Focus on 'prevention' abusing kids

In other words, and incontrovertibly, many damaged children in OOHC are victims of the system that is failing to protect them. And child protection failures are swamping the OOHC system and imposing heavy burdens on state budgets.

The number of children in Australia aged 0–17 requiring overnight government-subsidised alternative home-based 'foster care' and 'kinship care' or non-home based 'residential care' almost doubled from 17,000 children in June 2001 to nearly 36,000 in June 2010. Total national real spending (adjusted for inflation) on OOHC has also significantly increased in all jurisdictions in the past decade, and topped $1.7 billion in 2009–10, an increase of over 180% since 2000–01.

All state and territory OOHC systems are under strain and face similar family preservation-related demand and cost pressures.

These pressures include not only increasing numbers of children needing care and longer times being spent in care, but also greater demand from children with high or complex needs. This has led to substantial rises in the real cost of services due to increased spending on 'special need' loadings for foster carers and expanded provision of additional specialist support service packages for high needs children in both home-based and non-home based settings (so-called 'treatment' or 'therapeutic' focused foster and residential care programs).

Growth in the size, scale and cost of the system is the reason policymakers support what are perceived to be lower cost alternatives. 'Early intervention' and family support programs designed to support children and families in the parental home and prevent entries into care are thus attracting increasing public funding.

National expenditure on intensive family preservation services has therefore increased by 317% since 2000–01 and reached nearly 11% ($277 million) of all other spending on child welfare services in 2009–10, or 16% of OOHC expenditure.

But the best form of 'early intervention' and 'prevention' of abuse for many children would be early and permanent removal, preferably by means of adoption by suitable families.

Jeremy Sammut is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. His report, Do Not Damage and Disturb: On Child Protection Failures and the Crisis in Out of Home Care in Australia, is available at