The Costs of Failing Our Children

Victoria’s Child Protection service is in crisis and the public has never been more outraged. We’ve seen stories about children placed in the care of convicted paedophiles, about workers who struggle to handle their case loads – often leading to burn out and impacting on the horrible retention rates. There’s even been a two-year-old girl who has died. She was killed by a man the department had determined should be responsible for her welfare. The signs of abuse were clear before the final assault - children shouldn’t have black eyes and head injuries.

So who’s to blame? Is there any point in finding someone to blame? Surely we should be more concerned about ensuring it doesn’t happen again. How do we stop it happening again? How do we improve the system?

The answer is heart-breaking simple and at the same time incredibly unlikely to be achieved. The system needs more money. Child Protection workers earn about $54,000 a year, $17,000 a year less than NSW. How can we attract the best workers with those wages. We’ve been informed that there are approximately 90 vacancies across the state and the government has committed to providing another 100. Now there are 190 vacancies and untold numbers of kids who don’t have a case-worker but are being ‘monitored’. A euphemism if ever there was one. We know Child Protection Workers don’t have enough time to work properly with their cases so we can, unfortunately, imagine what is happening right now to those children being ‘monitored’.

This is only one issue, there are many more.

Residential units generally don’t get a lot of publicity and often people don’t even know they exist. It is basically a house where three or four of the most traumatised young people in our state, kids who have been put in the too hard basket, live together with 24 hour staffing. The only thing these places guarantee is that by the time these young people leave there, they will be further traumatised. They should all be closed immediately. Paying foster carers and adoptive parents a proper wage would increase the numbers of carers available and improve the standard of care these children receive.

The costs involved in providing an effective service for our most marginalised kids would be significant.

Sure we’re outraged but do we care that much?