A child experiencing violence shouldn’t have to understand adult services and systems to get help.
It shouldn’t be up to them to work out whether a service is designed for them, or whether they are old enough to access it without a parent. They shouldn’t have to worry about whether telling a trusted adult will trigger consequences, or whether the support they need happens to exist in their postcode.
And yet, for too many children and young people in Australia, this is what seeking help can look like and there is a dire need to do better.
To inform what ‘better’ looks like, commissioned by 54 Reasons, we recently engaged with over 200 stakeholders – Children’s Commissioners, youth advocates, researchers, sector leaders and frontline staff.
Our findings aim to inform the development of the Federal Government’s Second Action Plan under the National Plan to End Violence Against Women and Children. This consultation project builds on prior in-depth interviews with child victim-survivors and other research which has engaged directly with children and young people to understand what they need.
The message outlined in our consultation report, now released, is clear. We already know a lot about what needs to change but too many of these solutions still haven’t happened. We need federal, state and territory governments to act.
Of course, there has been some progress. In 2022, Australia took an important step. For the first time, the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children recognised children and young people as victim-survivors of domestic, family and sexual violence in their own right.
It was a significant shift. Previous national policy had largely positioned children as extensions of an adult victim-survivor – most often their mother. The new National Plan recognised something that children, advocates, researchers and frontline services had been saying for years: children experience violence themselves. They have their own experiences of harm, their own safety and recovery needs, and their own rights.
But four years later, there remains a significant gap between that recognition and what children experience when they need help. Services for children are too often “bolted onto” systems that were never designed around their needs. Specialist services remain scarce and funding inadequate. For too many child victim-survivors, seeking help does not mean being able to access it.
The scale of the problem makes this gap all the more concerning.
We now know more than ever before about the extent of violence and abuse experienced by Australian children. The Australian Child Maltreatment Study found child maltreatment to be “endemic”. More than 40 per cent of Australians experienced more than one type of maltreatment during childhood. Nearly one in three experienced physical abuse, 28.5 per cent experienced sexual abuse, 30.9 per cent experienced emotional abuse, and almost two in five grew up in a household where there was domestic and family violence. Within this, First Nations children, children with disabilities as well as gender and sexually diverse young people were disproportionately impacted.
These are not experiences that simply end when the violence stops. Childhood experiences of violence and abuse can have profound and lasting impacts on mental health, education, relationships, housing stability and future experiences of violence.
What is needed now is a response that matches the scale of the problem.
As governments move into the final stages of developing the Second Action Plan under the National Plan to End Violence against Women and Children, there is an important question to answer: what would it actually take to turn recognition of children and young people into action?
That is the question at the centre of our new national report, From Recognition to Action.
Based on what we’ve heard during our consultation and from young victim-survivors themselves, we have identified 20 actions that governments could take now.
First, we need to invest in better understanding prevention of violence against children.
Australia has invested significantly in understanding and addressing the drivers of violence against women. But we do not yet have an equivalent national framework focused specifically on preventing violence against children.
The Second Action Plan provides an opportunity to develop Australia’s first National Framework for the Prevention of Violence against Children, developed in partnership with children and young people, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations, researchers and the community sector.
We also need to strengthen Respectful Relationships Education so it reflects the realities of young people’s lives today. The world children inhabit has changed rapidly. Technology-facilitated abuse, image-based abuse, harmful pornography and other digital harms are increasingly part of young people’s experiences of relationships and violence. Respectful Relationships Education must keep pace, while also doing more to teach young people how to identify abuse, seek help and support a friend who discloses violence.
We need to make it easier, not harder, for children to ask for help.
This takes us back to the problem we began with. Children should not need to understand complex laws and systems before deciding whether it is safe to tell someone what is happening to them.
Young people are increasingly turning online first to understand whether what they are experiencing is abuse and where they can get support. Yet when they reach out, our laws and systems can sometimes create unintended barriers.
Our consultation identified strong support for reviewing parental consent and mandatory reporting laws to examine where their operation may discourage help-seeking or prevent children accessing support safely and in a timely way.
Protecting children and enabling them to seek help should not be competing objectives. Our systems need to be capable of doing both. Currently, we have a crisis orientated system with responses that arrive too late and are overly dependent on statutory systems, including child protection.
Every Australian child who experiences violence or abuse should be able to access a specialist response designed for them.
This was one of the clearest messages from our consultation. We do not have a specialist service system capable of consistently responding to children and young people in their own right.
Specialist child-centred domestic, family and sexual violence services remain limited and unevenly available. Our report calls for the introduction of a specialist service for children and young people in every state and territory, with equitable access for those living in regional, rural and remote Australia.
That specialist system also needs to sit alongside a much better equipped universal workforce. Teachers, health professionals, early childhood educators, youth workers and others are often the people children first tell about violence. They need the knowledge, confidence and referral pathways to respond effectively when that happens.
Support cannot end when the immediate crisis does.
Recovery from violence rarely happens neatly or quickly. It can take years and intersect with schooling, mental health, housing, relationships and major developmental transitions.
Yet, too often, our funding and service systems operate on much shorter timelines.
Our report recommends a mental health and wellbeing guarantee for children and young people who have experienced violence and abuse, ensuring they can access long-term therapeutic and wellbeing supports when they need them.
Finally, responsibility for Australia’s children in the Federal Government needs to be clearer.
Responsibility for children’s safety and wellbeing currently cuts across numerous portfolios and levels of government. The result is fragmented responsibility and no single point of national accountability.
85 per cent of survey participants in our consultation supported re-establishing a dedicated Federal Minister for Children. This role should have Cabinet-level responsibility for children’s rights, safety and wellbeing, coordinate action across government and be accountable for ensuring commitments to children translate into funding and implementation.
None of these ideas emerge from a vacuum, nor are they particularly radical.
Again and again, Royal Commissions, Parliamentary Inquiries, Coronial Inquests, research and the lived experience of victim-survivors have identified many of the same problems and proposed many of the same solutions.
What struck us throughout this consultation was not disagreement about what needs to change, but the extent of the consensus.
Australia does not need to spend another decade debating whether children who experience violence deserve responses designed around their needs. We recognised that in national policy four years ago. The task now is to make that recognition real.
The Second Action Plan is an opportunity to build systems that prevent violence before it occurs, intervene earlier when children need help, provide specialist responses when violence happens, and support children over the long term to recover and heal.