AIFS staff presentation
Brisbane, 5-7 May 2011Child Protection in Australia and New Zealand – Issues and Challenges for Judicial Administration Conference
Child safety and protection in Indigenous communities
Dr Daryl Higgins
Deputy Director (Research), Australian Institute of Family Studies
Slide outline
- Child Safety and Protection in Indigenous communities.
Based on a resource sheet produced for the Closing the Gap Clearinghouse- Daryl Higgins
- Deputy Director (Research)
- Australian Institute of Family Studies
- AIJA Conference, 5-7 May 2011, Brisbane
- Closing the Gap Clearinghouse
- A online clearinghouse for evidence-based research on overcoming disadvantage for Indigenous Australians
- Disclaimer : The views are the authors' and do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute or the Australian Government.
- www.aihw.gov.au/closingthegap
- Outline
- The problem of child abuse & neglect of Indigenous children
- Risk factors for child abuse & neglect
- Current responses
- Cultural safety
- Indigenous community development approaches
- Indigenous community control
- Family support programs
- Family decision-making models for responding to maltreatment
- Child-safe communities & situational crime prevention principles
- Facilitators and barriers
- Summary what we know about what does (and does not) work, and what we don't know
- The problem of child abuse & neglect of Indigenous children
- No national study of prevalence
- Impossible to confidently say whether prevention activities are effective
- Rapidly increased demand on statutory child protection services
- Aboriginal / Torres Strait Islander children overrepresented (making up 31% of children in out-of-home care)
- Risk factors for child abuse & neglect
- Economic factors
- Social factors
- Community factors
- Parental problems
- Challenging child characteristics
- Family characteristics
- Prior experiences of trauma / victimisation
- Risk factors
- Can be concentrated in particular communities
- Historical / contextual factors that led to trauma and intergenerational disadvantage:
- Colonisation
- Disadvantage
- Cultural dislocation
- Past welfare practices (cf. Canada's residential schools)
- Framework for Current Responses
- National Framework for Protecting Australia's Children
- Public health approach
- Addressing known risk factors to prevent occurrence
- Identifying and intervening in high risk cases
- Tension between seeing child maltreatment as:
- Personal family problem
- Part of a broader societal / structural issue
- Current Responses
- Statutory Approach (forensic, risk-management, adversarial focus)
- Identification / detection
- e.g., NTER's voluntary child health screening
- Family Support Approach
- Address underlying problems that place children at risk
- Reduce demand on statutory child protection systems
- Cultural Safety
- Respect for culture, knowledge, experience, obligations
- Feeling safe to express one's culture
- Feeling 'listened to'
- Should be embedded in all prevention and responses to child maltreatment
- e.g., young people in out-of-home care: connection to family, community, culture
- Indigenous Community Development Approaches
Key principles:
- Community empowerment (local knowledge)
- Indigenous leadership
- Trust
- Flexibility
- Leverage
- Sustainability
- Indigenous Community Control
- Lakidjeka Aboriginal Child Specialist Advice & Support Service Victoria (VACCA)
- Staff consulted on all statutory child protection notifications concerning Indigenous children & young people in Victoria
- Ensure compliance with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle
- Lakidjeka Aboriginal Child Specialist Advice & Support Service Victoria (VACCA)
- Family Support Programs
- Indigenous Group Triple P (Positive Parenting Program)
- strong evidence base to support its effectiveness
- Tailored for Australian Indigenous families with concerns about their parenting, or about their child's behaviour or development
- Family home visiting programs e.g.
- Australian Family Partnership Program;
- SA Children, Youth & Women's Health Service
- Family decision-making models
- Grown out of NZ experience
- Based on Maori & Pacific Islander understandings of family / responsibility
- Family conference transferring power for deciding about children to those with a life-long connection, and who have to live with the outcome
- Principle: given appropriate information, families are capable of making responsible decisions about a child who is at risk of abuse / neglect
- Child-safe communities
- Situational crime-prevention principles
- Modifying environmental characteristics that can facilitate crime
- Making it harder to potential offenders to access children:
- Access to school grounds
- Locks on doors for children
- Teaching children personal safety strategies
- Increasing adults' awareness of sexual offending
- Reducing access to pornography, alcohol & other drugs
- Enabling potential offenders to seek help
- Monitoring known offenders
- Changing community attitudes that minimise/excuse offending
- Focused on sexual abuse, but could be applied at the social level to addressing other forms of child maltreatment
- Factors affecting child safety
- Facilitators:
- Organisations and communities that adopt child-safe principles
- Coordination of strategies between governments, agencies & communities
- Harnessing goodwill by focusing prevention efforts on community-identified priorities and/or solutions
- Barriers:
- Past trauma & ongoing hardship & disadvantage
- Community dysfunction / hopelessness
- Poor access to services or unsuitability of mainstream services
- Facilitators:
- Summary What we know
- What we know does work:
- Taking into account historical context
- Prioritising cultural safety
- Control of services by appropriately supported and resourced Indigenous-managed agencies
- Providing family support and addressing the risk factors for child maltreatment (substance misuse; family violence; mental illness; poor parenting skills)
- Empowering families to make decisions to ensure safety
- Community-level strategies that build on situational crime prevention principles and address social exclusion
- What we know does work:
- Summary What we know
- What we know doesn't work:
- Adversarial, risk-management driven, forensic child protection systems that aren't focused on supporting families in need
- Focusing solely on detection (e.g., voluntary child health screening), rather than prevention
- Isolated bans on alcohol or pornography restrictions, without integrated community responses and supports
- What we know doesn't work:
- Summary What we don't know
- Evaluation data are needed to understand whether the following activities are successful in leading to sustained reductions in actual rates of child maltreatment at the community level :
- Economic strategies to improve financial wellbeing of families
- Income quarantining to change patterns of spending behaviour
- individual promising practices that are coordinated and rolled out comprehensively to address the needs of parents and communities
- Conclusion
- Community development framework assists with ways of improving Indigenous children's wellbeing
- Moves beyond an 'individualised' problem to recognising socio-cultural disadvantage, as well as protective factors
- Local solutions but sustainable implementation
- Recognising material disadvantage and past trauma is essential for the development of strategies to ensure the safety and wellbeing needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children
- The Australian Institute of Family Studies
- Level 20, 485 La Trobe Street
- Melbourne 3000
- www.aifs.gov.au
- 03 9214 7888
- Closing the Gap Clearinghouse
- www.aihw.gov.au/closingthegap
- Closing the Gap Clearinghouse
- A online clearinghouse for evidence-based research on overcoming disadvantage for Indigenous Australians
- www.aihw.gov.au/closingthegap
- 1800 035 938
- Project leaders: Dr Fadwa Al-Yaman, AIHW and Dr Daryl Higgins, AIFS