Leading University of South Australia child maltreatment expert, Professor Leonie Segal is calling for Australian governments to provide more support to families involved with child protection services, for the greater good of children and future generations.
In a confronting opinion piece, published in the Australian and NZ Journal of Family Therapy, Prof Segal is putting out a rallying call for a complete flip of the funding model, so that funds are directed to families in need before harms and costs escalate.
The pervasive cycle of intergenerational trauma, where parents struggle to nurture their children because of their own trauma, is the dominant pathway into abuse and mistreatment.
Prof Segal says these patterns underscore the critical need to better fund programs that focus on helping families to stay together and prioritise working towards safely reuniting children with their parents, when they've been placed in out-of-home-care.
"A child's right to be with their birth family is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, unless 'separation is necessary for the best interests of the child'," Prof Segal says.
"But understanding what's best for a child must consider the child's full-life trajectory, including their future parenting capacity - the driver of intergenerational outcomes.
"In Australia, budget allocations massively favour child removal over intensive support for a birth family. What this means, is that we as a society, spend far more on the consequences of abuse and neglect - unemployment, poor mental health, disability and so on - than disrupting the root cause.
"It's a very reactive response to child protection, and until we flip the narrative, we will continue to allow the cycle of intergenerational neglect and abuse to continue."
Prof Segal says that only a tiny proportion of the child protection and wider human services budget is allocated to supporting families caught up in intergenerational cycles of child abuse and neglect.
"In 2021-22 just $562 million of Australia's spend on child protection was allocated to supporting at-risk families, compared with more than ten times that for out-of-home-care," she says.
"State and federal governments have it all wrong. Instead of spending more than $28 billion on the consequences of child maltreatment we should be flipping the approach and spending way more than the current $1.5 billion on supporting distressed families before harms and costs escalate.
"The outcomes for children exposed to abuse, neglect, and out-of-home-care are shocking and include high rates of incarceration, life-long disability, serious mental illness, early death.
"Yet, the current system is more focussed on managing the harmful consequences of these situations than addressing the problem at the heart and seeking to heal distressed family dynamics.
"These families - parents with their own awful child abuse histories and their highly vulnerable infants and children - are not being offered the support that they need.
"If we could redirect funds to work intensively and therapeutically to provide healing to child protection-involved families before harms escalate, we could prevent a huge proportion of society's most disturbing and costly social ills.
"Shifting resources is an ethical imperative - families need appropriately funded programs that enable highly skilled teams to work with complex circumstances and trauma, to meet the needs of each individual family. This requires a commitment from governments to fund intensive family support programs at a level commensurate with need.
"More of the same is not an option if we want to improve outcomes for children and families caught up in intergenerational cycles of child abuse and neglect.
"A proactive and preventative approach is key to delivering better outcomes for children, to disrupting the intergenerational pathway into child maltreatment and socioeconomic disadvantage, and achieving huge budget savings."
