Chasing Shadows

By Michelle Griffin
The Age
March 1, 2012

http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/chasing-shadows-20120229-1u391.html

There has been a steady increase in abuse notifications, from 12,000 in 1990 to 55,000 today. Photo by Justin McManus

In 1990, there were 12,000 notifications of suspected child abuse in Victoria. Today, there are 55,000. What's going on and how can it be fixed?

SPRAWLING as a Russian novel and just as grim, the Cummins report into child welfare in Victoria caps more than 20 years of investigations of our society's thorniest problem: how to protect and care for our most vulnerable children.

There are no personal stories in the 900 densely typed pages of findings, data tables and recommendations. However, you can see the shadows thrown by the children whose unhappy lives inform the steady incline of the graphs charting abuse notifications, protection orders and, in the careful wording of bad news, adverse outcomes.

Hovering over the entire report as an eternal reproach is the spectre of Daniel Valerio, who was two years and four months old when his stepfather beat him to death in 1990. So many professionals saw him and his miserable family in the months beforehand, but nobody intervened, while the then-Department of Community Services and the police argued over who should have been investigating.

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Presiding over the murder trial of stepfather Paul Aiton in 1993 was Supreme Court judge Philip Cummins. Last year, newly retired from the bench, he chaired the three person panel that produced this report, which now unofficially bears his name. Along with his co-panellists, Emeritus Professor Dorothy Scott, the acting director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection, and Swinburne Chancellor Bill Scales, Cummins opened every public hearing across Victoria by noting that this inquiry could not investigate individual crises, nor would it seek to lay blame at the feet of any single parent, social worker, program or minister.

The murder of Daniel Valerio prompted more than soul searching: it led directly to mandatory reporting laws for police, doctors, nurses, teachers and principals. It informed the 1994 child protection inquiry of another judge, former family court justice John Fogarty.

But there's a chart, printed twice, that spells out two decades of frustration and chaos: it tracks all the many inquiries since 1989, measured against the number of notifications of child abuse over 22 years. In 1990, when Daniel died, there were about 12,000 notifications. As mandatory reporting was introduced, notifications more than doubled to 30,000 by 1995.

By 2005, as the state's Children, Youth and Families Act was made law, it was almost 40,000. In the last three years, there have been three separate, but equally damning, ombudsman reports into child protection, and a scathing assessment of the Children's Court by the Victorian Law Reform Commission. Numbers of notifications now hover around 55,000 and are expected to keep climbing.

Tragically, the biggest increase in the numbers of children taken into state care has been among our tiny Aboriginal population. One in six Victorian children in state care is Aboriginal.

"They're talking about a 10-year plan, but we need strategy on the ground really quickly," says Professor Muriel Bamblett, chief executive of Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency. What Aboriginal families urgently need, she says, is help for vulnerable families before their children are taken away. Again.

The deaths keep coming, too. In October, coroner John Olle laid some of the blame for the death of another two-year-old, Hayley, at the feet of the Department of Human Services. "The system did not serve Hayley well and the tragic and distressing circumstances of her death must be a catalyst for change," Olle said.

"A child protection system which relies on notifications of alleged child abuse is not the optimal system to protect children. It is likely that a child protection system designed to prevent abuse before it occurs was Hayley's best chance of survival. This is the single biggest learning from this investigation."

A child protection system designed to prevent abuse is what the Cummins report aims to create. Unlike the previous reports, investigations, inquiries and judicial findings, it does not focus on a single issue, such as the failures of child protection, the complexities of the courts or the shabby quality of care provided by the state.

Instead, the report provides, as Community Services Minister Mary Wooldridge puts it, "a road map" to fixing the entire system — not just the Department of Human Services, but also Education, Health, Justice and Aboriginal Affairs. The road map would address everything from law reform to alcohol taxes to playgroups when exploring solutions.

"Families have a range of complex needs and we need to work with them differently," Wooldridge said when she launched the report on Tuesday, half an hour after the three-volume document was tabled.

She kept saying her big task was to dismantle the silos between departments. She said the same in an interview with The Age in June last year. "We've got systems that operate in silos and don't talk to each other and don't communicate, but there's families that access all of them," she said.

"I see the whole lot fits together. That's why I also asked for women's affairs in my portfolio. The family violence element of this is absolutely critical as well. When you look at these families, so many of them have disability issues, family violence issues, child protection issues, drug addiction issues, and that's my portfolio."

A vociferous campaigner on child protection issues when she was in opposition, Wooldridge has staked her credibility on achieving some tangible results from this raft of recommendations.

But she has launched the report in tough economic conditions, as Human Services slashes 500 backroom jobs, child protection workers in crisis-riddled areas, such as the Loddon Mallee, keep introducing work-to-rule bans, and a depressed local economy only exacerbates soaring domestic violence reports in flashpoint areas such as Hume and Gippsland — the areas that also have the highest per capita child abuse notifications.

Wooldridge insisted on ABC radio yesterday and in her press conference that the Premier's "sustainable government" program, which will pare 3600 public service jobs, would not have any impact on front-line workers' ability to protect vulnerable children or the departments' ability to collect the detailed data that the Minister acknowledges is still lacking. "We have to know if we're having an impact," she said at the launch. "At the moment we can't measure it. There's not the accountability, there's not the oversight."

Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary thinks the government should make its first priority the multi-department "vulnerable children strategy", designed to tackle child abuse at its origins — in the tangled roots of alcohol and drug abuse and mental illness and conflict and inter-generational misery that goes into making the unhappiest of families.

"It will proactively put into practice some of the more positive recommendations," he says. "Working at the front end as much as possible and creating a concentration of area-based responses, working hardest where services are needed the most."

Geary also agrees with the report's finding that alcohol is a worse scourge of family lives than any other drugs. "Alcohol has always been the most debilitating of drugs in our community, the drug that has the most negative impact. In the 30 years I've worked in this sector, it has always been alcohol."

It remains to be seen if Geary will, as widely expected, be appointed to the independent Children's Commission recommended by the report, which would have the freedom to start investigations without waiting for a minister's permission and then to make its findings public.

Many wait to see how many of the report's 90 recommendations the state is prepared not only to accept, but to fund. Victoria still spends $261 less per child on child abuse prevention, early intervention, family support, child protection and care services than New South Wales.

The welfare groups the state contracts to work with vulnerable families have expressed disappointment that the report's recommendations do not suggest how much more should be spent, or on which areas, to make significant improvements.

"Victoria has lagged behind other states and territories for quite some time in what it spends per child on family services, out-of-home care and child protection — that has to change and we have to get the balance between these areas right,'says Dr Lynette Buoy, chief executive of the Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare.

Sandie de Wolf, chief executive of Berry Street, the state's largest child welfare service, wants to see priorities set. Now. "I had hoped for a greater sense of urgency and advice about what should be done first," she says.

"There are children suffering today and every day, and the community shouldn't accept that this is the best we can do."

In Berry Street's statement, de Wolf says the test of the government's resolve to tackle the problems would be seen soon enough. "The report may be 900 pages long and contain 90 recommendations, but ultimately it is about one thing: does Victoria care enough about abused and neglected children to invest in their healing and recovery? . . . Should the state budget fail to deliver a major sustained investment in support for these children, then the answer will be no."