Discourses about child abuse are usually adult centred. In the research described in this paper young people were asked to give their perspectives on abuse. They described abusive behaviour as that perpetrated by persons who use their power to control those they consider as lesser.

The young people described two forms of abuse. One was feeling let down by those with whom they are in an emotional relationship. The other was feeling discounted because of their age. The children and young people considered the right to negotiate or to have ‘two-way compromise’ as essential to the prevention of abuse. The power to disclose or not to disclose abuse was described as an important issue for children in enabling them to maintain some control over their situation.

The research process and findings highlighted the way in which the institutionalisation of adult power over children as legitimate, excludes children’s knowledge on issues concerning them by preventing their participation in knowledge creating forums, and by discounting their competency as children to contribute.

During recent years a significant change has occurred in child welfare policy in New South Wales as a large component of the government's substitute care program has been, or is in the process of being, shifted away from direct government provision to non-government agencies. Analysis of some aspects of the policy process by which this change has occurred illustrates the complexity of social policy development. In particular this analysis highlights the importance of the ideological and political context of child welfare policy development and the way in which this contributes to contradictions between official policy statements and policy as experienced by the recipients of the implementation of these policies.

Sleep disturbances such as bed refusal and resistance, sleep-onset delay, night waking with crying, and unwanted co-sleeping with parents affect 15% to 25% of families during their infant's first two years. A program is described that involves structured pre-bedtime activities, putting the child into his or her own bed awake at a regular time, and responding to subsequent waking and crying with planned ignoring and minimally-arousing checks when necessary. This programme was demonstrated in four families and shown to resolve infant sleep disturbances to a clinically significant degree and to the satisfaction of the parents.

Most packaged parent education programmes available in Victoria teach some underlying principles about children’s behaviour and offer specific skills or strategies for managing children. Whilst parent education is seen as an important part of a treatment plan for parents who have abused or neglected their children, these parents are rarely at a stage where they can make use of the information or strategies taught in the packaged programmes. Acutely vulnerable parents, who themselves have been hurt as children, must first heal some of their past before being able to learn and use new approaches to parenting. This paper considers the characteristics of acutely vulnerable parents and proposes some approaches that can be employed to assist these parents reach a point where they can respond to parent education and develop new positive ways relating to their children.

With attention focussed on child abuse and measures for child protection in many countries around the world, efforts have been made to understand something of the nature and dimensions that lie behind abuse. Now the time has come to look at domestic violence in its other manifestations - not only parent to child as in child abuse, but also husband to wife or cohabiter to cohabiter. What, however, has been missing from this widening of concerns has been a focus on parental behaviour toward their children which involves the use of physical punishment in child rearing but which may fall short of the legal definition of abuse. This gap is about to be considered with the emergence in Australia of the EPOCH campaign in which Oz Child is to be a leading participant.

Existing research findings indicate that young people from state care backgrounds experience higher rates of substance use and misuse than the general population. This study explored the nature of this relationship via semi-structured, qualitative interviews with four young people who had recently transitioned from state care and three workers in the out-of-home care field, plus a focus group with seven out-of-home care and leaving care workers. The findings suggest that a range of individual, interpersonal and systematic factors contribute to problematic substance use. They include the use of self-medication to address past and present trauma, a lack of meaningful and stable relationships, and state care policies and practices that lead to young people experiencing premature and unplanned exits from state care. Some significant implications for policy and practice are identified.

If you go down to the woods today…

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), the nineteenth-century English poet, wrote about the live murmur of a summer’s day’, presumably referring to bees, birds and other bugs humming around the countryside. A twentieth-century American (whom I believe to be a poet though not all would agree) wrote that The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1963). Nowhere have they changed more than in the English countryside. In 1991, it was the ‘live murmur’ of the summer’s night that was more likely to be heard. Out in fertile rural England the English people have discovered crop circles in their cornfields.

It is good to be in England in (the admittedly all-too-brief) summer, but quiet evenings in cornfields sleeping off the effects of English ales are a thing of the past. These days, find a cornfield and you will find half the media and a sizeable chunk of the English population. In some country areas, they say, it is quieter sitting in the middle of the road because you avoid the crowds. Crop circles in cornfields have seized the imagination of the public.

This article describes one agency’s strategies in developing benchmarks for best practice outcomes in fostering. Workers have used current literature, research and reports to identify optimum outcomes, and have then compared the performance of their own foster care program to these points. Future directions and current needs in research in this area are identified.

This paper combines clinical and research insights to systematically explore the experiences of infants and children through the course of repeated attachment disruptions and loss. It sets out core findings from a phenomenological study of the experience of multiply placed foster children, focussing on the experience of self that children accumulate in their journeys through long term care, as they lose, find and re-form their primary attachments. Findings point to what constitutes ‘good enough’ foster parenting for children with histories of traumatic attachment and loss.

This article presents the argument for the development of a national research agenda for out-of-home care and what is needed to make this agenda work. The need for a commitment to research, adequate funding and access to reliable data, plus the rapid transfer of research findings, into practice, is outlined. It also reports on the outcomes of a research agenda-building workshop sponsored by the National Child and Family Welfare Research Coalition and held in September 2002. This workshop provided an opportunity to generate a list of research question that researchers, service providers and practitioners saw as significant priorities in a national research agenda.

Working from a background in child protective intervention and staff training and development, the authors sought to address two commonly reported deficits in child protection – the lack of a risk management framework and failures in interagency collaboration. This paper reports their approach to locating a risk and safety factor matrix and their evaluation of its use in a series of interagency workshops designed to improve collaboration.

Post-traumatic stress affects both the mental and physical health of individuals, giving rise to various psychological disturbances. The neurological effects of these disturbances are similar across age groups, irrespective of race or culture. However, the perception of psychological disturbances differs from culture to culture depending on issues such as the stigma that attaches to mental illness and the ability or willingness to seek assistance. While much research has been undertaken on the impact of trauma on both adults and children, research to explore the effect of trauma on people in the context of their various cultures, especially people of refugee background, remains at an early stage. Mental health professionals working with refugees encounter various challenges. They range from dealing with resistance by individuals to the notion of counselling itself, to barriers such as the perceived stigma that prevents some individuals from acknowledging mental health problems. Other challenges in providing mental health services in such cases are contributed to by government policies and the limited resources available. All this exacerbates the mental health of traumatised parents and caregivers, and has a ripple effect on their children, who exhibit the effects of trauma in their own ways. This paper aims to highlight and discuss these issues through the presentation of two case studies, suggest a workable recovery model, possible ways to deal with the challenges, and to propose recommendations for working with non-Western children and their families.

Developmental trauma is a term that describes the impact of adverse childhood experiences that results in the loss of capacity to integrate sensory, emotional, cognitive and relational information into cohesive, trusting and safe lived experiences. Infants’ and children's brain, nervous systems and neural development are vulnerable to these traumas. Trauma is stored in the implicit memory and is manifest through body gestures, breath, body behaviours, sensory perceptions, emotions and thoughts. Play therapy, sand tray therapy and creative arts therapy are all offered as interventions for childhood trauma. Work at the Clay Field®, is a sensorimotor art therapy and differs from play, sand and visual arts therapy as it focuses on haptic perception, the use of the hands and touch as a tool of perception. Touch is one of the most fundamental human experiences and is the basis of secure attachment, linked to our earliest body memories. Work at the Clay Field® is grounded in theories of developmental psychology, object relations, sensorimotor therapy and haptic perception. Haptic object relations as skin sense, vestibular sense of balance and depth sense are presented as the underpinning principles of Work at the Clay Field®. Children from the age of 2 years old onwards are enabled through work at the Clay Field to satiate developmental needs, in particular those from the preverbal age of early infancy. They also can complete trauma-related fragmented or incomplete action cycles through safe touch and restore their developmental path.

The research aim was to discover the circumstances, if any, in which contact with the parent who had abused them, could help survivors of intrafamilial child sexual abuse (ICSA) to recover from the inherent relational trauma. Thirty-five (31 female and 4 male) participants were recruited from across Australia and New Zealand to speak about their experience of post-abuse contact. The research methodology was primarily qualitative, and analysed in a contextual framework. In the Pre-Contact stage, themes such as the need for empowerment versus the fear of the response, linked to motivations for and against contact. Emotional reactions, and issues of acknowledgment and apology were core themes in the Contact stage. Post-contact themes related to evaluation of the overall experience. The majority of participants believed that their contact experience had helped more than hindered their recovery. Participants articulated the need for more public education about the complexity of ICSA, more options for dealing with the crime, and access to non-judgmental professional help for all the family at disclosure. The emergent themes provide a valuable guide for future research, policy and practice and perhaps most importantly, insight into the needs of victims and their recovery processes.

Although the new family law legislation, the Family Law (Shared Parental Responsibility) Amendment Act of 2006, seeks to implement the notion of ongoing and collaborative parenting of children following parental partnership breakdown, separation and divorce, institutional obstacles still prevent the realisation of this policy. The question then arises: can such a model of separation and divorce be achieved? This question is examined through a discussion of a series of studies undertaken by a Monash University research team investigating parents' involvement in their children's schooling following parental separation and divorce. The research, building on a number of small studies carried out in Western Australia, looked at parents' and teachers' views of schools' ability to relate to separated and divorced parents and the wider difficulty of schools managing this family form.

Child protection is one of the most difficult fields for social welfare professionals to work within. Being an enabler on one hand and an agent of social control on the other, can create a dichotomy that leaves practitioners feeling like they need a different set of skills to do each component. Maybe a strengths approach framework can provide the link between the two. A strengths approach is greater than a set of strengths-based tools. It is a way of conceptualising the organisation and delivery of child protection services. This article expresses the current views of a practitioner with 37 years experience in the child and family welfare field.

In Australia, it is commonly reported that rates of child protection notifications have increased over time. More and more children in any given year are subject to a child protection notification. On the whole, these conclusions have been based on cross-sectional notification counts or rates recorded in a given year (e.g. AIHW 2009). Although useful, such analyses are limited in that they do not account for the fact that child protection incidents are unevenly distributed across individual cases. Crosssectional analyses also do not indicate the incidence of notifications within a given cohort of children.

In this paper, we summarise the longitudinal and comparative analysis of data relating to children born in 1991, 1998 and 2002. The results highlight the increasingly early involvement of child protection systems in children's lives, higher annual incidence rates, as well as increasingly steep cumulative involvement curves for cohorts tracked from their year of birth. The implications of these findings for mandatory reporting policies are discussed.

Becoming a parent and mother is ‘the irreversible crossing of the boundary from being someone's (daughter) to becoming someone's mother’ (Schmidt Neven 1996) and what we know of this transition for adopted women is still primarily anecdotal. Many women adopted during and after the 1970s in Victoria are still in the parenting life stage, and this paper describes the experiences of three of them. The women participated in qualitative, in-depth interviews that were part of a Master of Social Work research study

This article primarily takes a life course approach in eliciting themes of normative family experiences, delay of identity consolidation until the time of childbearing, the impact of search, reunion and divided loyalties, and the negotiation of multiple family systems (adoptive, in-law and birth). The management of these complex phenomena have demanded a high level of skill and effort by these women as they cope with their own emotional reactions, continue to be responsive mothers and assist their children and partners to negotiate new, extended, family relationships.

The study draws attention to and provides insight for practitioners in this hidden area of welfare and indicates the need for further research.

In Australia the number of children removed from birth parents and admitted to State care, i.e. foster care, kinship care, other home-based care, group homes or residential care, continues to rise. Because the number of foster carers (the preferred care option after kinship care) has fallen and the recruitment of new carers has become more difficult, this rise in admissions to care is a critical issue. This paper explores those factors that drive the increase in the number of children that are taken into State care and makes suggestions about how this trend might be reversed. New South Wales is used as the example for this purpose although the points made are applicable in other States and Territories.

The South Australian foster care system is plagued by problems of both supply and demand. Decreases in the availability of residential care and suitably trained foster carers has led to a shortage of placements to meet current demand. At the same time, increased selectivity in the intake of children into care has led to an over-concentration of more challenging children who either cannot be placed in foster care, or are being placed with the support of significantly higher loadings or payments. In this paper, it is argued that these problems can be understood conceptually using basic micro-economic principles, namely: demand-supply curve analysis, separation of market segments, and supply elasticity. It is argued that the supply of placements has become increasingly price-inelastic due to the nature of demand (the type of child), and that increasing short-term payment rates only serves to magnify the problem by artificially maintaining unsuitable care arrangements. Alternative solutions, such as the introduction of training and professional foster carers, are discussed.