Submission to The Social Lens: A Social Work Action Blog by Heather Fraser, Associate Professor in Social Work, Queensland University of Technology (Brisbane) and Linda Briskman, Professor in Social Work, Western Sydney University.
GN08884 SA Education department social worker visiting mother and children in Adelaide suburb, South Australian (Historical) Photographic Collection, licensed under CC0. 1.0.
The Department is a full-length documentary of child protection work in New South Wales, recently screened on one of Australia’s public broadcasters, SBS. Billed as a compassionate portrait of the work, it tracks the lives of some of the most disadvantaged families in Australia—Indigenous and working-class—and the largely female workforce of child protection workers who knock on their doors. If you look hard you will see in the film how the effects of structural oppression in our society can play out, specifically, how poverty and generational trauma from past Stolen Generations are implicated in family and domestic violence; and how methamphetamine use can reflect attempts to escape this pain (also see Fraser & Seymour, 2017). As it has so often occurred in the past, poverty is often mistaken as neglect, especially for Indigenous Australians (Funston & Herring, 2016).
We write as experienced academics with long-standing backgrounds in child welfare and child protection. We are educators who impart to students the importance of critical social work, critical reflection and human rights frameworks to guide future practice, even though we know they will face barriers in organisational contexts (see Briskman, 2017; Fraser, Beddoe & Ballantyne, 2017; Fraser & Briskman, 2005). We also write from the despair of seeing little change to the child protection system, in spite of decades of government inquiries and child protection restructures.
Australian child protection systems are state-based and have long been criticised for bias against marginalised groups, for marketising their services and being fixated on predicting the risk of harm to children (Mendes, 2017; Thomson, 2016). This risk paradigm fills the days of the workers in The Department, who are well meaning. However, it is only familial risk that counts in these assessments. It is only what one family member does to another, or doesn’t do, that matters. The risk of harm from impoverished, neglected and racist environments does not count, nor the problem of few rental vacancies, high rents and substandard housing; nor the below-the-poverty-line public welfare payments (also see Fraser & Jarldorn, 2018). None of these are factored into The Department’s risk assessments, other than to hold the individual mothers accountable for a system over which they have little if any control. And it is only mothers held accountable in the film, including mothers who child protection workers expect to single-handedly prevent their male partners from abusing them and their children. Fathers are notably absent from The Department’s attempts to protect children from harm.
The documentary shows how devastating it can be for women to have their children removed by child protection, and how difficult it can be to regain custody once The Department is involved. Yet, there is no evidence of any attempt for service collaboration across housing, income, domestic violence services, corrections, mental health and the education sector. Focussing only on familial risk of harm to the children, the workers in The Department do not link the women to community based, peer support networks.
Most importantly, there were faux attempts by the child protection workers to collaborate with the mothers, and many of whom insightfully challenged the workers’ rhetorical and performative claims of ‘working together.’ For the most part, low income women in Australia who are addicted to methamphetamine must largely DIY their own recovery for past trauma. Little meaningful support (housing, counselling, drug treatment) is offered to the mothers, despite the palpable pain they express to the workers about needing help to rebuild their lives. For the pregnant mother using meth, the workers do not consider residential drug rehab that allows new mothers to enter with their babies, so as not to break the mother-baby bond. This mother had her baby removed very quickly after delivery who was then moved interstate to her estranged sister’s care. With no way of visiting the baby over ensuing months, the predictable happens.
The social workers’ surveillance of the mothers was extensive and invasive, especially after the children had been removed. One of the Aboriginal mothers had been ‘clean’ from methamphetamine for three years and was still being scrutinised for drug use and held to account for her ex-partner’s potential use of violence. She understood the politics of her situation and the history of Indigenous oppression, showing her in the film protesting with First Nations advocates against the removal of children. We must show this understanding too through our actions, not just our words (see Briskman, 2003, 2016, 2017).
No matter how disadvantaged, abused and downtrodden, women can come up with their own solutions if they are permitted and resourced to do so. Without the benefit of university education, the mothers knew what much of the child welfare research has shown us in the past, and continues to show us today: the state is not a very good substitute parent. We know that adverse childhood experiences, especially child abuse, can cast a long shadow over their/our lives. We also know children ‘in care’ often ‘graduate’ to juvenile (in)justice systems, which can also be a pathway to adult prisons (see Musgrove & Michell, 2018).
For a fair and decent child protection system, we need to do much more than focus on familial risk using bureaucratised tools that default to immediate risks, rather than the long-term harm of child removal (also see Thomson, 2016). We must question a system that conscripts workers to hold mothers responsible for much more than they can control. If we are to have any hope of preventing child abuse and child removal, we must address the increasing inequality, chronic poverty, unaddressed trauma and shortage in basic necessities that adversely affect child health and wellbeing and feed into the dynamics of familial abuse. Risk assessments devoid of the risks of living in chronic hardship and oppression must be challenged, if not jettisoned. What we should be aiming for is flourishing lives that provide choice and opportunity; a halt to the growth in statutory interventions and out-of-home care; and to ensure that we do not reproduce harms across a trajectory of failed systems and across generations.
References
Briskman, L. (2017). Revitalising radical social work. Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work, 29(2), 133-136.
Briskman, L. (2016). Decolonizing social work in Australia: Prospect or illusion. In Indigenous social work around the world (pp. 111-122). Routledge.
Briskman, L. (2003). The black grapevine: Aboriginal activism and the stolen generations. Federation Press.
Fraser, H., Beddoe, L., & Ballantyne, N. (2017). Is there a renaissance of radical social work? Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work, 29(2), 1-5.
Fraser, H., & Briskman, L. (2005). Through the eye of a needle: The challenge of getting justice in Australia if you’re Indigenous or seeking asylum. In Globalisation, global justice and social work (pp. 116-130). Routledge.
Fraser, H., & Jarldorn, M. (2018). Helping alliances with stigmatised, impoverished women in neoliberal South Australia. Social work case analysis: Global perspective, 11-32.
Fraser, H., & Seymour, K. (2017). Understanding violence and abuse: An anti-oppressive practice perspective. Fernwood Publishing Company.
Funston, L., & Herring, S. (2016). When will the stolen generations end?: A qualitative critical exploration of contemporary ‘child protection’ practices in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Sexual Abuse in Australia and New Zealand, 7(1), 51-58.
Mendes, P. (2017). Australia’s welfare wars: The players, the politics and the ideologies. Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work, 29(2), 145-148.
Musgrove, N., & Michell, D. (2018). The slow evolution of foster care in Australia: Just like a family?. Springer.
Pease, B., Allan, J., & Briskman, L. (2020). Critical social work: Theories and practices for a socially just world. Routledge.
Thomson, J. (2016). The mission of critical social work and the statutory child protection system in Australia: Resisting neoliberal encroachment. Social Alternatives, 35(4), 59-65.
THE SOCIAL LENS: A SOCIAL WORK ACTION BLOG - The views and opinions expressed in this blog are solely those of the original author(s) and do not express the views of the UBC School of Social Work and/or the other contributors to the blog. The blog aims to uphold the School's values and mission.
