Jey's Stuff

Abusive parents have no right to keep their kids

AUSTRALIA is failing its children. Year after year, new reports are issued documenting the hopeless inadequacy of welfare bureaucrats when it comes to protecting children at risk. Horrific stories of babies and toddlers dying cruel deaths are increasingly common, prompting this urgent question: how many innocent children have to die before governments act to redress a situation no society should tolerate? At the heart of the matter is a system in which social workers and lawyers wrongly place abusive parents ahead of the precious children they are supposed to be nurturing. For decades the pervasive, ideological nonsense that any parent is better than no parent has infected the ranks of the welfare bureaucracy, with tragic consequences for numerous vulnerable babies and toddlers who are not removed from bad parents. It seems even a dad who shoots up and bashes his kids is acceptable, just as long as the family stays together.

The trail of victims to this misguided philosophy includes Wade Michael Scale, 11 months old when he was found drowned in a bath and doped with the adult prescription sedative diazepam. Just weeks before Wade died, Western Australia's Department of Community Development had restored him to his drug-addicted mother and her convicted baby-basher de facto husband. Robbie Gillett, aged 13 months, had perforations to his bowel, liver and one kidney and damage to his heart when his mother discovered him dead on July 31. Within months of his birth Robbie suffered a fractured skull, and six months later unusual damage to his testicles, but apparently alarm bells were not ringing loudly enough for welfare workers to intervene. "Jeremy Lennon", 3, died after being repeatedly anally raped and given electric shocks after being abandoned by his mother to the care of two men she had just met at a train station. The youngster and his sister had been the subject of at least seven NSW Department of Community Services notifications documenting their mother's neglect and also possible physical and sexual abuse. The mindset behind these preventable deaths will be hard to uproot. Two Melbourne doctors writing in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1966 described eight cases of child abuse and two deaths that resulted. They denounced "the blind application of the 'philosophy' that even a bad home is better than no home or the best possible institution". Little has changed since, except perhaps the extent of abuse and the number of deaths of kids. In Western Australia, 57 children have died in the past three years despite the DCD being warned about allegations of abuse. In May, the NSW Department of Community Services released a report damning its own performance in protecting the state's most desperate and damaged children.

The report amounts to an admission that DOCS staff never follow up about half of all abuse notifications deemed worthy of further investigation in a meaningful way. As we reported yesterday, this adds up to about 33,000 children at risk. Other states have also been found badly wanting when it comes to protecting their most helpless citizens. In one week in 2003, three cases involving the deaths of Queensland toddlers came before Brisbane courts. No one would disagree that welfare workers have an incredibly difficult and demanding job. Figures from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare show national reports of child abuse and neglect doubled to 200,000 between 1999 and 2003. But the tired refrain from most quarters that it is a paucity of resources that is behind Australia's failure to protect our children at risk is no longer credible.

Given the systemic failure of child protection in every state, federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock's proposal to introduce a national approach through a uniform child-protection regime is a start. But much more is needed than that. The public service hours that most welfare bureaucrats work are not the times when abuse is most likely to take place, such as when an alcoholic or drug-addled parent returns home at night in a violent frame of mind. This must change. Introducing caseload targets would help cut the number of reports of abuse that go uninvesti gated. And bureaucrats should learn from private welfare agencies such as the Brotherhood of St Laurence that parenting contracts may be a way to address inadequate parenting.

Being a parent is a privilege. Those who abuse their duty of care should not be guaranteed the right to keep their kids. Parents who spend their days scoring drugs are unlikely to be able to equip their children with what it takes to thrive.