Once in care, kids' chances of going to jail, committing suicide, dying young, alcohol and drug dependency and total abject failure remain very strong, if not greatly enhanced.
Once in care, kids' chances of going to jail, committing suicide, dying young, alcohol and drug dependency and total abject failure remain very strong, if not greatly enhanced.
In the recent Queen's New Year honours, I was privileged to be recognised with an award. It has caused me to reflect on those who have brought me this far.
Almost all of my successes have been team efforts and others have played crucial roles. Most of those people were never hand-picked.
We don't get to choose our parents and neighbours, teachers, footy coaches, employers and supervisors or work colleagues.
Nevertheless, these people have influenced and enhanced and shaped the decisions made that have led to a successful tenure in a role or an operation where the goal was achieved.
I am very grateful for those who have shepherded me through.
They say success has many fathers but failure is an orphan.
Nobody puts their hand up to say they played a key role in what was never achieved or in the catastrophic decision that resulted in lives or fortunes lost or complete embarrassment to those most wanting the project to succeed.
We accept that people who have made it can fall from grace, but we are reluctant for those we have labelled as failures to ever succeed. "Once bitten, twice shy;" "A leopard never changes its spots."
It is as if we were to find some redeeming feature in someone previously condemned for some crime or cock-up, it would throw the earth off its axis and equilibrium out of sync.
We are loath to investigate the causes and influences for when the young go off the rails.
We don't want to follow back down the trail that led to the disaster headline, except in the rarest of circumstances. In my years in the police, we seldom had a post-mortem on a lost jury trial to fully investigate the reason why the decision-makers never saw it our way or whether we could have presented the evidence more clearly — in effect, ask the question "What went wrong? We just put it down to the frailties of the jury system.
We could have done a better job on many occasions.
Chester Borrows
I am pleased to hear the new government announce that it will inquire into the history of kids in care and also that it will consider a watchdog for the work of CYFS and vulnerable children in its care.
We have the Independent Police Conduct Authority scrutinising the actions of the police and, it would seem only logical to have some independent view of the actions of those in charge of an organisation so crucial to the success or otherwise of those most at risk in our society.
Young people are placed in the care of the state after months or years of dysfunction, always at the hand of those charged with acting in their best interests.
The future never looked bright for these kids but, once in care, their chances of going to jail, committing suicide, dying young, alcohol and drug dependency and total abject failure remain very strong, if not greatly enhanced.
Mind you, we'll never know what the chances of those terrible outcomes would have been if we had done nothing.
So investigations should go far wider than state care and also look to those caregivers, educators, enforcers, decision-makers and influencers who could have chosen to act or to act differently and probably achieve a better result.
While we are happy to bask in the reflected glory of those we have trained, supervised, and nurtured, love and like, we need to be responsible for those we'd rather forget, don't like and could care less about.
Those who fail to fire, those who flop, those who offend and those who are offensive. It is about not making the same bad decisions twice because the cost is too expensive. Sometimes it costs lives.
