For the love of children, not money

Five of John Duke’s foster daughters, including Carli, have chosen him to give them away. Picture / Greg Bowker

John and Marion Duke have two sons of their own, but John has walked up the aisle five times to give away "daughters" to their husbands.

Carli, now a florist in West Auckland and married with a son of her own, came into the Dukes' care at the age of 14 after abuse in her family. She was with them, on and off, for about four years.

Jenny, "one of the most badly abused kids we ever had", married a pastor and now lives in Australia. She and her husband are about to take their four children to look after African children in Uganda.

"That's the sort of thing that keeps you going," John says.

"The highs are amazing," Marion agrees. "The lows are terrible. You are never in the middle."

In 34 years of caregiving, first in Britain and since 1981 in New Zealand, the Dukes have provided a safe home to more than 2500 children.

Most were far from little angels. Two years ago John was knifed by a 12-year-old because he was asked to do the dishes. Last year a young woman attacked Marion with a knife and a dinner plate.

When they ran a family home for eight children in West Auckland, social workers would often ring in the early hours of the morning asking them to take a child in an emergency. They would sit up until the child arrived, try to make the child welcome, then be up again at 7am for the other children.

 

Yet, apart from expenses, the Dukes have never been paid a cent for their work. Like all of New Zealand's foster parents, who are looking after just under 5000 children officially in state care as at June last year, they are volunteers.

Many foster parents would not have it any other way.

"We run the risk, if we move to start paying foster parents, of losing the dynamic of voluntary service," warns Russell Martin of the Open Home Foundation, a private trust with 700 foster families.

"Immediately you professionalise it, you would change the motives."

But those who have run large homes, like the Dukes, believe some youngsters need both foster-mum and foster-dad on hand 24 hours a day, making the old model of dad going out to work impractical.

"In the school holidays, what was I supposed to do - stay at home with six high-risk teenagers?" asks one woman who ran a family home for Child, Youth and Family with her partner, a painter and decorator, and two daughters then aged 9 and 7.

"It was a melting pot for disaster," her partner says. "I gave up my job."

For at least 20 years, Child, Youth and Family and its predecessors have struggled to rescue children at risk.

Old refuges such as mental hospitals have gone. Most long-term boys' and girls' homes, and "family homes" which sheltered children while they waited for longer-term placements, have also closed. Spending on care and protection of children was cut from $141 million in 1991 to $109 million two years later.

The agency has just spent $214,000 on its biggest campaign to recruit new caregivers for its remaining 55 family homes and for foster care, but at last count had signed up only 28.

It hired 15 per cent more social workers in the year to last June, bringing its total to 1099. But the number of children waiting for a social worker doubled, from 1780 to 3682.

The agency's family homes are supposed to cater for up to six children, but often accept up to nine. They are semi-secure, sometimes with alarms on the doors and bars on the windows. Bedrooms may be locked during the day.

There is usually a lounge with a TV, a kitchen which may double as a classroom, an area for outdoor relaxation and perhaps a billiard table or a basketball hoop.

There are two beds in each bedroom, so youngsters usually share.

House-parents have to be on the kids' wavelength - shoulders to cry on, wise old advisers, friendly rivals at the pool table or quasi-cops getting up to stop fights or confiscate weapons in the middle of the night.

They are told not to use force except to stop "dangerous behaviour", but it helps to be big and strong.

They are practical people. John Duke was a mechanic before becoming a fulltime caregiver. Bill Galloway, who ran a family home for 26 years with his wife Billie, was a school caretaker.

The caregivers get two locked bedrooms in the house for themselves and their families and do not pay rent. CYF pays the power bills, the phone rental, a cleaner for up to 16 hours a week and a travel allowance of $119.65 a month, which most use to run a van for their youngsters.

They also get board of $147.29 a week for every child, a bed payment of $41.25 a week, or $247.50 for six beds whether they are filled or not, and pocket money for the children of up to $10 a week each. CYF pays for the children's school fees, medical costs and a clothing allowance. But costs are also high.

"We bought the van, but we can't get insurance because of the boys we deal with," says a house-parent who takes teenagers from the youth justice system, including rapists and attempted murderers.

House-parents are supposed to have every fourth weekend off and three weeks' holiday a year, but it is hard to find relievers.

"There are no relief staff for caregivers," says one. "We have been here two years and still haven't taken leave. In the first nine months we were without a weekend off."

If both partners have to stay at home, they have to live on benefits - superannuation for the Galloways, the invalid's benefit for John Duke, who has emphysema.

"The thing that really riles you is that relieving staff take away $300 to $400 a week. Our babysitter, if we can get one, gets paid. We don't," a house-parent says.

"We all feel under-valued," says another.

For some, the worst thing is that if a child alleges physical abuse by a caregiver, Child, Youth and Family immediately takes all the children out of the house while the allegation is investigated. Street-smart youngsters have learnt to use allegations to get out of any home they don't like, but the process can leave caregivers with no means of support.

In one recent case a social worker and her partner, a tradesman, gave up jobs in Whangarei to take over a CYF family house in Auckland. They had got together not long before, some years after separating from their spouses, and wanted to make a new start.

A year after moving in, they got a call from their CYF manager informing them that an allegation had been made against them and they had two days to leave the house. It was two weeks before Christmas.

"We had family that had flown over from Australia to join us for Christmas. We had nowhere to go," the social worker says.

"I wanted to die. I just felt the humiliation, the shame."

They went to a lawyer, who got CYF to put them up in a motel for a month. After that, while the investigation dragged on for a further seven months, they were cut off completely.

The social worker found a bed in her niece's garage and went on the dole. Her partner went to his daughter's place.

While they were in the motel, they discovered that the social worker was pregnant. In distress, she miscarried. Her partner left her.

"I love her very much," he says. "But when we argued, it caused a lot of unnecessary tension."

Police investigated the allegations intensely, even questioning the social worker's daughter at school.

When, finally, the police found there was no basis for a prosecution, the tradesman "cried like a bloody baby". By then, the couple were back together.

But eight months on, CYF refuses to reinstate them, arguing that the threshold of behaviour required for caregiving is higher than that required to prosecute. The couple have asked their lawyer to seek mediation.

"I want my job back. What have I done?" the social worker asks.

The Family and Foster Care Federation is now piloting a scheme offering experienced foster parents to support anyone facing an abuse allegation. But Massey University researcher Jill Worrall, who is evaluating the project, says support people cannot write letters or advocate for the caregiver.

"The scheme is being paid for by the department [CYF], so I suppose there is a little bit of a conflict of interest," she says.

Independent support groups such as the newly formed South Auckland Caregivers' Association do not get CYF money and can provide less restricted support.

Worrall, a former foster parent herself, says family home house-parents looking after abused and neglected children should be paid.

The Youth Horizons Trust, which runs five family homes in Auckland and Hamilton for teenagers with conduct disorders, pays its house-parents $30,000 a year each - $60,000 for a couple. It also pays $30,000 a year to about 20 foster-parents where only one partner stays home.

"It makes them treat it [caregiving] as a job," says the trust's clinical director, Justine Harris. Ironically, its money comes from CYF.

"We have specialised contracts saying unless you fund us to this level we can't provide this level of service," she says.

"But we also have home-based services where we support the family in their own home. You reduce the number in foster care if you have home-based services. If they [CYF] did that, it would end up being cheaper. With the money saved you could pay the ones you need."

The issue is complex. Allysa Carberry, founder of the South Auckland Caregivers' Association, says family home house-parents are already better off than people like her who foster children in their own homes.

"If I was offered 16 hours of domestic assistance every week, I'd be in heaven," she says.

Foster care allowances went up on April 1 to between $110 and $159 a week, depending on the child's age, but that is all most foster-parents get.

Grandparents and other informal carers who have not gone through the formal fostering process get even less - orphan's benefits or unsupported child benefits worth between $95 and $129 a week.

Natural parents coping with difficult children get only family support - an income-tested payment of up to $72 a week for the first child plus $47 to $75 a week for every other child, depending on age.

The Government is reviewing the fairness of the different rates. Officials are due to report by the end of this year.

Harris believes the only way to overcome the desperate shortage of caregivers will be to pay them at least a partial wage.

"If people come into it out of the kindness of their hearts, they don't stay very long," she says.

But life-long caregivers like the Dukes, who are now in their 60s, continue to take in foster-children. And they are not asking for much.

"Send us a Christmas card, or invite the family-home caregivers to the Christmas party," Marion suggests.

"All we want is more recognition for the job we do," adds John.

"We are not vocal enough because we do the job from the heart and not from the head. You can't do the job any other way."