Funding to prevent child abuse should be more focussed on supporting the impacted family to break the generational cycle of harm, according to a leading Australian academic.
Professor Leonie Segal, a child maltreatment expert from the University of South Australia, said the current funding model needed to be flipped from working to remove the child from the family to investing in the family.
Professor Segal said if Australian governments provided more support to families involved with child protection services, it would result in better outcomes for children and future generations.
She said there needed to be a change to the funding model, so that funds were directed to families in need before harms and costs escalated.
“The pervasive cycle of intergenerational trauma, where parents struggle to nurture their children because of their own trauma, is the dominant pathway into abuse and mistreatment.”
Professor Segal said these patterns underscored the critical need to better fund programs that focussed on helping families to stay together and prioritise working towards safely reuniting children with their parents, when they’ve been placed in out-of-home-care.
“A child’s right to be with their birth family is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, unless ‘separation is necessary for the best interests of the child’,” she said.
“But understanding what’s best for a child must consider the child’s full-life trajectory, including their future parenting capacity – the driver of intergenerational outcomes.
“In Australia, budget allocations massively favour child removal over intensive support for a birth family. What this means, is that we as a society, spend far more on the consequences of abuse and neglect – unemployment, poor mental health, disability and so on – than disrupting the root cause.”
She said it was a very reactive response to child protection.
“Until we flip the narrative, we will continue to allow the cycle of intergenerational neglect and abuse to continue.”
Prof Segal said only a tiny proportion of the child protection and wider human services budget was allocated to supporting families caught up in intergenerational cycles of child abuse and neglect.
“In 2021-22 just $562 million of Australia’s spend on child protection was allocated to supporting at-risk families, compared with more than 10 times that for out-of-home-care,” she said.
“State and federal governments have it all wrong. Instead of spending more than $28 billion on the consequences of child maltreatment we should be flipping the approach and spending way more than the current $1.5 billion on supporting distressed families before harms and costs escalate.”
