A numbers game: Indigenous children in care and the threat of another stolen generation

Tomorrow is Sorry Day, the anniversary of the Bringing them Home report, which documented the systematic removal of thousands of Aboriginal and Islander children forcibly taken from their families and communities.

It is perhaps a strange time for the New South Wales government to announce controversial changes to child protection – including a push towards open adoptions – when Aboriginal children are so heavily overrepresented in the out-of-home care system.

default

While Aboriginal children are only 5% of under-18s in NSW, they make up 37% of all young people in care.

As a leading advocate for Aboriginal children has put it: “Our main priority here is the safety and wellbeing of Aboriginal kids, it’s not about adopting them out because it suits a numbers game.”

But is that message getting through to the NSW government?

The “My forever family” program, announced this week, shifts policy and resources towards adoption. The non-government agency Adopt Change has been awarded a $2.3m contract to recruit and support foster carers for the next three years, with an emphasis on finding carers who can double as adoptive parents if needed.

From 1 July there will be a fortnightly adoption allowance, to encourage eligible carers to adopt, and $2.85m for an institute for open adoption studies at the University of Sydney.

A Family and Community Services spokesman told Guardian Australia the department would not rule out adoption of Aboriginal children.

“Open adoption for Aboriginal children is possible under the legislation, when it is preferable to any other care order and is in the best interests of the child,” the spokesman said.

“Where preservation or restoration to family is not an option, we want our children to have a forever family through guardianship or open adoption.”

Open adoptions mean biological and adoptive families have access to varying degrees to each other’s personal information and have the option of contact with each other, in the best interests of the child.

All states and territories have adopted principles of permanency in out-of-home care (that regardless of the placement, all children need a stable and consistent home life centred on their best interests) but NSW is the first to take this systemic approach as a solution to the skyrocketing numbers of children in the system.

The changes have alarmed Aboriginal organisations working in the sector.

The Aboriginal Child, Family and Community Care State Secretariat (AbSec) is the peak body for Aboriginal child and family services in NSW. Its chief executive, Tim Ireland, told Guardian Australia the move was disastrous for Aboriginal families and communities.

“Most people don’t have an intimate knowledge of the child protection system and I understand that, without that knowledge, the idea of adoption and a ‘forever family’ sounds really nice,” Ireland said.

“But the reality is Aboriginal children in the child protection system already have a forever family – their extended family, kinship network and community back home. We’ve seen so many young people exit the system at age 18 with no idea of their Aboriginal identity and all their connections to a loving community severed, which is tragic and absolutely unfair to those young people.”

For adoption to be used as a last resort, Ireland said, is to rely on a child protection system that report after report has identified as failing children and families.

“When a child is adopted, they are issued a new birth certificate, their surname is changed and there’s no longer any departmental oversight to ensure that their cultural connections or even their basic health and safety are being upheld,” he said.

“It’s a permanent, legal move that completely separates them from their existing extended family.”

There is evidence that prevention is better for everyone and is cost-effective. Prevention is a systemic approach to identify families who might be at risk of breakdown and offer support with parenting, employment, relationships, poverty, mental illness, family violence, addiction, with the aim of keeping families intact wherever possible.

A 2017 NSW parliamentary inquiry into child protection found that early intervention would give the sector the best chance of reducing the number of children going into out-of-home care.

The inquiry recommended a “specific one-off injection of additional funding for early intervention services” with a focus on rural, regional and remote areas.

Facs told Guardian Australia its first priority was to keep Aboriginal families together, and had allocated $90m over four years to rolling out “internationally tried and tested evidence-based preservation programs”.

Each year 900 families will have access to these programs, with half of those places open to Aboriginal families.

But AbSec has concerns about the cultural relevance of imported family therapy programs for Aboriginal people who have had generations of traumatic contact with the child protection system.

The 2017 parliamentary inquiry also had broad reservations about Facs’s role, pointing out that “seeking help from Facs when it has the authority to remove a child can prevent individuals from engaging with services”.

Overall, the inquiry was scathing about the “manifest failure of politics and the bureaucracy to deal with child protection in NSW” and “raised existential issues about the ability of the principle government department which has responsibility for child protection, Facs, to fully comprehend, plan and execute its mandate.”

The second priority in the “permanency continuum” is restoration – the complex process of putting families back together once a child has been removed.

It is an intensive process according to Ireland.

“Restoration doesn’t happen overnight, particularly when a child has been traumatised after being removed by child protection authorities,” he said. “It’s a different kind of workforce that you need, where a person is working intensively with a families to overcome issues that are happening there, and then slowly restoring kids back to the home environment and strengthening that after restoration has occurred.”

Facs has attached a timeline to the process by which parents can prove they are ready to have their children back: six months to two years. Ireland said that might not be long enough for parents to access the services they needed, such as rehab or therapy.

“Placing a timeframe of two years to achieve a restoration can place even more risk on to the family falling apart,” Ireland said.

“The minister claims that adoption will only be imposed on Aboriginal children as a last resort, when all other avenues have been exhausted. But who will monitor this?

“We’re dealing with an extremely secretive government that commissioned an exhaustive, independent review of the out-of-home care system over two years ago, but has refused to release it to the public or even the NSW parliament.”

Ireland is referring to the Tune report, a 2016 review of child protection services conducted by the former federal public servant David Tune.

The NSW government has said the current policy direction was informed by the Tune report but has refused to make it public, fending off another motion to do so in the NSW upper house earlier this week.

“There is no oversight or mechanism to keep the system accountable to Aboriginal families,” Ireland said.

In this sea of change, later in the year will come another important review, one that might be able to influence the direction the government takes with Aboriginal children in the out-of-home care system.

The University of NSW pro-vice chancellor and constitutional lawyer, Prof Megan Davis, has been asked to identify the reasons why so many Aboriginal children come into contact with the system, and recommend ways to reduce the number of kids in care.

Davis and her team will also do a comprehensive case review of the 1,152 Aboriginal children and young people who entered care in NSW between July 2015 and June 2016.

The Davis review, Family is Culture, will report to government in December and is said to be focused not just on the shortcomings of the current system but on ways to establish self-determination in Aboriginal child and family services.

In the meantime, AbSec and others continue to resist the policy direction announced this week.

“Is a blanket approach to adoption the right approach to impose on Aboriginal people and children, taking us back to historical policies where government agencies would remove that child and then forcibly push them on to someone who’s been deemed to be appropriate as an adoptive parent?” Ireland asked.

“In the future we will see a lost generation here. More and more adoption of Aboriginal kids will result in the decimation of our communities. That’s sad and that’s a conversation that should be had publicly.”

• Support our independent journalism by making a one-off or monthly contribution.