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On 13 December 2007, Chairperson of the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care (SNAICC), Muriel Bamblett, sent an open email calling for an overhaul of child protection and foster care in Australia.
Response to Aurukun child abuse case
Muriel Bamblett's open email was written in direct response to the actions of the Queensland Department of Child Safety who removed a 10-year-old girl from her foster family and returned her to Aurukun, the Indigenous community where she had been raped.
Time for national laws to place Australia's first children first
Sadly, it comes as no surprise to SNAICC, the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care, that the Queensland Department of Child Safety was directly involved in the case of the 10-year-old girl so brutally abused at the hands of young people in her community of Aurukun. That the 'justice' system then compounded the violation of this child by ignoring her right to expect that her abusers would be appropriately punished is also of no surprise. We have seen this before and we will see it again unless and until we throw out the existing models of child protection and foster care and start again.
Reality of child abuse in Indigenous communities
The reality is that in most rural and remote areas Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children cannot count on statutory child protection authorities to protect them or to respond effectively when abuse occurs. Child protection models have been built on two assumptions that don't often operate outside of large urban cities. Firstly, that child protection staff can get to a family and respond to critical incidents quickly and, secondly, that within a community there will be a 'supply' of well-resourced high-functioning families with whom to place a child.
Faced with this reality, child protection staff make agonising decisions about when to remove a child from their family, and by implication their community, and place them in foster care a long way from home. Placing Indigenous children in non-Aboriginal foster care far removed from their community, as happened in the Aurukun case, doesn't resolve all the case issues or provide the child with all that they need. Children – all children – whatever their race or culture, want to be with their family. The best evidence and research tells us that abused children want to go home, to see their mum and dad, their brothers and sisters, their friends and peers. The child now at the centre of this latest national debate about Aboriginal children wanted to go home.
A new model of foster care
The model of foster care we operate in Australia is wrong. It is wrong for all children; it is wrong for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. It is based on a false dichotomy: that a child is either with and raised by their birth family or by a foster family. SNAICC argues that children can and should be raised by both. There is a third way. Place children with a well-supported, resourced and trained foster family to ensure children are not at risk of abuse or neglect. Set up a community visitors program and coordinate visits between the community and the child. Don't bounce kids around between foster care placements and home. Support foster families to raise children with the birth family – not for the birth family. Reinforce the message that families have to raise their children well. Train the magistrates to administer the law correctly. Provide community services to heal the victims. Insist at every level – family, community and within the justice system – that abuse is intolerable and will be severely punished.
Call for national protection against child abuse
Calls for the Federal Minister, Jenny Macklin, to extend the NT intervention to Queensland don't go far enough. SNAICC has for decades called for national legislation to create a framework that sets out standards for child protection, children's rights and a common approach to preventing child abuse. Next week Jenny Macklin meets all her state and territory colleagues. She should tell them that national legislation for child protection is on its way.
Muriel Bamblett, AM
Chairperson
Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care
Related reading
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