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Chapter 1
The Successes and Limitations of Contemporary Approaches to
Child Protection
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Introduction
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Overview of Child Protection Systems
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Difficulty in recruiting and retaining foster and kinship carers, the costs of residential
care, and problems of placement instability; and
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Despite the evolution of—and the growth in demand for—statutory systems, there is little
evidence that the often-intrusive nature of the investigations and interventions is successful.
One common criticizm is the lack of any real interventions after an investigation (US DHHS
2009). There are no studies (and of course, designing an appropriate methodology would be
incredibly difficult) to demonstrate positive outcomes of statutory involvement, compared
with other types of intervention. As Price-Robertson et al. (2014) noted:
“As these models represent country-level systems that are embedded in complex
cultural, social and historical contexts, it is not possible to determine whether these
different approaches are ‘evidence-based’, ‘promising’ or ‘untested’” (p. 4).
9
When children are removed into alternative/out-of-home care, research consistently shows
high levels of behavioural and emotional difficulties – which could be due to the trauma of
abuse, or to the failure of the statutory responses to adequately respond to their needs. In a
rare study looking at follow-up of a US cohort study of high-risk children known as
LONGSCAN, Campbell, Cook, LaFleur, and Keenan (2010) compared those who
experienced a Child Protection Service investigation with those who did not. They found that:
“investigation for suspected child maltreatment is not associated with relative improvements
in common, modifiable risk factors suggests that we may be missing an opportunity for
secondary prevention of maltreatment and maltreatment consequences” (p. 943). Despite
being investigated by a statutory service, the problems that these families encountered
remained—social support, family functioning, poverty, maternal education, and child
behavior problems—and were no different from families who were not investigated
(Campbell et al. 2010). And many families who come to the attention of protective authorities
feel deeply stigmatized by their experiences (see Ch 2 and Ch 12).
Re-referrals and Unmet/poorly Met Needs of Families Experiencing
Vulnerability
One of the most significant challenges of statutory systems is the ‘churn’: the fact that the
same families, and indeed often the same children are ‘re-referred’ (i.e., are notified to a
statutory service (often through mandatory reporting mechanisms), when they have already
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Successes in Statutory Child Protection Services
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Marginal Reform: Reform at the Margins
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The Rationale for a Public Health Approach
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The Problems of Demand, and the Mismatch between Incidence of Reported
Maltreatment and Underlying Prevalence
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one in every five children in NSW would be reported to the Department at some point before
age 18 (Department of Community Services 2007). The work of Bilson et al., Cant, Harries
and Thorpe’s (2015, 2017) work in Western Australia shows higher rates for children’s
notification to child protection authorities, with truly alarming rates for Aboriginal children.
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Conclusion: The Public Health Approach as the Way Forward
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Should the preventative approach prove successful, there is likely to be a gradual shift
away from the government-run child protection response. Much like the ideal system
proposed by proponents of the current “family support” child protection models, only
a small number of families—families that health surveillance, early intervention and
family support services are unable to help—will receive the statutory child protection
response. In many ways such a system could look much like it did before the rise of
statutory child protection agencies in the 1970s. Such a utopian system may also lead
to greater attention being placed on addressing the structural forces impacting on
families (p. 56).
Tomison’s (2001) forecast has proved correct in terms of widespread acknowledgement of
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the need for prevention. However, his ideal of a ‘smaller, leaner’ statutory service has not yet
been realized. As mentioned earlier, the continued rise in notifications to statutory services
and their lack of capacity to respond effectively is one of the greatest challenges and
criticizms of the status quo. We argue that this is because the reform agenda has largely been
placed in the hands of those running the statutory service, rather than finding effective
mechanisms to share responsibility for those running primary care, universal services that
have the capacity to engage all families and truly embed child abuse prevention efforts across
a range of portfolio areas. In this book, we outline not only the ‘why’ but also the steps that
are needed for moving responsibility for child protection out of the statutory service system,
and into the community, addressing the ‘structural forces impacting on families’, supported
by whole-of-government thinking and responsibility.
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References
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