Growing them strong, together: promoting the safety and wellbeing of the Northern Territory’s children report

A focus on prevention, collaboration, greater Aboriginal involvement and control of service delivery, and strengthening families and systems are at the heart of recommendations by the Inquiry into the Child Protection System in the Northern Territory. In addressing what it described as the ‘overwhelming failure’ of the Northern Territory’s child protection system, the Inquiry’s three co‐chairs said it was important to focus on systemic failures not the many hard‐working, thoughtful, dedicated people struggling to cope with limited resources in an environment characterised by extreme need. They said their inquiry had uncovered a “tsunami of need” that could be addressed only by immediate action to deal with an overburdened system, preventative measures to deal with the problems upstream and a dual response system to helping vulnerable families that doesn’t depend only on statutory interventions. The inquiry’s report, “Growing them strong, together”, found the Northern Territory child protection system is in crisis because of:• insufficient resources to deal with both the number of statutory interventions needed and the many issues beyond child protection that are integral to effective case management;• the number of notifications of children formally identified as at risk which remain uninvestigated – currently there are nearly 1000 children in the Northern Territory identified as at risk who are receiving no support or investigation, with many more cases likely to be unreported;• the fact that mandatory reporting was introduced without a commensurate increase in support services, with a tripling of notifications since 2003‐04 and a 79.4 per cent increase in the past two years;• an almost complete lack of Aboriginal controlled services, despite the fact that 73 per cent of notifications relate to Aboriginal children;• under‐resourced out of home care options (such as foster care and residential care) despite the fact that the $34 million budget is the most costly component of the Health and Families budget. The number of children in out of home care has more than tripled to 555 in the past 10 years, with Aboriginal children four times as likely as non‐Aboriginal children to be in care;• a failure to monitor children in out of home care or provide appropriate support to foster parents, many of whom feel they are not respected, that they are subject to arbitrary decisions, and that children are moved in and out of their care with little planning or consultation;• a non‐government sector that is poorly resourced yet could play a critical role in supporting families and children;• fragmented service delivery across agencies, many of which lack confidence in the ability of the child protection system to respond to notifications of children at risk and to work collaboratively with them in addressing problems;• overwhelming workforce issues, such as problems recruiting staff, high turnover, untenable caseloads, low morale, a lack of Aboriginal workers, ad hoc training and staff inductions and poor supervision;• a lack of support and therapeutic services for protected young people in the Northern Territory, who are at risk of adverse mental health outcomes, relationship difficulties and becoming clients of the youth and adult justice systems. The Board of Inquiry into the Child Protection System in the Northern Territory was appointed by the Chief Minister Paul Henderson in December 2009. Its three co‐chairs are Professor Muriel Bamblett, Dr Howard Bath and Dr Rob Roseby