Persistent neglect is thought to be just as harmful to a child as abuse. However, neglect is often difficult to assess for two reasons: firstly it often resembles poverty; and secondly, neglecting families tend to have disorganised patterns of accessing health care and social support. This article looks at the importance of joint health and welfare input in interventions with families at risk of neglecting their children. The Strengthening Families Program at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital provides a model for interdisciplinary and intersectoral (welfare and health) collaboration, which offers care management to individual families and is working towards systemic changes in the hospital's response to these families.

The South Australian foster care system is plagued by problems of both supply and demand. Decreases in the availability of residential care and suitably trained foster carers has led to a shortage of placements to meet current demand. At the same time, increased selectivity in the intake of children into care has led to an over-concentration of more challenging children who either cannot be placed in foster care, or are being placed with the support of significantly higher loadings or payments. In this paper, it is argued that these problems can be understood conceptually using basic micro-economic principles, namely: demand-supply curve analysis, separation of market segments, and supply elasticity. It is argued that the supply of placements has become increasingly price-inelastic due to the nature of demand (the type of child), and that increasing short-term payment rates only serves to magnify the problem by artificially maintaining unsuitable care arrangements. Alternative solutions, such as the introduction of training and professional foster carers, are discussed.

This paper outlines the growing awareness of one experienced professional in the out-of-home care field regarding some of the deleterious practices of the present time. While much good practice exists in this field, it is the author's contention that entrenched attitudes which convey insensitivity and discrimination towards children and young people in care are still all too frequent; and that these attitudes continue to militate against meeting the essential needs of children and young people.

This paper outlines a group of theoretical concepts and relates them to a number of areas of current malpractice by way of an attempt to explain how these occur. In doing this, it seeks not to deny the sensitivity and skill of most current practitioners, and the excellent work that abounds in the child/youth welfare fields. Rather, the paper seeks to address those areas of practice which are still of concern, and to call for a change of attitude where needed.

This article is a follow-up of a paper describing a proposed ‘best practice’ model for a home visiting service for first-time parents (Drielsma, 1998). The results of three years implementation and evaluation of a pilot of that model in a geographically isolated semi-metropolitan high growth area on the Central Coast, NSW are presented and discussed. The service uses paid professionals within the context of a ‘Family Centre’ with a volunteer network to offer ongoing home visiting support to first-time parents who are facing social and geographical isolation and who have few supports and resources to meet their needs. Importantly, the service has relied on close collaboration with child health services and a partnership with other community agencies and the local community itself. The external evaluation used a mix of Action Research and quantitative tools. This showed that the pilot model effectively engaged ‘high-risk’ families in a non-stigmatising way. Further, these families were networked to an array of other mainstream child health and family support services. The essence of this model was described through an Action Profiling process and this correlated closely with the model's structural parameters of operation.

This paper explores the recent emphasis on family reunification as an intervention strategy with ‘high-risk’ families whose children have been placed in the care of the State for reasons of significant abuse and/or neglect. It considers some of the dominant ideas and ideologies around reunification as an intervention strategy and reflects on the many layers of complexity involved in seeking to reconnect children and families under circumstances of risk Finally, it considers the ‘systemic factors’ that compound the inherent difficulties involved in returning children to the care of their parents and offers some practice strategies aimed at recognising and minimising those risks and maximising the likelihood of a successful and safe outcome.

Using a state-wide sample of 122 school counsellors (52 males and 70 females) in Queensland, Australia, factors which influenced their decision not to report child sexual abuse were examined. These factors were a lack of evidence; lack of confidence in the authorities to accurately evaluate or protect sexually abused children; adverse effects on the family's social standing in the community; potential to break up the family; and the fear of breaking counsellor-client confidentiality. Further, school counsellors were not likely to report all cases of child sexual abuse when they suspected it, thus confirming the popular belief that child sexual abuse is under-reported by them.

Family violence is a serious and widespread issue in our community. Violence between adults within the same family is a risk factor encountered by child protection workers at all points of child protection intervention. Accurately measuring the extent of family violence within the general community and within families notified to child protection is difficult, but we do know that it is an increasing aspect of the workload of Child Protection workers. The Department of Human Services Child Protection program tracks the number and types of characteristics for parents involved with Child Protection according to six categories. These categories are: psychiatric disability, intellectual disability, physical disability, family violence, alcohol abuse and substance abuse. For substantiated cases of child abuse and neglect the percentage of families with family violence noted as a parental characteristic increased from 38 per cent in 1996-97 to 52 per cent in 2000-01 (Department of Human Services 2002). The same data also indicates that for parents for whom family violence was the major parental characteristic recorded over the past five-year period, the co-occurrence of psychiatric disability increased by more than 50 per cent, alcohol abuse increased by 20 per cent, and substance abuse increased by 52 per cent.

Child abuse allegations in the context of parental separation and divorce have long been seen as merely weapons fashioned by angry and vindictive parents involved in separation and divorce wars. They have been disregarded on the basis that they were unlikely to be real.

However recent research from Australia and overseas has shown that this picture is not true. Child abuse in this context is real and it is serious. Moreover the research has shown that the socio-legal system does not serve children caught in this situation at all well.

The Magellan program, a world first experimental program to overcome the problems for these children and their families as they progress through the socio-legal system, was introduced by a consortium of agencies in Victoria recently. This article reports on the program and its outcomes, and considers implications of some of the components of the new program for the various professionals working with this issue.

Domestic violence has been a highlighted concern for some years. This has resulted in governments now providing recurrent funding for a range of domestic violence service provisions. The funding of services has given rise to a significant shift in service delivery, moving from volunteers staffing services to the development of specialised professional expertise in a range of domestic violence service provisions.

A number of years practice experience in the field, together with a review of the literature, leads to the conclusion that pregnancy may be a vulnerable time for some women whose partners choose to use violence. This has grave implications for the short, medium and long term health and welfare of these women and children.

In March 2002 the authors notified all the children living in the Woomera Detention Centre to South Australia's child protection system, in an effort to ensure that the well-being of those children was protected. An investigation was conducted; serious problems at Woomera were identified; and the relevant South Australian Minister asked the Federal Minister for Immigration for ‘new guidelines’ for the centre. Then silence descended.

In this article, the authors detail the reasons for their notifications and outline the events which followed. The Federal Government criticised the report of the investigation by SA child protection workers, and there is no indication of any action taken on it. In explaining the ensuing silence the authors refer to their understanding of the contents of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Federal and South Australian Governments. This memorandum, it is believed, ensures no further information about Woomera will be revealed. Further, the memorandum appears to leave the Federal Government with total responsibility for follow-up action. The South Australian Government seems to have surrendered its responsibility in this regard. Given the lack of action, the authors question whether both levels of government could be in breach of South Australia's Children's Protection Act 1993.

Wanslea Family Services (WFS), a non-government family welfare agency in Perth, has provided foster care placements for the Western Australian Department of Family and Children's Services for many years. Data about these children and their families is held in a comprehensive electronic database that covers the period 1991-1999. This 9-year data set is unique in Western Australia and may be unique nationally.

An analysis of this data indicates no significant variation across the nine year period for age at admission of children to foster care. In contrast, a statistically significant cubic trend was found for length of episode of care indicating that the duration of foster care placements significantly varied across the nine year period. Analyses of gender for both age at admission and length of foster care showed significant differences but only for particular years. In 1995 females were significantly younger than males while in 1998 males were significantly younger than females. Only in 1998 was length of episode of care significant when it was shorter for males than females. Possible explanations for these results are discussed.

Children and young people have too easily been subjected to state-sponsored mistreatment and neglect. One primary reason for the discriminatory and often hostile conduct directed at them by agencies ostensibly established to promote their welfare is that they have been ‘constructed’ as dangerous and ‘antisocial’, or as dependent, incompetent and naïve. A key aim of this article is to promote discussion about the significance of children's and young people's status as a key determinant of policies which routinely override their basic rights. The article argues that attention needs to be given to how child and youth policies can be developed more securely within a justice framework.

I argue that, if we are serious about developing both just policies and ethical relationships with young people, we need to recognise the role played by dominant narratives about young people in shaping policies. Once this is achieved, attention can then be directed towards how those identities might be contested and reconstructed. I offer a number of suggestions for securing ethical treatment of young people which includes respecting them as fully-fledged human beings and citizens. I argue that challenging common-sense understandings of young people as dependent, not fully intellectually or morally competent, etc, can inform policies in ways that secure young people's entitlements as full citizens. In particular one way of challenging popular views about young people is to increase their involvement in the public sphere. The fact that most young people cannot currently claim rights for themselves directly is no reason for denying them. Indeed it is a good reason for securing mechanisms for monitoring those who have children in their care and to intervene to put those rights into effect. I also make a case for embedding young people's rights into an account of obligations that can be used to secure respectful and just conduct on the part of older people who have young people in their care.