Every year for 25 years, National Child Protection Week starts on Father’s day. Next week NAPCAN, sponsored by the Department of Social Services, will continue its campaign to “invite all Australians to play their part to promote the safety and wellbeing of children and young people”.
Protecting children is everyone’s business.
If you think that no one would be so heartless (or so stupid) as to disagree with such a sentiment, you’ve obviously not counted on South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill, who this week achieved levels of mouth moving, microphone on, brain still grinding away trying to find second gear that even Tony Abbot might hav been left agape.
More than 15,000 calls South Australia’s child abuse hotline went unanswered last year, that’s nearly 40% of the total calls made to the hotline.
Weatherill has a solution to this: Wind back mandatory reporting of child abuse.
No, this is not a joke or satire, neither was it a slip up or gaffe. This is what he actually said.
The reason we have such an extraordinary number of calls is because we have a thing called mandatory reporting, which sounds good on the face of it, but it is absolutely swamping our child protection system
Mandatory reporting isn’t something that exists everywhere in the world, it started it the United States and we picked it up. We think it’s time to rethink the whole mandatory reporting arrangements.
It was actually introduced back in the 70s… but now it covers everything, psychological abuse too, so if you see a parent shouting at a child, or if you visit a home for domestic violence purposes, and even if the matter is being attended to, the police have to raise a child protection notification.
Now, what that’s doing is clogging up our system. It’s the equivalent of having everyone going into the emergency waiting room at a busy hospital, everybody that’s got a heart attack all the way through to an ingrown toenail.
We think it’s time to wind back mandatory notification – it’s a big call but I’ve had discussions with Steven Marshal about this. He’s noticed in some of his international visits that there are jurisdictions that actually cope well without it and they’re horrified that we would have such a system.
It’s just got out of control. We’re getting notifications now for almost 1 in 4 kids by the time they reach the age of 18. I do think suggesting that 25% of all the children born in this state are a child protection risk issue, well, I don’t think so.
He doesn’t think so? Really? He might want to do a smidge of research on that, maybe even a quick skim through the first couple of results on a google search. And it’s not out of the question to expect a little more than that from a state Premier talking about winding back mandatory reporting of child abuse.
Particularly not a Premier who presided over one of Australia’s more horrific child abuse deaths. Chloe Valentine, the little 4 year old girl who died after being repeatedly crashing a motorbike her mother and her mother’s then boyfriend forced her to ride. Families SA acknowledged that they knew Chloe was neglected, but took no action on her behalf.
The coroner on Chloe’s case said
Nothing less than a massive overhaul of Families SA and its culture and training of its staff will be sufficient,” he said, adding that the government agency “took the path of least resistance and the whole history of its dealing with Ashlee is a history of drifting, irresolution and aimlessness.
That wasn’t years ago, long after the institutional problems the Coroner described were addressed, that was 6 months ago.
Defining rates of child abuse is almost impossible, by its very nature it is a secretive act, significantly underreported. However, best estimates of the prevalence of violence against Australian children suggests:
• Physical abuse is between 5% to 18% of all children
• Sexual abuse between 1% and 23% (depending on definitions, up to 45% in one study)
• Neglect is between 2% and 12%
• Emotional abuse is 6% to 17%
• Children witnessing family violence is 4% to 23%
There would almost certainly be at least some cross over in those numbers, but not nearly enough to dismiss the possibility that 25% of children in South Australia are at genuine risk, and that when someone rings the hotline to report something, it’s not the abuse equivalent of an “ingrown toenail”.
The crossover in my newsfeed yesterday was tragically surreal. Reports from two Royal Commissions – Institutional Responses to Child Abuse and Family Violence – telling chilling tales of abuse, lifelong injuries and horrific trauma, combined with Weatherill blithely chatting on the radio about how difficult it is for the SA Government to deal with the number of calls coming into the hotline.
If you think of child abuse as a reporting and statistical problem then he’s right and his solution makes perfect sense: too many calls are coming in, so if you have less calls you’ll have less of a problem. Reduce the number of reports and you reduce the reported problem. Solved!
Except, of course, child abuse is not about statistics.
Child abuse is trauma that lasts a lifetime.
To quote the interim report from the Royal Commission:
Although there is no single set of symptoms that victims and survivors experience, we have discovered some common themes. For example:
• there are both short-term and long-term effects, and many may be lifelong
• children and adolescents face emotional, physical and social impacts
• these impacts often extend into adulthood, affect life choices and mental health, and may lead to victims committing suicide
• the nature and severity of the impacts vary between survivors
• the impacts extend beyond the immediate victim, affecting parents, colleagues, friends, families and the community.
Chloe Valentine was not an isolated case, and she won’t be the only child to die in South Australia while they are still unable to properly address the level of child abuse occurring there, as it does everywhere. But forcing everyone’s heads into the sand by reducing the number of reports is taking bureaucracy to levels that would be laughable if the outcomes weren’t so terrifyingly tragic.