joan, found on a church step in June, will be adopted. The pastor who found her, Matthew Beckenham, who is married with three young children, immediately offered to take the baby but was told he could not even see her. If the mother comes forward any time in the next 12 months she can claim the child.

The case of Dean is complex: he was in the care of his grandmother but had been at his mother's house on an access visit when he died. His mother has been charged with his murder. The NSW Department of Community Services knew the mother was not coping with her three children but NSW Community Services Minister Kevin Greene has said that several calls to a helpline did not suggest "that the child's life was in danger".

"I'm not minimising the seriousness or the tragedy of this case. I'm not suggesting these reports were unimportant," he said. However, no action was taken.

Dean's death was one in a string of recent cases, including that of William Thomas Clare, who last year was found guilty of the manslaughter of a three-year-old boy, known to DOCS, whom he anally raped and electrocuted; and a six-year-old, also known to the department, who died after ingesting drugs in her home.

Liberal MP Alan Cadman sat on the same committee with Quick and came away with the same conclusion, that "generally departments give extreme emphasis to keeping children with their parents".

"They say it's for the child, but the evidence indicates the child enjoyed not being with their parents," Cadman says. "We heard from foster parents who have children backward and forward where a family explodes in rural areas, where they take one or two children. After a couple of years a family settles down and back go the kids.

"Where people were able to have some sort of detoxification, the mother would then ask for the children to come back, and they would get into a cycle of violence: they form a number of relationships, and (there are) children from different fathers in the same family, and violence erupts. (The children) are eventually moved out again. So instead of a stable lifestyle where somebody looks after them consistently, they've got this backward and forward thing. We had evidence of children saying: 'Why is there so much food, are you not going to be here when I get back?' It indicates there is not enough emphasis on what the child might need."

Cadman says he "couldn't even begin to guess" why children are constantly sent back to abusive homes, "except it's a convenient legal arrangement. The parents have a legal right to the children. If you place them with somebody else, you've got to have all kinds of complicated reasons why they are not at home. It's time-consuming and it involves courts. So it's not easy. But more effort must be given to finding better solutions."

Quick says he was appalled to see on television NSW Premier Morris Iemma, who, the Tasmanian MP says, appeared to be saying, "Oh well, we'll investigate this, because once they bury the poor bugger it will be something else on the front of the newspapers, and will there be any high-profile people at his funeral? No."

Caroline Overington is a senior writer with The Australian.