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- August 25, 2013
- NAPCAN
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Great article in the Sydney Morning Herald by Anne Hollonds who is the chief executive of the Benevolent Society.
Last week I found myself reading the harrowing account of a day in the life of a Family and Community Services caseworker in the Herald. I only made it to ”10am” before I had to stop. The memories of my time as a front-line child protection worker came flooding back.
I did that job for four years in the 1980s – and then moved on to work as a child and family counsellor in community health and in non-government organisations, and eventually in the management of these services.
Those early years spent in frontline child protection have left their mark, and I am passionate about promoting the well-being of children and families, especially those most vulnerable because of disadvantage.
Everyone agrees that more needs to be done to protect children at risk of serious harm, but so far in the recent debate in NSW no one has asked: Why are there 60,000 children in our community whose lives are so dangerous at home that they need child protection services to monitor them?
Child Protection Week next week offers us the opportunity to face up to an uncomfortable reality: that we have created a system that relies on sending more and more ambulances to the bottom of the cliff, instead of building a fence at the top of the cliff to keep kids safe. The truth is that there will never be ”enough” child protection workers if we expect them to do all the heavy lifting and we wait until the damage is done before anyone acts.