‘Obscene’ rates of Indigenous child removals persist
Keira Jenkins |
The child protection system needs to be turned upside down to “change the story” of Indigenous over-representation in out-of-home care, advocates say.
The Family Matters report, released on Wednesday, found early intervention and community-led supports are chronically underfunded, with investment instead skewing towards crisis interventions such as removals.
“Without action on the underlying causes of intervention, like poverty, housing insecurity, racism and exclusion from services, and improved supports for families experiencing crisis, little will change,” the report said.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are 9.6 times more likely to be removed from their parents than non-Indigenous kids, and make up 45 per cent of those in out-of-home care, the report found.
Catherine Liddle, chief executive of peak body for Indigenous children SNAICC, said the Family Matters report, now in its 10th year, came from a need to keep governments accountable on the number of children being removed from family.
“There were no eyes on this alarming figure,” she told AAP.
“Today the number is still obscene.”
Just seven per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were reunified with family, compared with 10 per cent of non-Indigenous kids.
Richard Weston is the chief executive of Maari Ma Health in the far-west NSW town of Broken Hill.
Every program the health service offers was related to the community’s needs, Mr Weston said.
Their focus was supporting entire families, with their “healthy start” and early-years programs focusing not just on children but their carers and other adults in their lives.
He said unlike Maari Ma’s approach, the child protection system was not designed to prevent families becoming at risk of having kids removed.
“It’s badged as a child protection system – I don’t think it’s a child protection system, it’s a child removal system,” he said.
Just under 16 per cent of money spent on child protection went to family support services, which focus on early intervention tactics, while six per cent was spent on Aboriginal community-controlled organisations.
Ms Liddle said these organisations were critical to addressing the over-representation of Indigenous children in out-of-home care.
“The whole system needs to be turned upside down,” she said.
“While all investment is put into the crisis end we’ll never be able to change the story at the scale and speed we need to and every time we fail to do that, we have lost an opportunity.”
Mr Weston said rather than focus on improving the child protection system, a new path needed to be forged that was focused on strengthening family units and keeping children at home.
“Kids that come out of care always tell us they want to be with family, even if their families aren’t perfect,” he said.
“That’s their identity, that’s their connection to culture, to 65,000 years of history, and that’s what we should be building, a system that supports families and supports children.
“Unfortunately the child protection system doesn’t do that, it’s set up to punish vulnerable families and make their lives misery.”
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