Care and protection: Capturing the essence of our practice
By Mike Doolan and Marie Connolly
Why care and protection is important
New Zealand is the first Western country in modern times to try something different in responding to children and families where abuse, neglect or insecurity of care is alleged. Accordingly, what we do creates a lot of interest internationally. Much has been written about our law and practice, with particular interest in the family group conference. While what we do is important from an international perspective, of much more importance is the potential we have to impact the lives of children and their families and communities in positive ways.
The essence of our practice, and our point of difference, is that we work with families (whanau, hapu, iwi and family groups) to resolve child protection and child welfare issues. Family groups are partners in securing resolution – we do not make decisions and plans relating to children and young persons without them. We do not work alone or only in professional networks as in the past, relying solely on professional knowledge and processes in formulating assessments and plans. We hold family and community perspectives as importantly as professional knowledge and expertise and regard the best decisions and plans as a thoughtful integration of family, community and professional perspectives.
Done well, care and protection will keep children safe and cared for into the future, will strengthen their families and maintain their place in children’s lives, and lessen any need for state incursion into their lives in the future.
Some history of New Zealand's approach to child welfare
Early laws relating to child welfare have generally been developed primarily in response to the European population of New Zealand, and closely paralleled child welfare law in other Western jurisdictions.
Until the 1870’s, settler children in New Zealand, whose main value was their contribution to family economies, had no separate civil law protections to those that existed for adults. It was between 1870 and 1925, as children began to lose their economic value in the young colony and their asset value was recognised, that reformists sought to provide for needy and deprived children. The methods largely involved removing them from what were considered unsavoury or dangerous family environments and providing them with rigorous training and moral programming believed important to equip them for productive, morally correct, adult lives. Residential institutions and later, “boarding out” from Industrial Schools (a precursor to foster care) formed the basis of government social services for children in 19th century New Zealand. Industrial schools had powers to hold children until they were 21 years of age, and to educate and train them for working life. Children could be held for being destitute or homeless, neglected or maltreated, living in undesirable surroundings or with unsavoury companions, being uncontrollable or mischievous, or for committing offences (Dalley 1998). The services that did exist were primarily a response to European poverty. The requirement for them pre-dated Maori urbanization and during this period it would seem that traditional models of care for Maori remained relatively intact. For non-Maori, there were few alternatives to institutional care or confinement in the young, sparsely populated colony, and children of very young ages were transported from the streets of cities and towns large distances to the industrial schools at Dunedin and Burnham, and some North Island sites. Some of these places were state-run and some were under the patronage of religious orders.
The Child Welfare Act 1925, developed in an era characterised by the theories of Freud, Jung and Erickson, was the first codification of child welfare as a professional activity. The legal grounds for intervention in the lives of families were: indigence (no person accepting responsibility for the child); neglect by parents; living in an environment detrimental to a child’s physical or moral well-being; not being under proper control; and delinquency. These differ somewhat from the modern emphasis on causation of harm to children as a result of physical, emotional or sexual abuse and maltreatment by reasons of neglect or deprivation. These earlier grounds shaped not only formal complaints heard by a Children’s Court, but also the informal work of the Child Welfare agency.
New Zealand’s population almost doubled in the twenty years following the second World War, and this period also saw the beginnings of what were to become mass movements of Maori people away from traditional tribal areas and rural farmlands and into cities. Maori children began to feature and rapidly made up a disproportionate number of the children and young people responded to by the state.
During the 1960s knowledge about child abuse and issues of child protection developed within the professional community. In 1962 Henry Kempe and his colleagues brought community and professional attention to the plight of abused children. Professionals started using the term ‘battered child syndrome’ and child welfare systems set about developing specialized child protection services.
Although when it was introduced the Children and Young Persons Act 1974 would have been seen as an important modernization of child welfare law, it was in fact, a consolidation and clarification of what had become an entrenched approach to child welfare. Described as a workable, versatile, and adequate piece of legislation, it was perhaps more pedestrian than early promoters planned (Dalley 1998, p.264) and tended to continue a benign ‘child rescue’ model of practice. And social workers did rescue children in reasonably large numbers, thus imitating the general approach of other systems in English-speaking jurisdictions.
Changing practice
Cultural issues have been at the heart of practice changes in New Zealand. During the 1980s there was increasing dissatisfaction with the negative effects statutory care practices were having on a growing number of children (Connolly 2004). Children were frequently placed outside their kinship network, and the overrepresentation of Maori children in care meant that Maori families felt the effects of this cultural loss.
In 1986 the most significant report to address welfare issues and the needs of Maori was introduced, Puao-te-ata-tu (Ministerial Advisory Committee, 1986). The report made many recommendations regarding the particular needs of Maori children and their families, but most critically with respect to the care and safety of children it reinforced the centrality of whanau and the maintenance of the child within the family group. The sentiments within the report influenced strongly the principles of the 1989 legislation that revolutionized the ways in which children and families would be responded to in New Zealand:
…the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act reflected its commitment to greater family involvement, its principles clearly articulating the primary role of the family in caring for children and the need to support family, whanau, hapu, and iwi, and the family group to undertake this role. (Connolly, 2004, p. 2)
The family group conference (FGC) was, and is, at the heart of the approach. It provides a forum for family, including extended family, to come together with professionals to work out solutions that support child care and safety. In essence, the FGC has three phases: information sharing where professionals talk to the family about the concerns they have for their child and information is clarified; private deliberation, where the professionals withdraw from the meeting and the whanau have the first chance to work out what needs to happen moving forward; and agreement where agreement is reached with respect to the family’s recommendations and plans.
The legislation emphasises that court proceedings are a last resort and Courts are not empowered to make decisions to dispose a case unless a family group conference has been held and has either not resolved the matter or has decided to involve the court.
The change in legislation and practice sought a balance between family, community and professional perspectives, both in terms of identifying risks to a child’s safety and well-being and in responding to them. It also introduced key mechanisms designed to strengthen child protection practice, notably the establishment of Care and Protection Resource Panels. The panels, which are both multi-disciplinary and community focused, provide advice to social workers undertaking their statutory work with children and their families.
Challenges along the way
Whilst the legislation of 1989 clearly established a ‘family support’ orientation toward practice with children and their families in New Zealand the decade of the 1990s saw significant pressures that impacted on practice. Across international jurisdictions, relentless increases in the number of children being referred to statutory systems started to overwhelm services. International responses saw an increased emphasis on risk assessment within investigation-focused practices. Despite having family-supportive legislation that was seen as innovative across international jurisdictions, New Zealand nevertheless became strongly influenced by these international developments. This shift from a family support orientation to a child protection orientation created tension between New Zealand’s legislative principles and practice realities.
Conscious of the negative impact this shift was having on practice with children and their families, in 2006 the New Zealand child welfare system began a set of reforms that realigned practice with legislative aims, incorporated an evidence-base with respect to good outcomes for children, and created pathway systems that increased responsiveness to children and their families. The professional reforms come together in an integrated conceptual frame which includes:
• The knowledge framework that provides a succinct picture good practice that is both ethically- and evidence-informed.
• The service model providing the pathway system supporting service responsiveness to children and their families.
• The practice package providing the tools and resources that give effect to the framework and the service model.
Embedding the reforms over the next years will be imperative. Developing new frameworks, models and tools can only ever be the first part of a process of practice change. Reforming child welfare does take time and there are inevitably challenges along the way that can threaten to derail the processes of change. Having an integrated frame to work toward nevertheless provides the best protection against the child protection/family support pendulum swings that so often undermine services for children and their families.
References
Dalley, B. (1998). Family Matters: Child Welfare in 20th Century NZ. Auckland: University Press.
Connolly, M. (2004). A perspective on the origins of Family Group Conferencing. American Humane FGDM Issues in Brief, retrievable from http://www.americanhumane.org/assets/docs/protecting-children/PC-fgdm-ib-fgc-origins.pdf
Connolly, M. & Doolan, M. (2007). Lives Cut Short: Child death by maltreatment. Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing Ltd, for Office of the Children’s Commissioner.
Ministerial Advisory Committee (1986). Puao-te-ata-tu (Daybreak). Ministerial Advisory Committee on a Maori Perspective for the Department of Social Welfare. Wellington: Department of Social Welfare.
