This week I have had the good fortune to participate in the US-based (Denver-Colorado) Kempe Centre International Virtual Conference: A CALL TO CHANGE CHILD WELFARE. The theme of the conference was generated by the challenges facing child protection systems globally, and specifically across the English-speaking / Anglophone ‘world’.
Tag: child protection
I read the Ministerial Advisory Board Report on Oranga Tamariki – Kahu Aroha – yesterday. The report is a mixed bag. It does not go as far in terms of devolution to Māori as it might have done and much of the detail remains unclear. It walks the line between two commitments which is likely to generate ongoing tension: strengthening the authority and capacity of ‘Māori collectives and communities’ on the one hand and re-centering social work within the OT bureaucracy on the other. I will consider the relationship between these two initiatives and discuss some of the challenges and opportunities of each in turn.
As many others will be doing at this uncertain time, I am hunkering down and wondering about the state of the play in the world as I know it. On a global scale the hypocrisy and ultimate futility of the US project in Afghanistan is gobsmacking. On a bigger scale still, the growing evidence of a planet pushed to breaking point by the extractive profit driven commodification of all things is chilling. Closer to home we have a virus to surround and conquer. It does seem that our politicians and public health specialists are close to being on the same page and we can have some confidence that this outbreak will be isolated and extinguished. We also have winds of change blowing through the bureaucracy of our state child protection system in Aotearoa. In this blog post I want to touch on the indirect connections – the conjuncture – between some of these things.
Given the extensive and harrowing testimony presented to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State and Faith-Based Care we should not be surprised by the recent whistle-blower evidence of physical abuse in a Care and Protection residence. I have read copious case records of young people placed in institutional care settings in the 2000s which document incidents of violent and coercive behaviour by residential staff during this period. Not all staff were guilty of this sort of practice and it didn’t happen all the time.
Any such behaviour is unacceptable and indefensible, but we don’t really need our politicians to repeat these platitudes to us – we already know that. What we need is a plan to abolish the residential incarceration for children in need of care. Andrew Becroft is right to point out that secure residential regimes are not fit for purpose. They are challenging workplaces. Staffing gaps tend to be filled by casual contracted workers. High needs young people grouped together in rule saturated behaviour management systems form hierarchies and actively push back against the system. They are gold-fish bowls – small prisons for kids – and they don’t work. All too often staff end up controlling children with bullying and intimidating practices of their own.
In this episode, Deb Stanfield interviews Emily Keddell (University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand) for the RSW collective. Emily speaks to The Prevention Project: Supporting Whānau and Reducing Baby Removals, a project undertaken with colleagues Luke Fitzmaurice and Kerri Cleaver.
Emily explains the background to the project and shares its key findings, which include the important mediating role of community social workers and other professionals, the value of a poverty-informed perspective, and the role of community building initiatives to improve social networks of whānau. Improving the pathways into, and availability of, early, intensive, culturally responsive services and enabling a whole of whānau orientation to practice are key promoters of preventing entry to care.
Devolving power and resources to build the availability of such services, particularly by Māori, for Māori services, was suggested as a way to help build the capacity of these kinds of services. Whānau involved with Oranga Tamariki around the time of birth reported the trusting, non-judgemental and supportive relationships with community-based workers, and focussing on intrinsic motivating factors such as love for children, helped them navigate Oranga Tamariki intervention, and their own personal struggles, to retain care.