White paper a whitewash, says Counsellor & Social Services Outcomes Researcher

“The fatal methodological flaw of the Ministry of Social Developments recent release of the “White Paper on Vulnerable Children” is that the Ministry has spent 4 years seeking answers to the problem of child abuse from those who didn’t have any answers prior to the report being commissioned, which has now resulted in a “whitewash” report empty of any real answers to the problem, says Steve Taylor, Counsellor, and Social Services Outcomes Researcher.

The “Child Protect Line” initiative is simply a watered-down version of the CYF Notification service. The current CYF National Call Centre cannot even fully staff its own contact service with qualified professionals, so setting up another call centre facility will simply double the problem, and further increase the performance pressure on current staff.

The “Vulnerable Children’s Bill” initiative, while a laudable idea, omits to recognise that adequate training and external supervision for frontline social service staff is simply not a priority (service or funding wise) for the sector. As an example, CYF staff do not all receive external supervision and skills training, and a significant percentage of CYF staff hold only minimal qualifications for their roles, while Relationship Services, New Zealand’s largest provider of Family Counselling services, recently reduced its training and supervision budget for its frontline staff. In addition, whilst privileging the voice of the child is encouraged in any child-centred legislation, such a goal has yet to be achieved by the Family Court, via the application of Section 4 & 6 of the Care of Children Act 2004, 8 years after this legislation became law.

The “Vulnerable Kids Information System” is self-contradictory in its application. On the one hand, the goal of this initiative is to put “all front-line practitioners on the same page” regarding child and / or family, whilst at the same time negating this outcome by providing different levels of accessibility to users of the system. There are also no apparent controls, templates, or monitoring in terms of what sort of information is entered into the database, meaning the potential for abuse of the system is significant.

The “Mentoring & Supporting Scholarships” initiative of the White Paper seems to be unaware of the New Zealand Youth Mentoring Network meta-analysis entitled “The Effectiveness of Youth Mentoring Programmes in New Zealand” (2010), which found that there are currently 23 active mentoring programmes operating in New Zealand and only 35% of these programmes have conducted evaluations examining the effectiveness for mentees.

The “Local Children’s Team and Regional Children’s Directors” initiative is simply another version of the 2006 Family Safety Team Pilot re-launched. The FST pilot was so unsuccessful at reducing Family Violence (the outcomes for FST families mirrored those of the national family violence trend, meaning the FST interventions made no meaningful impact on reducing Family Violence, despite a Pilot budget of over $14 million dollars), that ongoing monitoring and evaluation of the FST Programme was postponed indefinitely.

The “Protect & Respond” initiative invites the possibility of family and whanau collusion with abusive familial practices by nominating “Iwi approved caregivers”, assuming that “Iwi” are a protective factor for Maori children, when most summaries of sociological outcomes for Maori in toto strongly indicate that “Iwi” are no more adequately competent or resourced to protect vulnerable children than is the State. One key area of significant protection that children and families need is only flirted with in this section of the “White Paper” – the establishing of an Independent Complaints Authority to protect families from being statutorily abused by the State.

The “Public Awareness & Community Action” initiative assumes that there is not already a high level of community awareness regarding child abuse in NZ – there is. What is lacking is meaningful enforcement and sanction against those who perpetuate atrocities against children – nothing less than permanent life incarceration should be considered in these instances, which would guarantee that the perpetrator would never again hurt another child.

The “Dealing with Abusers” initiative strays into very dangerous legal territory by adopting a “Balance of Probabilies” Model, especially if this model is to be tested within the New Zealand Family Court, an institution with no meaningful outcome measurements of success. Currently, there is no monitoring or evaluation system for Lawyer for Child or Psychological Reports to assess the accuracy of the Court reports, resulting in the potential for systemic abuse of process. Lawyers practice is not submitted to any external supervisory scrutiny, and there is no meaningful external appeals process for Plaintiffs or Defendants against abuse of practice by Family Court representatives. “Who decides, and on what evidential, as opposed to assumptive grounds?” should be a critical question to answer when determining interventions with vulnerable children and families.

The “Focussing on what works” initiative, while tied to a current Government Outcomes focus, will require more commitment from the Minister of Social Development to implement then was recently demonstrated in the Family Violence arena.

As can be seen from the above, the “White Paper” is basically a sociological photocopy and summary of old and largely unsuccessful interventions already tried, and found wanting –an outcome which is no surprise, given the source of the information was from the same Stakeholders who have been unsuccessful to date with dealing with the problem of child abuse” says Mr Taylor.

ENDS

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