KEY POINTS:
When British social worker Jonny Ward spotted an advertisement for jobs with New Zealand's Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS) last year, he jumped at the opportunity.
He knew New Zealand's reputation as a progressive leader in the child welfare world, the place where family group conferences were invented, where social workers would not be oppressive agents of the state but advisers to help families take control of their own destinies.
When he accepted a two-year contract to work in the CYFS Manurewa office, he knew he would be going to one of New Zealand's poorest areas where most of his clients would be Maori or Pacific Islanders, a stark contrast to the wealthy English seaside resort of Brighton he came from.
What Ward was not prepared for was how he was expected to work with the families to whom he was assigned. "On my first day, the service manager informed me the job was more like being in the police than being a social worker," he says.
His job included taking his share of the 66,000 notifications of potential child abuse or neglect that come into CYFS' national call centre in Grey Lynn each year, take between five and eight a day, and knock on those five to eight doors without warning to try to assess whether children were at risk.
If Ward judged there was a critical risk, he was expected to get a warrant to remove the children, take a posse of social workers and police to literally pull children from the arms of their parents - then find somewhere for them to stay.
"I did an uplift last week with a social worker who tried to push away the mother cuddling her child where the child was having to be removed," he says. "There was a case on Cyfswatch [blogsite], which I can believe, where the child was being breastfed and the social worker attempted to take the child.
"There was no reason to do that. Regardless of what the parents might have done, you need to work with them. Most parents, regardless, will want the best for their children."
Last week Ward told CYFS he was quitting, returning to Britain 18 months before his contract expires. This week he posted a searing indictment of the service on Cyfswatch and sent copies to Prime Minister Helen Clark, National Party leader John Key and the Herald. "The failure of CYFS to protect children goes hand in hand with gross professional incompetence among a large proportion of its frontline staff," he wrote.
He told the Weekend Herald that Key's speech in Christchurch on Tuesday about streets like McGehan Close in Auckland, where the parents feel helpless and in terror of their teenage children, was spot on.
"We are creating an underclass because we are letting these children down," he says. "When we do intervene, we are not providing a better alternative.
"Sometimes the caregiver is more abusive than the family we have taken them from. I know from a colleague that they placed someone with a convicted murderer because the social worker didn't tell the supervisor about that."
Of course, the "underclass", or what Clark after the Kahui case last year called "Once Were Warriors families", can't be put down just to poor social work.
These families are still paying the price of the destruction of working-class jobs in the fight against inflation and state controls in the 80s and early 90s, exacerbated by addictions, welfare poverty traps and often race-based gang loyalty.
Rodger Smith, who started as a community worker in McGehan Close in 1981, says that even then the street was known as "Auckland's ghetto", with a high rate of unemployment in the wake of the oil crises of the 1970s.
But Ward is not alone in suggesting that the way we are responding to families in need is now part of the problem, rather than the solution.
The director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection, Dorothy Scott, told a conference in Wellington last year that "our current child protection systems are unsustainable and harmful to children and their families.
"Given the scale of child protection notifications now received, it is hard to exaggerate the extent of rage, humiliation and intense fear felt by many parents who are subject to child protection investigations where the concerns are not substantiated," she said.
"Paradoxically, and tragically, this is very likely to reduce the coping capacity of parents by causing high levels of stress, and by reducing their informal social support and their use of services, as parents are left very suspicious about who in their kith and kinship circle, or who in their local service system, may have notified them to the authorities.
"While this is an area in which it is hard to conduct research for ethical and privacy reasons, it is very likely, in my view almost certain, that our current unsubstantiated child protection investigations are actually increasing the risk of child abuse and neglect for many children."
The director of the Family Centre Social Policy Research Unit in Wellington, the Rev Charles Waldegrave, argued in Social Policy Journal that New Zealand should move away from the adversarial Anglo-American model of child protection, based on removing children from their parents, to a system more common in Europe where judges and social workers work together to try to help the parents to raise their children.
"I think CYFS is beginning to be aware that there has been a problem in the Anglo-American systems," he said this week. "All the research shows that they are getting social workers to become evidence detectors against the family, so they lose the support of the family as they are doing that.
"Continental Europe has had a totally different approach. If the situation is really serious, of course they have to go for the legal things, but they have realised that the vast majority of abuse in families can be changed if you pour in the resources, so the social worker goes in with the approach of, 'What you are doing with your child is not working, we are here to change that, now where do we start?'
"They do things like providing literacy courses, parenting courses, and they help people into sports and other activities.
"I was in Germany in November in a tenement block where they have 24-hour social work staff so that people who have difficulty bringing up their children can come and live there with their children for four months or six months. There is no lock and key, no one is forced into it, but a social worker is there. They can protect the children and sit down with the parents and work it through and help the families learn."
New Zealand's equivalents - places like Manurewa and McGehan Close - are physically and ethnically different from Germany. But the addictions, poverty traps and racial or gang loyalties are just as strong.
Angie Shortcliffe, a Manurewa foster parent to three children under 7 in CYFS care and mother of two of her own, has taken on children whose parents were both hooked on pure methamphetamine (P).
"I've got two whose parents used P," she says. "One has been very good, like a normal child. The other one just screamed.
"No matter what you did, it was hard to settle the child, to the point where you have to leave the other children to constantly deal with this one child." She has taken in another baby with a brain injury caused by domestic violence. She had to give back a 10-year-old girl who smashed her hands through an upstairs window and tried to jump out.
Shortcliffe, a 33-year-old solo mum, says she is always broke in the holidays when she needs to organise things for the children. CYFS pays a foster care allowance of $114 to $163 for each child a week, depending on the child's age, but this covers only the basics, such as food, power, phone, water and rent.
"I don't have a bed for myself," she says. "I put a mattress on the floor in the lounge so everyone else has a bed."
Massey University researcher Jill Worrall, who surveyed 323 families in CYFS-sanctioned kin care, found drug abuse featured in 40 per cent of cases, second only to neglect (46 per cent).
Other common elements were alcohol abuse (29 per cent), child abuse (28 per cent), mental illness and domestic violence (both 27 per cent).
CYFS statistics provided to Worrall show that the number of children in care has risen by 47 per cent since 1999-2000, from 3533 to 5191 as at November 30.
In Worrall's survey, 80 per cent of the children in care came from broken families - 61 per cent from the care of their mothers, 10 per cent from their fathers, 10 per cent from other relatives and only 20 per cent from both their parents. She believes it's no accident that New Zealand and the United States have the world's highest rates of sole parenthood and children in state care, higher than in Australia, Japan or most of Europe.
"I think it's to do with the public ethos. It's to do with the belief that it's okay [to split]. In Japan it's not," she says. "Not that I think women should stay with violent partners. Sometimes you have to go for marriage counselling where you support the marriage, but there also has to be a will to change."
South Auckland Caregivers Association chair Allysa Carberry says a third of her members looking after CYFS children are also solo mums, and two-thirds are couples. The association gets sponsorship from charities and churches to organise outings for children in care, including three fun days in the next few days. CYFS itself recognises that things need to change. Late last year it brought critics Scott and Waldegrave on to an advisory group with Children's Commissioner Cindy Kiro and Principal Family Court Judge Peter Boshier, who are all pushing for a better balance between child protection and family support.
"We have been pretty aggressive in challenging them," Waldegrave says.
He says the service's chief social worker, Marie Connolly, understands the issues. She has written about "practice slippage" away from the principle that families should be given power to take control of their own problems - the basis of the 1989 Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act that gave New Zealand its once-progressive reputation.
"The family support orientation is not trouble-free," she told the Weekend Herald this week. "It's striking a balance that is important so that you're responding to the child protection issue and also providing family supports."
The Government plans to amend the act this year to let social workers in the CYFS call centre refer non-urgent cases directly to community agencies with powers only to support the families, not to remove children.
A review posted on the CYFS and Treasury websites last month suggests the CYFS call centre could become a "single entry point" for families seeking a range of state-funded family support services.
Ward's stinging critique of the current system is being taken seriously at the highest levels. Clark passed it on to CYFS Minister Ruth Dyson, whose private secretary has invited Ward to brief her in the Beehive next week.
Waldegrave says the debate about CYFS needs to be seen in the context of a dramatic reduction in numbers on the unemployment benefit in the past five years from 124,720 to 41,027.
He believes this drop has been boosted by the new "in-work payment" which gives low-income families an extra $60 a week if at least one parent is in paid work.
"The whole Working For Families package is based on the international research that shows that if you pour money into temporary work for that group on the edge of the labour market, they get a toehold in the labour market and go on to find a secure place in it," he says.
"Key is trying to create a crisis out of something that is actually a huge success in New Zealand. The proportion of people in the underclass has been reduced by at least half in the past five years.
"If we are to go further, we need to address the international research and continue in that direction."
