All children have the right to have sexuality education in order to enhance their self-understanding, their developing maturity and their self-concept. In the past, parents and some schools have provided this, usually as formal school programs. However, many children receive sexuality education informally from other sources such as peers, television, magazines and books. The technology available in the information age provides yet another source. The Internet has a growing number of sites specifically for sexuality education for children and pre-schoolers. Here, a selection of relevant sites is identified and presented for their developmental appropriateness. The opportunities these promote are almost limitless for children's enhanced personal understanding and knowledge-base upon which further development will occur in their teenage years and beyond.

Therapeutic Residential Care (TRC) has attracted increasing interest in Australia, as a specialised out-of-home care option for children with complex needs. Extending beyond the limitations of traditional residential programmes, TRC aims to address the impact of trauma and promote positive development and wellbeing. The Lighthouse Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation based in Melbourne, providing a long-term programme of TRC to young people aged 15 to 22 at intake. The organisation has developed an attachment and trauma-informed therapeutic community approach, embodied in the Therapeutic Family Model of Care. This discussion paper explores how the therapeutic community approach taken by Lighthouse provides a different experience of the cultural ‘sites’ in which early traumatic experiences occur – including the home environment, experiences of family, and the wider community. In doing so, we propose that an important dimension of TRC is the capacity to challenge traumatic relational blueprints of abuse and neglect. This, in turn, supports children to form and sustain positive and reciprocal relationships, and to live inter-dependently in the community.

It is widely accepted that culture is a contextual factor that can affect mother–infant attachment. Cultural beliefs are translated into child-rearing patterns that influence maternal responsiveness to infant attachment behaviours and could thus affect sensitive caregiving that lies at the heart of secure attachment. This article reports on the findings of a study that explored the influence of culture on maternal caregiving behaviours in the multi-cultural South African context. Data were collected by means of semi-structured interviews conducted with participants from three study samples to ascertain their perceptions of socio-cultural influences on attachment. Two samples consisted of mothers and mental health professionals, respectively, who represented different South African cultures (Xhosa, Sotho, Zulu, Coloured, Indian and White). The third sample consisted of experts in the field of attachment. The research findings indicate that culture could influence maternal caregiving behaviours. Although all the participants valued good caregiving, some maternal responses to infant attachment behaviours varied among participants from different cultures. The research emphasises the importance of considering local contexts in understanding attachment and maternal sensitivity.

The focus of this article is young women aged 16–17 years who, while in State care in New South Wales gave birth, and from whom the child was then removed by the same department that is responsible for the mother's care. This topic is rarely examined due to two constraints. One is the lack of available data about the incidence of events of this kind. The second is the confidentiality provision in the New South Wales Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998 which defines the Children's Court as a closed court and prohibits the reporting of identifiable case information.

As a consequence much of this article is based on the authors' direct observation of cases involving young women of this age that they have encountered while undertaking professional duties in the Children's Court. The article also explores the further issue of the adoption of children removed from mothers who are still in State care.

Because of the lack of data this article can be classified as an opinion piece which attempts to raise awareness about an important care issue. The article has a New South Wales focus but the authors expect that the same concerns are echoed in other Australian states and territories.

This study examines the use of section 106A of the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998 in the New South Wales in Children's Court. Section 106A was inserted into the Act by way of an amendment in November 2006. This amendment establishes that if a child has previously been removed from parental care and not restored to the parents, then that is prima facie evidence that any subsequent child born to these parents is in need of care and protection and can be subject to removal. The parents must then rebut this evidence if they are to recover or retain custody of the new born child. To date, no data exists about the use of this section of the Act, hence this study. The only significant finding was that if section 106A was cited in Court documents, then restoration of a child to family is less likely. The analysis did not show any significant relationship between Aboriginality and any of the other variables in the study.

This paper presents the case study of a family which was supported by a Victorian foster care agency over a two-year period whilst both parents were imprisoned. The article aims to raise awareness amongst practitioners across a range of fie Ids of practice about the issues faced by the children of prisoners, and to document effective and collaborative practices which enable the impact of parental incarceration to be managed and minimised for the children involved. The paper is based on data gathered for a study examining the impact of maternal incarceration on young people conducted by one of the authors. Through focusing on one family, the paper discusses the increasing phenomenon of mothers in prison and the challenges this presents both to their families and to practitioners. The paper concludes by reflecting on the process and suggests that collaborative work with the families of prisoners requires not just good intentions but resources, commitment from all parties, and mutually respectful relationships.

Child protection legislation in every Australian state and territory prohibits the disclosure of the identity of a person who acts as a mandatory reporter. There is also provision in most child protection legislation that prevents the naming of children and families in protection cases. It is argued that disclosure is not in the interests of the child, the family or the general public. Children's Court proceedings in most states and territories in Australia are closed to the public so that, unlike in most other jurisdictions, interested parties are not able to observe the proceedings. Child protection authorities also have considerable power to collect information about children and families from many sources. This power to obtain information is compounded by legislation which removes confidentiality provisions from professional codes of ethics. Furthermore, the rules of evidence do not ordinarily apply in the Children's Court. This article uses New South Wales as the exemplar state and raises questions about all of these issues.

In the light of Dave Vicary's review of 40 years of publications addressing out-of-home care (OOHC) issues and current concerns about both the systemic context of child protection and the comparatively narrow range of options for the delivery of care in the sector, a range of people from Australia and beyond were asked for their responses to the question: Where do you see OOHC going in the next 40 years and what do you think our priorities need to be?

For me, wearing a possum skin cloak is as foreign an idea as it is to non-indigenous Australians. But I know, from stories told by Elders and old photos, that possum skin cloaks are part of my heritage as a Koorie person. We wore them inside-out – with the warm fur on our skin during the cold winter days and nights. And that was how we kept warm for over 40,000 years.

For 40 years, Children Australia (and previous incarnations) has provided an enormously valuable space for research, practice and policy to delineate challenges, successes and innovation on issues pertaining to the wellbeing and welfare of children and their families. Articles published in the Journal during this period have been incredibly influential and have added to our collective knowledge of children, young people and their families. Nowhere has this been more evident than the area of out-of-home care (OOHC). This paper will explore and reflect on some of the issues that have been articulated in papers published in the journal over the last 40 years – with a specific focus on Australian Kinship, Foster, Residential and Therapeutic Residential Care. Past issues that are still presenting current challenges will be described and opportunities for change and future improvement identified.

In June 2010 the Secretary of State for Education in England asked Professor Eileen Munro, Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics, to conduct an independent review of child protection in England. As Professor Munro says in her third and final report, she: ‘sets out recommendations that taken together, will help to reform the child protection system from being over bureaucratised and concerned with compliance to one that keeps a focus on children, checking whether they are being effectively helped, and adapting when problems are identified.’ This article, which is a selective review of the final report, firstly cites the principles of an effective child protection system and then the principles to guide ‘risk-sensible’ decision-making as put forward in the report. It concludes with the 15 major recommendations of the Munro report and makes some comment and comparisons with recent Australian state- and territory-based reviews of child protection services.

In response to concerns within the Children’s Welfare Association of Victoria (CWAV) about the difficulty of recruiting foster parents, a study of the recruitment process experienced by Victorian inquirers was conducted. The literature consistently reports a low rate of conversion of inquirers into foster carers. This study was concerned with finding out the cause of this low rate, what happens to the inquirers after making a call and why they decide to continue or not continue with foster care?

Telephone interviews were conducted with 91 inquirers about their experience of the recruitment process. Only 4 per cent of these inquirers had become carers. The rest were split evenly between those who decided not to continue because of personal circumstances, and those who were discouraged in some way by the response to their contact received from the allocated agency. This result was surprising and disappointing, and we suggest that these callers may be a more valuable resource than agencies suspect. Ways of giving these callers more effective follow up, while recognising constraints on time and resources experienced by workers in this field, are needed to take full advantage of the opportunity to recruit the potential carers among them.

The neurological, psychological, emotional and social effects of abuse do not stop when the actual abuse has stopped. These affects are likely to be significant, pervasive, and long-lasting. Children who have experienced abuse at the hands of their parents tend to mistrust both their parents as well as subsequent carers who are making efforts to keep them safe. They avoid eye contact, comforting touch, reciprocal activities and communications that might facilitate a sense of safety and the development of a secure attachment. Those caring for such children need to find ways to patiently and gently help these children to begin to experience relaxed, reciprocal interactions with them along with the more intense experiences of comfort and joy.

Finally, when children have begun to trust their carers, but are returned to those who previously abused them, only to be abused again, they are at high risk to have even greater difficulty learning to trust. These more severe symptoms secondary to repeated trauma then cause their subsequent carers much greater challenges in helping them to begin to trust once again. This places the carers at risk for developing blocked care which further compromises the child's psychological development.

The Sanctuary Model (Sanctuary) is a trauma-informed model of care for human services. The model is made up of tools, norms and theoretical underpinnings that form the basis of building safety and promoting recovery from adversity within the context of communities. Sanctuary focuses on healing those who have experienced trauma, by being purposeful and deliberate about the well-being of the system as a whole, including the client, staff, the organisation and more broadly the community. Churches of Christ Care Pathways have been implementing this model within the Australian out-of-home care context including Foster and Kinship Care, Intensive Foster Care, Residential, Supported Independent Living and Intervention Services for the past three years. This article provides a brief description of components of the model, including the SELF model, Community Meetings, Safety Plans, Psycho-Educational Group Work, Self Care Plans, Red Flag Meetings and Team Meetings; detailing practice examples from its use within an Australian context. This article aims to make the link between the model and practice.

Jean Jacques Rousseau is arguably the grandfather of the modern discussion amongst educational theorists regarding the rights of the child. His own childhood was by contemporary standards a disaster and that of his own children even more so; nevertheless Rousseau laid down a programme for the education of one fictional male child, Emile. The proposal was radical in as much as it implied a child-centred focus for learning rather than a content-centered approach associated with the classical and mediaeval curriculum. Writing just before the dawn of modern democratic practices and two centuries before conventions of human rights, this romantic rogue reformer, was midwife to the tradition in education which focusses on the child. The discussion of this paper emerges from that tradition.

The busy clinical practitioner, while being encouraged to innovate and formally evaluate his or her work, has less time than ever before to do either.

The Mums' and Dads' Project represented a modest attempt to implement a short-term parent education project in adult mental health and review it in the style of practice-research. A number of qualitative methods were employed to research the Project conducted in the Mid West Area Mental Health Service exploring consumer satisfaction and parents' perspectives of their children's needs.

Consumers attended the sessions readily, demonstrating knowledge of child development and a willingness to confront the difficult issue of informing children about mental illness. They reiterated how much they appreciated meeting other parents with a mental illness.

Service delivery to parents with a mental illness and their children deserves dedicated funding if their needs are to be addressed and programs carefully evaluated.

Despite the claims of statutory child protection authorities to be ‘child-centred’, the language used to record responses to child abuse and neglect allegations still focuses heavily upon parental actions. In most Australian states, child protection records perpetuate an emphasis on how harm was caused and by whom. This paper illustrates that parental blame – theoretically a concept of the past – is alive and well within child protection recording systems, and raises the implications of this for the development of policy frameworks and service delivery. It is argued that recent moves by some states towards differential responses actually perpetuate a focus on the parent to the detriment of a focus on the child’s needs. A better way of conceptualising the outcomes of child protection assessments – focusing on a child’s protective needs – is suggested.

Child abuse and neglect is a preventable public health issue, yet a complex global phenomenon with considerable adverse impacts on children, families, health and social services, as well as the Australian community. Despite the widespread adverse impact of child abuse and neglect, the research in this field within Australian child welfare systems is relatively scarce. What is needed is to understand the various challenges, barriers and limitations that face child abuse and neglect researchers and impede methodologically rigorous research within child welfare systems in Australia. This paper provides a brief overview of the key methodological limitations, barriers and challenges, as well as the strengths of the research methods used in studying child abuse and neglect. This paper also explores the potential gains from adopting a national translational research framework. Innovative translation of research and knowledge into effective care system responses and evidence-based practices for children remains a pressing issue. Further advances in Australian research and the evidence base will require substantial investment in research and evaluation activities, with a new emphasis on translational research and active collaboration between researchers and practitioners. Finally, this paper concludes with key recommendations and directions for future Australian-based research with the ultimate goal of improving practices and policies.

The Aboriginal family unit has seen many changes since European invasion. Like families all over the world, the Aboriginal family is the place where social behaviour is constructed, interpreted and transmitted from one generation to another. This is a process which has continued since the invasion of white man. Aboriginal people see the family as a place of nurturing, with the ability to provide and teach. When one or both of these factors is not functioning adequately, a family breakdown can occur.

This article (the first of a series of three) reviews the research and literature on the connections between non-biological care (adoption, permanent care, foster care and residential care) and mental health and relates this to the policy context in Victoria.

The implications of the over-representation of children who have experienced non-biological care in a mental health setting are explored.