• Karen Healy
• Australian Review of Public Affairs

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31 August 2011Few issues capture media attention and spark public outrage as much as the abuse or, worse, the murder of children at the hands of their caregivers. In the immediate aftermath of child abuse tragedies, the public demands answers about who is responsible and how they are held to account. Media focus on the human interest angle of these tragedies fuels public fury by highlighting the defencelessness of the abused child and the culpability of the perpetrators and the public officials who failed to protect the children. What follows are often ugly and unforgettable scenes as families, neighbours, and community members turn on each other—as much an expression of powerlessness as of anger at how such a tragedy could have occurred in their midst. Markers of social disadvantage, such as the public housing apartment or caravan park where the child once lived and the parents or caregivers aged beyond their years, usually form the visible but unmentioned (and unmentionable) backdrop to these ostensibly classless tragedies.

More often than not, media and therefore public interest in the tragedies is short-lived and rarely sustained beyond the initial court hearings in which the perpetrator is charged. Sometimes child abuse tragedies lead to public inquiries and to policy change. Though, as Juliet Gainsborough points out in her fascinating and somewhat depressing book Scandalous Politics: Child Welfare Policy in the States, ‘questions remain about the extent to which any of the reforms enacted in response to scandal actually improve the child welfare system in ways that benefit children and families’. Indeed, Gainsborough, like other commentators, proposes that scandal driven reforms can make matters worse by, for example, directing resources away from preventative and supportive services towards bureaucratic regulation of services, and the investigation and removal of children as a risk minimisation strategy. After all, as Gainsborough wryly observes ‘prevention does not come with compelling stories’.