Listen to Children to Avoid Past Tragedies, Commissioner Urges

By Rachel Browne
Social Affairs Reporter
April 11, 2013

http://www.smh.com.au/national/listen-to-children-to-avoid-past-tragedies-commissioner-urges-20130411-2hnf4.html

Megan Mitchell. Photo: Jacky Ghossein

Australia's inaugural National Children's Commissioner, Megan Mitchell, has used her first major public speech to warn that there is a heavy toll for not listening to children, and to urge Australians to learn from past tragedies.

Speaking at the Child Aware Approaches conference in Melbourne on Thursday, she said young people need to have greater involvement in decisions which affect their lives.

"We must learn from the mistakes of the past, when children's voices were ignored with devastating consequences," she said at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.

"The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse will, I am sure, uncover stories where children's voices were unheard, and even when heard, were deliberately not taken into account.

"We need to make sure our attitudes and our systems respect the child's voice. This is one of the essential ways that we can help children to be safe, to realise their potential, and to live full and happy lives."

Ms Mitchell told the conference that – as with any sector of the population vulnerable to disadvantage – children too often had an agenda shaped for them, rather than with them.

She said young people need the same access to complaints mechanisms as adults.

"The individual complaints systems, which many adults use to address injustices, so often do not adequately engage children and young people," she said.

"How can children who suffer injustice have those rights wronged if mechanisms are inaccessible and inappropriate? This is an area that needs urgent examination."

Ms Mitchell will conduct a national listening tour to spend time hearing what young people want.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child released a report on Australia's performance last June, noting a number of areas of concern.

The committee expressed alarm about discrimination against indigenous young people, who are over-represented in the prison population as well as out-of-home care.

Figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show that indigenous children aged 10-17 years were 31 times as likely as non-indigenous young people to be in detention on an average night in 2012, up from 27 times as likely in 2008.

Indigenous children are eight times more likely to be the subject of substantiated abuse and neglect and 10 times more likely to be in out-of-home care.

The UN committee was also concerned that the principle of a child's best interests was not being applied consistently, with children in detention and asylum-seeker children being an example.

The committee also raised the issue of economic and social inequity between certain groups of Australian children, for example those in rural and remote areas or those with disability.