More than 30,000 Australian ‘at risk’ kids are removed from their parents annually. There were 58,000 proven cases of child abuse or neglect in Australia in 2007 - an increase of 45 per cent over the previous five years.
How do we reach out to these children, their parents, families and communities to provide them with support and help reduce such horrific abuse? Helping someone become a good parent takes time, effort and resources. There’s no ‘silver bullet’.
Protecting children at risk is not going to be achieved simply by flooding the streets with child protection officers or punitive measures such as quarantining a parent’s welfare payments. One thing we should be doing is focusing more of our efforts and resources in the area of early intervention – supporting mothers and fathers from the time their children are born and helping them develop their parenting skills.
No parent is a ‘natural’ – it’s something you learn over many years with the help, if you’re lucky, of family and friends.
But if you don’t have that support – and you’re also struggling with a range of other issues, such as long-term unemployment, mental illness or substance abuse – then the odds are stacked against you, and your children, from the start.
Mission Australia’s own early intervention program, the Pathways to Prevention Project (which operates in Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne), shows that such programs achieve greater family connectedness, improve child communication and language skills, and reduce difficult behaviour.
They also save the community dramatically in terms of future spending on health, welfare, justice – and yes, child protection – in the future.
Early intervention programs don’t make headlines – they’re not as exciting to media or politicians as introducing harsh penalties on parents receiving income support or increasing the number of child protection officers – but they must be considered as part of the range of responses we need if we are to reduce the level of child abuse in this country.
1 comments:
I think you're really onto something really helpful here. I think if we were all more supported to do the 'right' thing than punished for doing the wrong thing we would have a happier society.
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