CW: Family and domestic violence
A crisis within the nation’s child protective services has been unfolding for some time, with 19 children killed this year.
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In Western Australia, child protection lacks a dedicated response system for young people who do not meet the threshold for statutory intervention—an issue which child safety advocates have raised the alarm about.
Conor Pall, Lead of Youth Engagement and Advocacy at the Australian Childhood Foundation, told Youth Jam’s Isaac Mulcrone that Australians are not attuned to the scale of violence against children.
“The demand on the child protection system, the amount of reports that systems get across states and territories, is stupidly high. As a country I don’t think we’re in a position where we’re looking the risk that children and young people face squarely in the eyes.
“We’re not admitting to ourselves how big of a problem child abuse is in our country,” he told Newsflash listeners.
While young people are being reported to the child protective system, Pall says a number of children aren’t being supported.
“To that child or young person, they’re still living in an unsafe situation because we don’t fund services to deliver a response that is commensurate with the scale of the crisis that we have,” he said.
Regional Australia is particularly vulnerable due to services being stretched, ill-suited or non-existent. Having grown up experiencing family violence in regional Victoria, Pall argues that there is a critical lack of investment in dedicated support services.
“Something I hear time and time again from children and young people, particularly those children and young people who live in rural and regional communities across the country, is the lack of investment in dedicated responses for them in the regions, so they know where to go to when they need help,” he said.
Pall questioned whether there is political will to rectify issues and provide further support to young people.
“It pains me to say maybe we don’t have political will to deal with this issue, maybe politicians think it’s too difficult, it’s not going to win votes.”
