A village to raise a child, but what if the village is struggling?
The government has released its latest quarterly report on the performance of the child protection system. Like most reports of this type, the report is best used to prompt questions about what the figures are telling us rather than assuming we know what the figures actually mean.
However, the report does illustrate very pleasing progress made in responding to major aspects of the reforms recommended by the Carmody Child Protection Inquiry concluded in 2013, namely the rollout of 16 new 'Family and Child Connect' and 22 'Intensive Family Support' services with more scheduled for families living in Mount Isa, Cape York and the Torres Strait.
Despite promising results being achieved by these new services, the government's report indicates an increase in the number of child abuse and neglect notifications warranting investigation by the Child Safety Department – from around 21,900 in March to over 22,600 in June.
This is a sobering statistic. Even more alarming are the figures which indicate that families who are coming to the attention of the department are grappling with an increased range of pressures – an approximate 15 per cent increase (from 35 per cent in 2006-07 to around 50 per cent in 2015-16) in families that have experienced domestic and family violence, a similar sized increase (from 50 per cent in 2006-07 to approximately two-thirds in 2015-16) in families who have experienced difficulties concerning their use of alcohol or drugs and an astounding 30 per cent increase in families in which at least one parent has a diagnosed mental illness (from 19 per cent in 2006-07 to close to 50 per cent in 2015-16).
It's not known whether these figures should be attributed to an actual increase in the prevalence of these problems or whether it is more likely that they represent the presence of problems that were always there but which have become more evident and now less likely to remain hidden behind closed doors. It's probably a bit of both.
There is truth to the saying that it takes a village to raise a child, but in light of the data released by the government, do we now need to ask ourselves whether the 'villages' in which we are raising our children are in as a good a shape as they should be? It's often speculated that in today's world, parents are less able to access support from extended family, neighbours or the company for whom they have worked for many years. It now seems that people of all ages are more likely to identify with a 'community' that's been defined by their Facebook page than by the township or neighbourhood in which they live.
But before 'baby-boomers' (like me) start pining for days when family life seemed simpler, let's not forget that those times did not serve the interests of some groups at all well. This includes women who felt compelled to remain in marriages where they, and often their children, were repeatedly subjected to violence. It includes children who were not believed and often severely punished when they dared to complain about abuse, sexual assault or neglect inflicted upon them by the institutions and individuals charged with responsibility for their care. Importantly, it includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families ripped apart by laws aimed at eradicating the very existence of their race.
So what do we want the villages in which our children are being raised today to look like? Clearly, we cannot continue down a path where an over-burdened child safety department is increasingly being required to step in and fill the gap when families are unable to access the support they need when they need it and, as a consequence of that, collapse. What also becomes very clear is that, if we are to turn this around, we must continue to vigorously pursue, and add to, the 10-year road map of reforms recommended by the Carmody Inquiry.
What we can also ascertain from the government's report is that we may need to think even bigger than Carmody did when he described his vision for a reformed child protection system. Our questions need to become even more fundamental about what the village should look like. These are questions that cannot be answered by the state government alone, they must be wrestled with by all levels of government – federal, state and local. They are the questions that should also feature in discussions and debates taking place in the board rooms of corporations throughout the country, in staff meetings and at the water-coolers of businesses everywhere, at the gatherings of faith-based organisations, at school P&C meetings and the committee meetings of sports and recreational clubs, and very importantly, in the commentary reported on in mainstream and social media. And within each of these forums, there must be opportunities created to listen closely to the voices of children and families themselves when they tell us what they need from the village.
We must continue to implement, and build on, the 10-year roadmap recommended by Carmody and take notice of research and the evidence about what works and what we can do better. If we fail to create a better village for raising our children safely and well, we will be mopping up the pieces of more and more broken lives for decades to come.
Lindsay Wegener is executive director of PeakCare Queensland, a child protection peak body.