A visit to Australia (February 12-16, 1979) by Dr. Masamba ma Mpolo, Secretary of the Office of Family Education, World Council of Churches, Geneva, has stimulated great interest in the Family Power: Social Change project, which is part of the family ministries programme of the World Council of Churches.

The project is rooted in insights I find exciting — the belief that families need not just succumb to external pressures and become victims of outside forces; they need not wait for commercial interests, television and radio, newspapers and magazines, films and advertisements, patronizing and matronizing social service bodies to tell them what to do, what to think, what to buy, what value systems to uphold, what goals for living to accept. They can become more self-reliant, more liberated, less other directed, be makers of history. Fatalistic, hand-wringing despair can be replaced by courageous grappling with issues, in a spirit of hope. In line with the Old Testament prophets, families can both denounce evil elements involving injustice and manipulation, and can announce new possibilities for a more truly human society (see Paulo Freire, Cultural Action for Freedom, Penguin).

The United Nations has called on the Governments of the world to increase budgetry provisions for programs benefiting children or to revise present priorities in order to consolidate and build on the results of the International Year of the Child, which officially finishes at the end of this month.

Australian Representative, Mr H.D. Anderson, at the United Nations thirty fourth General Assembly, said during the IYC debate: “IYC has surpassed all expectations reaching across national boundaries.

“Australia has sought to continue action initiated in the Year by funding projects from the normal Budget rather than a special allocation and sees considerable value in proposals for the exchange of child-related research between developed and developing countries and periodic reporting on national activities after IYC.

This paper will discuss some of the issues arising from the South Australian experience in the resettlement of Indo-Chinese refugee children. The main emphasis of this paper will be on the issue of service delivery to these refugee children and the problems arising from their adjustment to a new and foreign environment.

In this composite case study, the names and some details have been altered to protect the innocent, and the guilty.

Sue was nineteen years old and three months pregnant when she came into contact with a hospital. She had successfully concealed the pregnancy and claimed that she had only just realised her predicament. Referred to the social worker, by the time she got around to saying that she wanted an abortion it was too late. Adoption was explored, and she finally agreed, only to later change her mind. As the weeks went by, Sue, and her boyfriend, made no preparations for the birth, and neither of them talked about the expected child with any pleasure. The social worker discovered that both Sue and her boyfriend came from deprived backgrounds. Sue had been beaten and sexually assaulted by her father and was eventually made a State Ward after her father had died and her mother had claimed she was uncontrollable. Her boyfriend had had a history of psychiatric treatment and a criminal record for petty offences.

We all know — or think we know — that boys behave differently from girls, even if our analysis progresses no further than some tautologous recognition that boys are more ‘boyish’. We are also inclined to think that the ‘problem’ child will grow out of his difficulties, but that so far as socially disruptive behaviour is concerned, boys, on the whole, are rather more seriously problematic than girls. Generalized notions of this sort contain elements of both truth and fiction which cannot properly be appreciated unless sex differences in behaviour shown by young children are analysed and placed in perspective. I hope here to consider how the disordered behaviour of boys generally differs from that of girls and to draw attention to some of the implications of this for their adulthood and for the social worker.

Australians are being bombarded day after day with a series of words and expressions which fortunately — or perhaps unfortunately — are becoming more and more familiar to the ear of Mr Average: ‘ethnic’, ‘multicultural’, ‘multilingual’, ‘social integration’, ‘cultural shock’, ‘cultural identity’, ‘social interaction’, just to mention a few of them. Fortunately, because it indicates that it is being accepted in an increasingly natural way the fact that the migrant phenomenon is a dignified social reality which has and will continue to have a leading role in the shaping of the present and future structure of Australia politically, economically and culturally. The general, although still slow, acceptance of this basic truth represents a healthy sign and an indication that our society appears to be moving in the right direction.

Social policy may be defined in a general sense as the conscious process by which members of a society, or some large sub-section of a society, collectively seek enduring solutions to the problems that affect them. Social policy refers particularly, but not only, to the actions of governments and to the activities of large organisations and institutions. It is now generally accepted that the concerns of social policy have at least to do with questions of social justice, equity and environmental protection, although there is much debate about specific application of these values or of the lower order values that might be derived from them

An extensive literature on social policy now exists. This literature deals with the principles or philosophy underlying the process of formal policy making, the development and current extent of policies in selected nations or in relation to specific population groups or social problems and also deals in a normative way with the actual activities to be undertaken in the formulation and implementation of social policies.

Under the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia, adoption is not a matter on which the Commonwealth has power to legislate. Accordingly, each State and Territory has its own legislation which is administered by its social welfare department.

The States have co-operated to draft “uniform” legislation, and during the period 1964-1970, new legislation was enacted in all States and Territories. A major aim of the uniform Acts was to curtail the practice of private, or independent, adoptions, where the child was placed in the care of a person with a view to his adoption, without any prior approval of the placement by a government department or an approved private adoption agency.

Anniversaries provide a convenient time to stop and look back on the event they commemorate, a time to take stock of what has been achieved and assess what remains to be done. November 20, 1979, will mark the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Child. This year – the International Year of the Child – is particularly suited to this type of instrospection. IYC has put the spotlight on the situation of children all over the world and provided an impetus for child-related research. Drawing upon some of the statistics available, let us measure the rights the United Nations affirmed for children 20 years ago against the reality of their lives today.

The subject of parents and children is so immense and so much discussed that it takes a certain effrontery to write yet another article on it. I do, however, have a slightly original slant in that I am not concerned so much with how parents affect their children, but with the effects that children have on their parents.

Practically everybody has strong impressions of their own parents, even if they are not parents themselves, so that everyone has some kind of experience of parent child relationships. Sometimes this experience leads to understanding and insight: sometimes it leads to distortion and bias. In order to move away from the sort of discussion that is either an exchange, or a confrontation of various people's experiences, I propose to use two different approaches. The first will try to elucidate the structure of the dominant contemporary mode of parents-children relationships. The second will examine alternative ways of viewing parent-child relationships.

The Project is based on a project conducted in Britain, where children in care were invited by the National Children's Bureau in London to attend a one day conference in 1975 to talk about matters of special concern to them. A group of children who attended the conference eventually published a book called “Who Cares? Young People in Care Speak Out” which reported on residential care as the children saw it. This book is locally available, and prompted the idea that a similar project might be carried out in New South Wales during the International Year of the Child. Information was sought and readily obtained from the National Children's Bureau in London about the “Who Cares” project.

This paper traces the development of Parents Anonymous in Australia. It was found that it was not possible to simply transfer the American system into the Australian context.

The major feature of the Australian PA is the highly successful telephone and home visiting service. In contrast, the groups have been successful for only short periods and in only few cases.

The reasons for these differences are described with reference to

(i) the wider social context of both government and public awareness of child abuse.

(ii) the changing nature of the interaction between professionals and members, and the need to distinguish between “deprofessionalisation” and “laissez-faire”.

(iii) the changing nature of the distinction between volunteers and members and the developing awareness of the symbiotic nature of giving and receiving help.

In two recent articles in this journal, a behavioural approach to childhood problems is discussed in the context of natural family situations (Griffin 1978, Herbert and O'Driscoll 1978). This paper extends the discussion to Residential Home settings, and can usefully be read in conjunction with the two earlier articles. It is based on our experience of implementing behavioural programmes of assessment and treatment with individual children living in the type of Residential Home that is administered by Social Services Departments in Britain, which I am told are very comparable to similar establishments in Australia. These Homes care for between 6 and 50 or more children, ranging in age from a few days to 18 years. The problems we have treated in such settings include nocturnal and diurnal enuresis, encopresis, self-care deficits in the retarded, and various forms of conduct disorder. The efficacy of this treatment is reported elsewhere (e.g. Jehu et al 1977), and the present discussion is restricted to its feasibility. Generally speaking, it appears to be a practicable and acceptable approach for the staff and children concerned, but inevitably there are certain obstacles and limitations which are outlined below. This concentration on sources of difficulty rather than strength, should not lead to an undue emphasis on the problems likely to be encountered or to any implication that these are insurmountable.

The Parent Education and Assistance Project (PEAP) is a pilot programme aiming to develop and evaluate a range of services for single parent families with pre-school children within Fremantle, Western Australia.

The Project is funded by the Office of Child Care, Department of Social Security under their “Alternatives to Residential Care for Children” programme, and is sponsored by the Western Australian Department for Community Welfare. The overriding goal of the Project is to support and strengthen vulnerable parent-child relationships with the aim of preventing the necessity for substitute care of the children.