Taking the scalpel to DOCS

Overloaded on one front, the state's child protection agency fails all.

When the body of a boy was found in a suitcase last year, and a girl was later found starved to death, the State Government could no longer ignore the calls for a major inquiry into the state's child protection system.

People wanted answers: why wasn't the Department of Community Services there earlier? How could problems escalate to the point of tragedy?

As evidence unfolded at the inquiry under Justice James Wood, it seemed miraculous the number of child deaths was not higher. Only a fraction of the tens of thousands of children reported to DOCS each year because of fears about their welfare and safety is removed from their families. Most reported children remain with their parents. But these parents receive little or no help for their drug addiction, depression, domestic violence, or poor parenting skills - the problems that prompted someone to make a report to DOCS in the first place.

"People assume because a child is in the child protection system he or she is getting help, but usually they don't get anything, and certainly not the intensive family support they need," says Jane Woodruff, chief executive of Burnside, a non-government child welfare agency.

It is this wider story of state neglect - of a failure of DOCS to intervene early before problems escalate into crises or tragedies - that has given rise to calls for radical change in the child protection system.

Justice Wood, who will present his blueprint to the Government in a few weeks, has been urged to make the sort of sweeping changes that happened in Victoria, Queensland and West Australia in recent years. Some believe DOCS is beyond saving. No amount of tinkering or infusion of money, they argue, can fix what they see as an overwhelmed, defensive and ineffectual bureaucracy.

"DOCS needs to be broken up," says Louise Voigt, chief executive of the non-government child welfare agency Barnardos.

Woodruff and Voigt want the department shrunk, not expanded, and they want it to get out of the way of non-government child welfare agencies, such as Barnardos, the Benevolent Society, Wesley Dalmar and Burnside, which would play a much bigger role in a revamped system. They want a pared-down Department of Child Safety to replace DOCS. Its sole function would be to investigate the most serious reports of suspected abuse and neglect, to take court action, and to remove children if necessary.

And to stop the new department from being overwhelmed by reports, as now happens with DOCS, the threshold for mandatory reporting by doctors, police, teachers and child-care workers would need to be raised.

Voigt, Woodruff and many others advocate lifting the bar so that only children "at risk of significant harm" would have to be reported to a statutory agency. Under the current definition, police, for instance, report every child at a domestic violence incident, swamping the DOCS helpline in the process. No discretion is allowed.

In separate submissions, Voigt and Woodruff are also calling for a second agency - a Department of Families, Children and Communities - to be established to help all families and children, but especially those "in need". This department would take over much of the other work DOCS is supposed to do but does badly because of its child protection workload. These duties include early intervention and foster care, but the proposed new department would contract the non-government children's agencies to do on-the-ground work with families.

"The aim is to enhance the efficacy of prevention and early intervention services," says Woodruff.

It is a bold vision but not everyone thinks such a radical restructure is the answer. Splitting the roles of child protection and early intervention between two departments has been less than successful in Queensland, according to Paul Testro, a child protection consultant from Brisbane, who has watched Queensland's 2004 changes create barriers and turf wars.

But it is a measure of the profound disillusionment with DOCS that the non-government children's agencies and many experts want the department, if not scrapped, then curbed, and its workload shared.

It would not be the only player in child protection work, for example, under a plan put forward by three leading child protection experts, Judy Cashmore, Dorothy Scott and Gillian Calvert. Police, hospitals, schools and child-care centres would have an in-house trained child protection expert who would judge whether children of concern to their colleagues were "at risk of significant harm".

So judged, the children would be referred to DOCS for immediate investigation. If not, they could be referred directly to a non-government child agency for practical help.

At the heart of the call for radical change is an ocean of unmet need for help from poor and struggling families. But it is hard to quantify. Of the 286,000 reports to DOCS, many involve the same children time and again. The inquiry heard that mandatory reporters, such as doctors, would repeatedly report the same child until they provoked some action from DOCS.

It is possible that a relatively small number of families with many children account for a lot of the reports. DOCS estimates only 10 per cent to 20 per cent of reports are high-level cases that require immediate intervention. It substantiated reports for 14 per cent of children notified in 2006-07. By DOCS's estimates, at least 10,000 families need early intervention programs.

It is not that government has been unaware of the huge hole in service provision. Less than two years ago, DOCS launched a major early intervention program, costing $150 million over three years. Badged the Brighter Futures program, it is a partnership with non-government children's agencies. Parallel systems have been set up of DOCS case workers and non-government workers to share the 6000 targeted families.

Fourteen non-government agencies won tenders. It is relatively early days. But the experience so far of the Brighter Futures "partnership" with DOCS has convinced many that even if the department survives Justice Wood's report, it should hand over all early intervention work to non-government agencies.

"If all the Brighter Future services were delivered by the non-government agencies, the state would get more bang for its bucks," says Maree Walk, director of the Benevolent Society's Centre for Children.

Most agencies were scathing in their submissions to the inquiry about DOCS's ability to do early intervention work with families. Sadly for the many good DOCS child protection workers, the department's reputation is so tainted that many families will not accept help from an agency that could take their children away.

As well, the agencies claim DOCS has much higher staff turnover than the non-government sector, jeopardising continuity with families whose relationships with the department are meant to span two years.

"Their capacity to deliver Brighter Futures is woeful," says the head of an agency contracted to the program. "They have the same size team as we have in this area but deliver services to less than half the families we do. If we were doing half our contracted families we would be booted out. But there is no consequence for DOCS."

As well, DOCS's multiple role as gatekeeper, service provider, funder and contract monitor has made Brighter Futures unnecessarily cumbersome, the agencies say. The department insists 80 per cent of the families referred to the program must first have been reported to the DOCS helpline; 20 per cent of referrals can come directly to the agencies from community sources such as mental health nurses or child-care workers. Many agencies want the ratio changed.

As most agencies have discovered, Brighter Futures is far from early intervention work. Many families DOCS refers have entrenched and multiple problems; their children have been known to the department for years. By default, some agencies have found they are doing child protection work with high-risk families.

"It's been a shock," says Peter O'Brien, manager of child and family services at Wesley Dalmar. He dreads one of his workers ending up "with a baby in a suitcase". But if he refuses high-risk families, the most needy children will get no help. "We're in a dilemma," he says.

Justice Wood and his team face a massive task. At every turn the dilemmas are profound - whether it be raising the threshold for mandatory reporting of child abuse, or cutting DOCS out of direct early intervention work, or out of existence entirely.

What is clear is that the small number of child deaths is a barometer of a wider malaise. Many parents, usually poor, often unwell, are struggling to supervise and care for their children adequately. The children may not be in immediate serious danger. But their life chances are being eroded, and their health and cognitive development compromised the longer their families wait for help.

How to ensure more families get high quality services early enough, long before children need to be removed from homes, or are found dead, is one of the biggest challenges facing Justice Wood and his team.

NO RHYME NOR REASON

The following is extracted from Burnside's submission to the Special Commission of Inquiry into Child Protection Services in NSW:

In 2004 Lisa, a sole parent, had three children under eight. She sought help from DOCS because she was depressed and felt she was not able to cope. She was told her circumstances were not serious enough to warrant a response.

In 2005, after a number of reports to DOCS that her children were neglected, the children were removed and placed in foster care. Lisa was left feeling alienated and angry.

Her children were restored after a couple of months with no further help offered. Her children were clingy, and frightened when she was away. She is engaged with a Burnside family support service, and doing well. She is bewildered about why, when she sought help, she was not able to access it.

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