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Children are being removed because child protection workers cannot tell the difference between cultural norms and emotional abuse. So inadequate in cross-cultural understandings are many child protection workers that they see exclusively from the cultural lens of Anglo-Western settings. This is what the manager of foster care agency, Yorganop, Virginia Dingo, told the Secretariat of the National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care national conference – Family Matters – Kids Safe in Culture, not in Care – in Perth, last Friday.
Ms Dingo’s allegations followed whistle-blower allegations along the same lines by former NSW child protection worker, Debra Swan. Ms Dingo told the forum that the rising numbers of children being removed from their families are in part due to misunderstandings of how Aboriginal people live.
“The Department describes children who have been emotionally abused as presenting as very shy, fearful or afraid of doing something wrong.”
“I know a lot of Black children (that are shy) and it is not because they have been emotionally abused.”
“The Department also describes emotional abuse as children showing extremes in behaviour, who are often anxious or distressed, feel worthless about life and themselves and have delayed emotional development.”
“It is often the result of years of racial discrimination and bullying.”
“Child Protection workers need to delve deeper before they take our children away,” said Ms Dingo.
“It is a mammoth failure in Government policy.”
Former NSW Department for Families and Communities child protection worker, Ms Swan, said that she has seen “the biases, the discrimination, the prejudices, the drive to assimilate Aboriginal people.”
“Towards the end of my time there, my eyes opened up to them and especially after I left I realised how they assimilate us, the Aboriginal workers.”
“The Department may say it has cultural education of its staff but that is not true. What they really have is an ulterior white picket fence vision for everyone. They disregard the fact that Aboriginal cultures are not about white picket fences. They disregard our definition of family. We are not into nuclear families with mum and dad alone at the top. In Aboriginal families, there is the whole village – there is the mum and dad but also the aunties and uncles, the grannies and granddads.”
A Western Australian Aboriginal child protection worker said, “The Department is about their line, and their line is about White workers making all the calls. We, as Black workers are only in there to make up the numbers on the book, to cover their backs that there is equality, but there is not. Child Protection is racist, because it is all assimilation and doing as they say, you speak up as a worker and you’re out of line,” said Ms Swan.
“Why are kids being removed at record rates? It’s not because of neglect, it’s not because of a lack of love, it’s because they are seen as not assimilating.”
I have heard these stories not just from Ms Swan and Ms Dingo but from far too many in every part of this continent I have been to.
Ms Dingo said that “children are being reported as neglected because they were playing on the street without shoes, sleeping on mattresses on the floor, sharing a bedroom with other siblings, living in messy homes or because they had head lice.”
“This is not neglect and not reason enough to be reported.”
“We have heard stories of children being removed from their families because they were being cared for by relatives or there was no food in their parents’ home.” Ms Dingo said that child protection workers did not appreciate the Aboriginal context of “multiple carers”.
Ms Dingo said that child protection workers should allow workers with cultural experience to “apply a cultural lens”.
“Aunties are also the child’s mother and grandmothers play an integral role as providers and teachers of culture and law. So while there may not be food in the child’s mother’s home there will be down the road at an Auntie’s or Nana’s.”
But the Departments of Child Protection and Family Services reject the claims and stated that they consult Aboriginal staff. Well, Ms Swan was once one of the staff. The Departments stated that they “never take children away from their homes unless they are at risk of significant harm.” We are now expected to believe 14,000 Aboriginal children were “at risk of significant harm.”
Ms Swan said, “They have lower thresholds of value judgments when judging our people.”
My foster children were removed from me after I had had them for four and a half and two years- from their births. The Department for Child Protection in WA had never given me any support in the four and a half years even saying that I was “like the good kid on the block”, “not needing any visits or support” because I always just did everything that was required. I was very dedicated to their care and loved them dearly- I had arranged surgery for my little foster daughter and stayed with her in the hospital when she had her tonsils removed, adenoids removed and grommets put in both ears- I received no help from the Department other than the permission to have it done. I enrolled my little girl into a private Catholic School which she had attended for almost a year when they were taken from me – I paid the school fees myself because I believed this was the best school to send her to. I had weaned my little boy off heroin to which he was addicted to at birth. I hardly put him down for the first four months of his life, usually having to give him Morphine and feeding him second hourly. I did everything in my power to give the children the best possible life I could. They were never sick, extremely happy and settled and very attached to me and my four grown up children. They were very traumatised when they were removed from us because they believed that we were our family. The Department lied to me about taking the children saying that they thought I needed a break after having the children for four and a half years. They picked them up from my house on 30th September 2011 and never brought them back My nightmare with DCP .started by me being called to a “Signs of Safety”meeting in which they accused me of having a home which “smells as though rodents live in it”. Further criticisms included that I was “mentally unstable, inconsistent, untruthful, unable to absorb information, unable to take responsibility for my own parenting, unable to take responsibility for my own learning, and too much of a permissive parent” (I had never been observed interacting with the children). Our case worker had only ever visited twice in four and a half years and those visits were only to deliver presents from family. The children were not returned to their partents (one was deceased and one was unable to be located-she had had a very long history of drug use. The children were returned to extended family because, as I was told by the auntie who was apparently to be their new carer,, she had promised her brother “on his death bed” that she would “get his children back.” The children’s biological family had shown no interest in rearing the children prior to this time. As a foster carer I have no rights, no right apparently, to ever see them again or even know how they are. Foster carers are treated through a prism of suspicion from the moment they take children into care, in my experience. We go through rigorous assessment and training over many many weeks in order to qualify as foster carers and have to have a working with children card and have no criminal record. These things count for nothing, however, if a case worker decides what should happen with certain children. I have been so bereaved for the 2 and a half years since the children were removed from me; I haven’t been able to work-( I gave up my very good job as a Registered Nurse at the suggestion of a DCP worker when the second little child came into my care), I haven’t been able to socialise with anyone- I have become a recluse in my own home- I can barely function on a day to day basis and suffer terrible nightmares The worst consequence of this whole scenario however, is my fear for these little darlings- I promised them that I would always be “there for them” and they believed that. They were swiftly. cruelly and ruthlessly removed from my care and I have to wonder if there was a monetary incentive behind it- why else would a case worker do this? I believe almost everything Child Protection case workers do is purely of a perfunctionary nature. They don’t understand families, they don’t care about the long term effect their decisions are going to have on children, and they certainly don’t care about the devastation felt by all “family members” involved.