• Daryl Higgins
• Australian Institute of Family Studies

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16 December 2011Australia is at a unique point in the development or "evolution" of statutory and support systems for protecting our children and young people from abuse and neglect.

In the 20th century, child protection systems began in the not-for-profit and advocacy sectors, with rapid expansion from the 1960s. They then evolved into state/territory statutory systems for responding to children who could not remain safely in the care of their parent(s).

With the shift towards governments taking responsibility for responding to those children who have been harmed or are at serious risk of harm, a network of intersecting systems has developed to detect child maltreatment, intervene to keep children safe, and respond to their needs. However, these systems have grown beyond what anyone could have imagined back in the 1970s and early 1980s, when communities were just starting to become aware of the serious harms that some children face while supposedly in the care of their parents. Since then, there has been a growing expectation that governments - on behalf of the community - have a responsibility to intervene in private family life to protect the wellbeing of these vulnerable and damaged children.

That all sounds like a straightforward task, yes?

No one is suggesting that the actual decisions being made by frontline workers are easy. They face the difficult task of determining whether children's situations are serious enough to warrant the statutory child protection system swinging into action. Nor is the task of caring for and responding to these children an easy one. Providing appropriate levels of care and treating the psychological distress that children's abusive and/or neglectful experiences have created is neither simple nor easy. But what has barely ever been a straightforward task - and what many researchers, politicians, social critics and practitioners themselves are now widely acknowledging - is that we have a juggernaut of a system to manage that has grown beyond all expectations.

Since the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) first started collating statistics on children coming to the attention of state/territory child protection authorities, the workload of these departments has escalated in terms of the number of concerns about child welfare that are made.