How accessible are child-abuse prevention services for families?

One of the causes of the heavy demand experienced by many services is that they were overwhelmed with tertiary clients (families where children had already been abused), being referred from statutory child protection authorities. Several comments were made by providers about how resources were being absorbed by tertiary clients, leaving little time left to be spent on secondary prevention:

Lack of funding negatively impacts us as we can only afford 30 hours a week of workers and we don't get any time to do prevention. In reality, everyone works extra hours.

Another matter to arise was that the performance of some services is measured by client turnover, so statistically a service looks better if it takes on the easier clients with less complex and time-consuming needs which can be resolved in a limited period of time:

We are finding that it is a number crunching game at present. Outcomes are measured in terms of number of people seen. Therefore we are seeing people who are easier to get and not those most in need of a child-abuse prevention service.

Success in the prevention of child abuse and neglect

It is interesting that, when asked to give the aims of their service, only one provider mentioned the prevention of child abuse and neglect. Further, when asked to outline desired major and minor outcomes of the service, more than half (53 per cent) of providers made no mention of children's welfare; in the majority of cases, service aims revolved around parents or family support and education.

Clearly, many services see the parents as the central clients in their service rather than the children, presuming that providing services to parents would automatically result in the prevention of, or reduction in, maltreatment of children, a view which has traditionally been held by providers in this sector.

The assumed link between parental support and child-abuse prevention is illustrated by responses to the question: "To what degree does your service prevent child abuse and neglect?" Many providers felt that their service was making some contribution towards child abuse prevention. The majority (53 per cent or 17 respondents) believed that they prevented child abuse "completely" or "mostly". Interestingly, 16 per cent (five) of respondents answered that they did not know whether their service was effectively preventing child abuse and neglect.

It is difficult for either observers or service providers themselves to be clear about whether the services are effective in preventing child abuse and neglect. While all agencies but one collected some information about their service operation, information about the impact of services is unavailable because services are seldom formally evaluated. However, there is evidence that service providers are increasingly recognising the importance of gathering information about the effectiveness of their services.

Conclusion

Although the sample was small and not randomly obtained, and therefore the findings not generalisable, some interesting insights were gained.

The study's key findings indicated that there was generally a greater need for child-abuse prevention services than there were services available. The availability of existing services was known in the community but possibly not by those most in need of the service.The most important provisions to facilitate use of the services were seen to be child care, transport, and flexible hours of operation.

With regard to those most in need of a prevention service, concerns were expressed about the fact that these families were not being assisted because services were overwhelmed with tertiary clients requiring intervention. It was difficult to gauge service outcomes as few evaluations were being conducted. However, while the prevention of child abuse was not seen by the majority of services as one of their major aims, providers thought that their services were making some contribution in the child abuse prevention area.

Future studies should increase the sample size so that it can be ascertained whether these findings are generalisable to similar child-abuse prevention services across Australia. It would also be beneficial to include the perspectives of families attending the services, and some independent data about the community characteristics. There is also a critical need for long-term follow-up studies, to assess the impacts of services on the welfare of children over time.