The first section of the paper makes some observations about young people, crime and the police, and the particular vulnerability of Aboriginal youth coming to the attention of the police. Two issues, the maintenance of public order and juvenile offending, provide the framework for the discussion here. The second section looks at the nexus between the pre-trial conference - a recent innovation in the Children's Court in Perth - police prosecutors, and Aboriginal youth.

The Lighthouse Foundation provides long-term accommodation to young people aged 15–25 at risk of homelessness, through a therapeutic model of care. This paper will explore its application to young people with histories in the out-of-home care system and those who are leaving care, by focusing on a four-stage process of recovery and the unique experiences it raises for this population based on their history. Drawing on themes identified through our practice with vulnerable young people, it is proposed that key elements of the programme and process hold particular relevance to the long-term recovery of this population, including the provision of stable and consistent therapeutic residential workers, an integrated care team, and the capacity to work with the young person beyond his or her eighteenth birthday. (Please note, no specific examples of young people are provided, rather the article will present observed themes at the various stages of the Therapeutic Family Model of Care.)

This is the second of three articles dealing with the co-ordination of services for children and adolescents suffering with emotional and behavioural disturbance. It describes the structures, process and findings of a Project established by State Government agencies in Western Metropolitan Melbourne during 1992-1993. The aim of the Project was to develop a model of co-ordinated services to better meet the needs of this group. The third article will describe the model.

The paper deals mainly with work undertaken at Travancore Child and Family Centre and discusses the connection between attachment disorder and Undersocialized Conduct Disorder. Clinical examples illustrate the difficulties such children present to the caregivers and workers in the systems around the child. As these children generally fail to respond readily to therapies based on the child’s ability to form trusting relationships, management and treatment strategies which rely on careful assessment of the child’s attachment behaviour are described.

In this article, the authors describe the development, piloting and evaluation of a parenting programme delivered to Aboriginal families of young children in remote NSW. The parenting programme was based on Parents as Teachers, an evidence-based early intervention and prevention home visiting programme that draws on child development theory, and was developed in collaboration with representatives from the local Aboriginal community. The impetus for the programme came from concern about the poor early learning and child wellbeing indicators in this community, pointing to the need for early parenting support that could be effectively delivered by trained Aboriginal workers in a remote area where early childhood resources were very limited. The sessions, implemented within a group setting, were structured and intensive. Six topics identified as being most important to parents of children aged from birth to 18 months, and six topics for parents of children aged from 18 months to 3 years were presented, with three sessions developed for each topic. An evaluation of the programme to date revealed that parent satisfaction with the programme was very high, as were reports of increased knowledge of child development and parenting skills, and increased connection with other families. Aboriginal staff valued the structured programme and resources that were developed. They reported increased knowledge of child development and how to run groups effectively, and observed positive changes in the participating families.

Sibling groups placed in out-of-home care are often separated due to the relatively small number of caregivers who are able to care for large sibling groups, as well as the individual needs of the children. This article briefly explores the complexities of sibling placement within the international, national and Victorian contexts. It continues with a description of the Oz Child Sibling Group Placement Program which was implemented in Victoria's Southern Region to place sibling groups of three or more children together in foster care. The results of a review of the program are presented, including referral statistics, placement data and caregiver feedback. The article concludes with the consideration of recommendations for change as a result of the review.

The introduction to this article provides a brief overview of current issues in kinship care. This is followed by transcripts of two speeches given by kinship carers at a Kinship Care Forum held in Brisbane in 2020. In these speeches, the speakers described how they became carers, their commitment to the children in their care, the challenges they have faced, the children’s development over time in their care and their struggles to achieve the support they needed.

Resilience is a concept that has captured people's interest in recent years in the hope of being able to readily identify the elements that make young people able to bounce back from adverse circumstances. Coping is an important component of resilience in that it can be conceptualised, operationalised, measured and developed. Since stress and coping have been arguably one of the most widely researched areas in the field of psychology there is a diverse literature. This article provides a brief review of the literature in the field of coping, particularly as it relates to adolescents. It provides a definition of the construct and considers correlates such as age and gender. It draws attention to the paucity of literature on family patterns of coping, such as an exploration of parents and their children's coping. Coping is helpful as part of a person-centred, rather than a situation-centred, approach to risk and resilience.

Burnside is an agency of the Uniting Church and has a role to facilitate the development of children and families most in need through quality services, research and advocacy. This article describes a home visiting model which was developed and approved for implementation as a three year pilot by Burnside on the Central Coast in NSW, beginning in 1997. The model is described and presented as a format that may be useful to stimulate similar program proposals elsewhere. The model uses paid professionals within the context of a ‘Family Centre’ with a volunteer network to offer ongoing home visiting support to first-time parents facing social and geographical isolation and who have few supports and resources to meet their needs. Importantly, the model relies on close collaboration with Child Health services and a partnership with other community agencies and the local community itself. The model accommodates current debate about the need to break cycles of abuse through positive preventative family support to strengthen families and communities.

In recent years there has been considerable analysis of how the media create images of crime. The relationship between child abuse and the media has also been subject to greater scrutiny. This article examines the role of one newspaper in a child protection case. The part played by the newspaper in the court case led to an examination of the language used by the media in their representations of children. The researchers found that a child may be objectified in language even when the child’s gender is previously identified. The ‘gender slippage’ may in extreme cases lead to the ‘textual abuse’ of children, where child abuse is rewritten to lessen the impact on the reader. The authors conclude that the actions of journalists and the language they use require more critical analysis.

Alfred Adler (1954) referred to the sibling rivalry between the first and secondborn when he said,

The striving for power in the case of a secondborn child also has its especial nuance. Secondborn children are constantly under steam, striving for superiority under pressure: the race-course attitude which determines their activity in life is very evident in their actions. The fact that there is someone ahead of him who has already gained power is a strong stimulus for the secondborn. If he is enabled to develop his powers and takes up the battle with the firstborn he will usually move forward with a great deal of elan, then while the first born, possessing power, feels himself relatively secure until the second threatens to surpass him (p. 126).

The Ermington Family Learning Centre provides educational opportunities for both children with learning difficulties from low income families, and their parents. The Centre specifically targets disadvantaged children and encourages the involvement of families, most of whom are vulnerable and isolated from traditional services. Because the focus is on children, many parents who would not normally use welfare agencies or seek professional support have accepted help from the Centre. The integrated but indirect approach has ensured not only sustained educational gains and improved self esteem in the children, but improvements in family functioning and the self esteem of parents.

Suzanne Jenkins has had over fourteen years experience in the field of child abuse and perpetrator work. She was employed as Senior Therapist at the Gracewell Clinic in Birmingham, England. The Gracewell Clinic had a world-wide reputation for its successful and innovative approach to working with paedophiles and other perpetrators of sexual violence. Since the clinic's closure in late 1993, Suzanne has developed her own therapeutic and training model for working with sexual abuse based on an integrated approach.

The interview was conducted whilst I was on a study tour of Britain supported by a Creswick Foundation Fellowship in Family Relations and Child Development and the Department of Social Work, Monash University.

The interview took place during Suzanne's time with the Gracewell Clinic. In the interview, Suzanne discusses ideas that she has found useful in her experience of working with perpetrators of sexual abuse.

Welcome to the year of 2014, which will no doubt be as busy as ever for us all. This year we hope to bring you some different content in the journal including a ‘Themed’ Issue in June that will focus on Family Inclusive Child Protection Practice.

Relational, body-oriented and brain-based approaches to recovery and change are increasingly popular modalities for working with traumatised children and adults. However, although these approaches encourage the awareness, and the harnessing of workers’ visceral experiences, there is little in the literature to describe how practitioners navigate their own somatic maps. In a research project undertaken from 2008–16, I invited nine human service workers to tell and explore stories about their own experiences of the body that emerged during, and/or in relation to, their own professional practice. A narrative methodology was used to help facilitate a depth of understanding of how the participants used their own bodies as a source of knowledge and/or as an intervention strategy with those with whom they worked. In this paper, I explore one of many stories told by Coral in which she describes the processes she uses to navigate her own somatic map as she interacts with clients and workers in a domestic violence service. I conclude that creating spaces for workers to explore embodied experience in the professional conversation is important, but is difficult without an acceptable discourse or narrative template. Nonetheless, given the opportunity, including the ‘body as subject’ encourages better outcomes for clients and provides richer accounts of human service workers’ professional experience.

Internal working models of self and others and expectations of early relationships formed from early attachment experiences strongly influence the ways in which the child relates to others and the world. Infants whose early emotional needs have not been adequately met may come to view the world as comfortless and unpredictable and develop relationships that are marked by anxiety or detachment.

This paper presents some of the foundations of attachment theory and case examples are used to illustrate the ways in which children develop anxious or detached patterns of attachment. Attachment difficulties, together with environmental influences, are thought to be a genesis of later behavioural problems such as poor impulse control, aggression, prolonged emotional dependency and extreme difficulty in relating to other children.

The purpose of this paper is to familiarise readers with a new social innovations programme at the University of Melbourne. MABL is an abbreviation for Mobilising change Alliance for Better Lives. The paper outlines the rationale for establishing MABL and describes the processes and principles it uses to generate, design, test and scale novel solutions to improve the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable children and adolescents. Information on how to join the change Alliance and/or invest in solving a better lives challenge is provided.

Internationally, there is a growing trend for children and young people to participate in decisions affecting their lives (Bellamy 2002; Hart 1997). The active participation of children and young people is clearly articulated in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). However, despite the international movement towards children's participation, there are precious few opportunities for Australian children and young people to contribute to policy and research debate in a sustainable manner. A review of the literature demonstrates that there are few ongoing research or policy advisory groups made up of children and young people, and those that are operational are generally auspiced by Children's Commissioners (e.g. New South Wales) and policy offices addressing the issues of children and young people.

In Western Australia, when children and young people are consulted, the dialogues tend to be short-term and issue-specific in nature. This paper will briefly discuss a number of techniques employed to engage Western Australian children and young people in dialogues about important issues affecting their lives. Using these examples, the barriers that challenge efficacious children's and young people's participation are discussed; finally, some suggested ways forward are delineated.