Respecting culture - allowing abuse

The front page story of The Australian on Wednesday January 23, 2008 - “Abuse Victims become Predators” - contained the allegation that the Queensland Department of Child Safety is still returning children victims to dysfunctional families in remote Queensland Indigenous communities.

In Tony Koch’s pre Christmas articles his sources laid the blame for the repeated return, serial rape and eventual gang rape of the Aurukun child, at the feet of misguided social workers rather than the Queensland Department of Child Saftey. According to one of Koch's sources, a senior departmental official:

“But two new social workers were appointed to the north and they expressed the view, which was repeated many times to the investigating committee, that putting an Indigenous child with white foster parents was another stolen generation.

“They convinced the department with this rubbish and the girl was taken from Cairns to Aurukun - back to where she was being abused previously and where she had contracted syphilis as a little child - and she was unsupervised, with the result that she was constantly raped.”

Koch's article claimed Department of Child Safety workers were responsible for the child's second return after the rape in 2002 at age seven but had no information regarding the child's return after the first rape in 2000 at age five. The departmental official continued:

“The report sets out how every step of the way the Child Safety Department did everything wrong, and all because they were told that a safe, white environment was ‘another stolen generation’.”

But the former Queensland Families Department, not the Department of Child Safety, had jurisdiction over the child's welfare from 2000 until 2004.

Koch's source described the “stolen generation” thinking as rubbish. If Koch's article is correct in the apportioning blame then such terrible repeated abuses should have ceased with the dismissal and suspensions of the lower level social workers. But that’s contrary to what his most recent article says is occurring now. So it is now reasonable to ask: why are these harmful returns still occurring?

An examination of the former Families Department Policy and the Practice Manual of the Queensland Department of Child Safety reveals the more likely cause of the ongoing return of these tiny victims to dysfunctional and dangerous environments.

In 1999 Anna Bligh the Qld Families Minister endorsed the Queensland Child Protection Strategic Plan 2000-2003 and it contained the following statement ;(PDF 170KB):

… child protection services must recognise cultural and ethnic diversity and different values about family life and child rearing. In particular, due to the detrimental effect State intervention has had historically on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander family life, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander identity and cultural practices are respected to ensure that child protection services are supporting, and not undermining, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Family and community values.

How close is this statement to the thinking and arguments described in Koch's article as rubbish? But this isn’t the arguments of low level departmental social workers, it is the policy statement issued by the relevant Queensland Minister.

Bligh's strategic plan followed the 1998 Forde enquiry into abuses of children in the care of the Queensland Families Department. That department was superseded by the Department of Child Safety in 2004. The Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) had conducted a further enquiry during October 2003 into the activities of the Families Department after further reports children in care had been abused.

There has been no minister who has contradicted Premier Bligh’s original policy statements. In fact those statements have been highlighted and endorsed by subsequent ministers. Judy Spence the Family Services Minister in October 2003 stated:

… with the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle. Essentially the purpose of this was to preserve the sense of identity by maintaining their own family, community and culture.

Mike Reynolds, as Minister for Child Safety and current Qld Parliamentary Speaker, stated in January 2006, two years after the Crime and Misconduct Commission's (CMC) enquiry:

… the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and their families had been carefully considered in all aspects of reforming the child protection system during the last two years. “The government has strengthened the Indigenous Child Placement Principle to better ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are cared for in a way that respects their culture and assists them to maintain their cultural identity”.

The original policy of the former Families Department has never been clearly rejected. A reading of the Practice Manual of the new Department of Child Safety, first applied in 2004, shows the adherence to cultural issues ahead of child safety when it involves Indigenous children in care.

That department's Practice Manual is still in use today.

Clearly since The Australian now has stories claiming abused children are still being returned to dysfunctional and unsafe environments something more than the arguments of over-zealous lower level employees is in play. The cause is more likely the Government Policy. Koch’s sources are right, the “Stolen Generation” rationale is rubbish.

The current Minister Margaret Keech should direct the Queensland Department of Child Safety to scrap the policy and Keech should oversee a re-write of the Practice Manual.