Too little too late - the CYFS report

Former judge Mick Brown's findings on the Child, Youth and Family Services make disturbing reading. MATHEW DEARNALEY reports.

Newcomers to New Zealand often speak glowingly about how they believe it is a great place to bring up children.

We certainly should have all the ingredients to assure our youngsters happy and fulfilled lives.

But almost a quarter of all our babies are born into households with no resident father, and about 50,000 children are living without either parent, so our natural advantages are being sorely tried.

Only now are we fully awakening to the horror of child abuse, too often compounded by the failure of over-burdened and under-resourced welfare agencies to carry out their statutory responsibilities.

Former principal Youth Court judge Mick Brown says the abuse and neglect of children should never be accepted as some kind of natural phenomenon.

He has issued an impassioned call in his ministerial review of the Department of Child, Youth and Family Services for the rights of our children to be made paramount, and for society to get serious about ending atrocities against them.

These rights are, after all, enshrined in a United Nations convention to which New Zealand subscribes. But Judge Brown says their importance tends to be overlooked in frenzied hunts for scapegoats with each tragic incident of serious child abuse or death.

Last year, 30 children and young people known to Child, Youth and Family died.

Two were killed by abusive relatives and many of the others by suicide or accidents.

According to Judge Brown's report yesterday to Social Services Minister Steve Maharey, about 3500 youngsters known to the department will have severe mental-health problems.

More than 5000 are in care - a figure rising by as much as 12 per cent a year - and it is feared at least 1040 will try at some stage to kill themselves.

Their rate of serious mental illness is four times higher than for other young people, yet Judge Brown noted that the department identified only 29 candidates for a therapeutic programme it is establishing in Auckland this year.

His report reels off a procession of woes facing the department, from social workers swamped with too much work to attend basic training to bewildering staff turnover rates and failures to keep a close enough eye on the children it entrusts to foster parents.

But at the seat of his concern is the primacy given to public finance legislation, with its consequent budget constraints, ahead of the department's statutory obligations to those in its care.

Judge Brown has spoken to a plethora of groups and agencies since being asked to conduct the review a year ago, but says his most crucial meeting was with 10 articulate teenagers who are either in care or have recently left the fold.

"That group I consider to be truly 'stakeholders' in the best sense of that overworked word."

SOCIAL WORKER PROBLEMS


Calling for better training for social workers, and a formal registration system, Judge Brown said the minimum justification for state intervention in the life of any child was that any placement in foster care would be safer and less traumatic than the family home.

Yet the teenagers reported feelings of confusion and indignation, and felt they were being treated as second-class citizens or criminals.

The average number of placements for any one child in care is estimated at 3.1 each year, often with little regard for the youngster's development needs.

Staff turnover - Judge Brown noted one instance where 27 social workers revolved through 4.2 positions in less than four years - was such that foster caregivers might not even know who their caseworkers were.

He discovered considerable sympathy among those dealing with the department for the extreme difficulties facing its social workers, who worked "at the hard end" of society where mistakes were dangerous and costly.

But he said it was important to focus on the quality of those staff, and noted a litany of examples in which families felt they were treated with serious lack of respect.

Numerous complaints were made of social workers being unavailable, of failing to comply with legal or agreed timeframes, and of dropping children off at new places then having no contact until a crisis occurred.

"One might ask," said Judge Brown, "how a social worker beset by unmanageable demands on their time, a barrage of criticism from the public and the media, and complex and ever-worsening social problems, manages to retain a sense of integrity of dignity.

"Or to maintain personal well-being. It is small wonder that social workers tend to stay ... for two years before moving on."

He says there needs to be a high level of job satisfaction in the department if social workers are to be retained and the levels of burnout and stress reduced.

Submissions painted a picture of unmanageable caseloads, extra administrative duties and unsafe practices as social workers tried to spread themselves thinly.

The report is also critical that only 44 per cent of frontline social workers and only 55 per cent of new recruits have a B-level social work qualification - "perhaps a sad indictment of the 1990s."

It makes recommendations about training, support and management.

And it suggests that the department's whole performance be monitored by a body akin to the Education Review Office.

HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND


Judge Brown says such a review is impossible without examining the political environment in which the department has operated, at least for the past 16 years.

He says the department is one which, like police and health, should enjoy a high degree of public good will and approval.

Yet its staff have become demoralised, bearing the brunt of public backlashes against difficulties and instability caused by a seemingly endless succession of departmental reorganisations.

The report says children were, by reason of their vulnerability, those most affected by the profound domestic economic effects of global trends in the latter part of the 20th century.

It says the quality of services provided by the department has to be seen against the turbulent background of the state sector reforms which coincided with the 1989 Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act.

Judge Brown, who sees that legislation as probably the most radical of its type in the Western World, quotes extensively from a paper by Massey University social policy lecturers Dr Grant Duncan and Jill Worrall.

They noted the general thrust of the act that families and whanau should take part in decisions about the welfare of those of their children needing care and protection.

Although the legislation says they would be given every assistance to do this, the lecturers note that it was accompanied by cost-cutting in which the amount spent on the Government's care and protection services fell from $140.7 million in 1991 to $109.4 million in 1993.

This led to inadequate staff levels, insufficient money to support families at risk, and an undue concentration on crisis management.

At the same time, financial help available to extended-family caregivers remains less than that given to unrelated foster parents.

"Extended families, and in particular women, are now carrying financial and emotional burden that in the past have been community responsibilities," say the lecturers.

Maori, whose children account for 45 per cent of those in care, are the most affected. Twice as many Maori youngsters are placed with relatives as are Pakeha children.

At the same time, there is a shortage of families able to offer care because more women combine work with motherhood these days.

The lecturers also heavily criticise what they call unrealistic performance indicators such as a requirement for 75 per cent of resolution agreements with at-risk families to be settled within three months with no further action required.

In 1996, only 30 per cent of such agreements met that threshold, leading the lecturers to ask how realistic it is to expect that cases of abusive and violent families can be dealt with and files closed within such short times.

CHILD ABUSE


Judge Brown says child abuse and neglect have probably been one of mankind's darker secrets from the beginning of human history.

"Neither its realities nor its perpetrators [are] easy to confront and, as a result, it has tended to be ignored or denied."

For a child living in pain, terror or extreme danger and unhappiness in the privacy of a closed family, referral to Child, Youth and Family is a potential lifeline.

But disclosure also carries added risks to the child, and therefore enormous responsibilities for those investigating abuse or neglect.

Accurate assessment of the risks is vital to a child's welfare and safety, yet the quality and speed of decision-making is jeopardised by the sheer volume of notifications to an under-resourced department.

Judge Brown is dismayed that on October 31 last year there were 3379 cases of reported child abuse waiting to be allocated to social workers.

Although he is satisfied that efforts are generally made to establish that those children are safe in the meantime, he notes a comparison with firefighters, who are able to put a fire out at the outset without having to return periodically to douse the flames.

It is often weeks before a social worker contacts the family after an initial assessment of relative safety, and then often by telephone.

Calling this a "deplorable situation," Judge Brown recommends an emergency budgetary allocation, beyond the department's present budget of $352 million, to reduce the number of unallocated cases to zero within six months.

He is also concerned at the effectiveness of the existing voluntary reporting scheme, as opposed to a legal requirement for all professionals such as doctors and teachers to report suspicions of child abuse.

But he wants voluntary reporting protocols to be given a chance first, through renewed effort and spending to ensure interagency collaboration to protect children.

And he has called for investigations into better ways of tracking and sharing information about at-risk children.

SERVICES FOR MAORI


Judge Brown says the 1989 legislation provided Maori with an opportunity to develop separate iwi social services, but expectations have failed to be realised.

Negotiations to devolve responsibilities and resources to iwi groups have been held up by successive department reorganisations, while Maori themselves are not sufficiently unified to take up the challenge.

"There is a great enthusiasm to devolve responsibility but not control, so what might have been a watershed for a vibrant pluralist society is currently a pathetic, meandering trickle polluted with the detritus of failed opportunities."