MUMMY HELP ME, I DON’T WANT TO GO

The heart-breaking story of how a Gold Coast choir girl was removed from her loving foster home to a life of drugs, sexual assaults and street-gang homelessness

A 12-YEAR-OLD girl is homeless and suicidal because the Government ignores her pleas to return to her foster family.

The Bulletin has obtained heart-breaking texts and shocking photographs showing the downward spiral of a happy child who was a choir girl just two years ago.

In one message to her foster mum of 10 years, the girl wrote: “Love you mummy I might come back to you maby (sic). Love you. Mummy child safety don’t lisan (sic) to me and help me come home aswall (sic). Child Safety lied to me please help me I don’t want too (sic) go.” On one occasion she tried to walk 40km home.

The girl has joined gang life on Coast streets, where she has been choked and sexually assaulted, and is taking drugs.

Child Safety removed the girl in mid-2018 and have remained silent on the reasons, allowing the foster carers only one contact call a week.

After learning that the girl’s life was in danger, the family contacted the Premier and Child Safety Minister.

In another report today, the Bulletin reveals a Gold Coast woman has written to Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk about a distressing conversation she heard between government staff. In a three-minute recording accidentally left on voicemail, a staff member talks about Child Safety failing to take a young child off a “dangerous” mother.

When the Gold Coast woman contacted the department she was told to delete the message.

She then wrote to Child Safety. It replied three weeks later asking for more details.

HOMELESS among teen gang members on Gold Coast streets, a 12-year-old girl in a text from her mobile phone sends a photograph of the inside of her arm. Eleven cuts – some with the blood still fresh, several centimetres long. “Bye bye,” she writes.

This was 18 days ago, sparking a frantic search by her foster family. Today she remains homeless, losing her place in a northern Coast residential care home after joining the gang known to police.

A friend of the girl, who fears she will attempt suicide again, says: “Two years ago she was singing in a children’s choir. Not chroming and using ice.

“She has been involved with others in shoplifting and car theft. There have been incidences of violence where police were called – being thrown through a window, being raped, being choked.

“This little girl could very well lose her life through the incompetency and unethical practices of the Department of Child Safety.”

An investigation that has uncovered email trails and obtained photographs and texts, reveals how complaints from foster carers, MPs, friends and lawyers to the highest levels of government – including Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Child Safety Minister Di Farmer – have been ignored for two years.

Friends allege the girl was with street kids linked to a “paedophile gang” being groomed for sex and drug deals.

The girl, who turned 12 in May, had spent 10 loving years in a foster home west of the city.

Since March she has lived in a tent at a southern beach until moved on by council workers, sheltered in Surfers Paradise, camped outside the shops in Southport and slept in a public toilet at Eagleby north of the Coast.

In Queensland, a child under the age of 12 cannot be left alone for “an unreasonable amount of time”. But her friends allege a deal struck between Child Safety and the contracted resi-carers considers the young girl is safe if she either sends a text or phones daily.

The girl has remained steadfast in wanting to be reunited with her foster family. A message sent to her foster mother, after she was removed from their care in May 2018, is heartbreaking.

In a car being taken away from her home, not sure where she was going as they headed east to the Coast, she wrote: “Love you mummy I might come back to you maby (sic). Love you. Mummy child safety don’t lisan (sic) to me

and help me come home aswall (sic). Child Safety lied to me please help me I don’t want too (sic) go.”

On a page of paper, a few months earlier, she had written: “Why can’t I go home. I am not happy your (sic) makeing (sic) me sad. Let me go home NOW. I want to see mum NOW.”

In one escape attempt north of the Coast, the girl walked about 40km. On another, on a recent Sunday morning after an argument with a carer, she travelled in her pyjamas in the winter cold from Toowoomba to Coomera.

“She telephoned me from a shop. She said she had tried to cut her throat and had been taken to a hospital,” the friend says.

Since the age of two months, the indigenous child had been placed with the same family, experienced with two decades of care. After a dispute with the area’s child support and safety agency, the child was removed without explanation.

Friends acknowledged her “escalating risk-taking, including running away and attempted suicides”, led to five subsequent foster care placements and attempted suicides.

Emails reveal Child Safety workers agreed that her original foster carers could have one telephone call a week as they tried to maintain contact and support.

In a letter from Country to Coast Lawyers to Child Safety Minister Di Farmer in July 2018, a solicitor on behalf of

the “approved foster parents” asked for an external review of the department service centre.

“We are instructed that the child is repeatedly turning up at the carers’ house, often late at night having caught lifts with strangers,” the principal solicitor wrote. “The child is desperately trying to seek out the carers of whom she has been removed from.

“She has reported to the carer that she has in the last week attempted suicide and was removed from a train overpass by police and taken to the hospital and has been threatened by another child at the residential care service and had a knife held to her throat.”

The solicitor said her clients had made a complaint against a Child Safety officer, and ongoing communication had been “inappropriate and retaliatory in the circumstances”. They strongly denied the alleged risk of “emotional harm” towards the child who was now at risk of significantly greater “harm”, the lawyer said.

Ms Farmer’s senior policy adviser told the lawyer the confidentiality provisions contained in the Child Protection Act meant she had to be “limited in my response” but the centre would “continue to meet and discuss the safety and ongoing care of (name removed) with key stakeholders”.

The regional director was monitoring the case.

Emails show a complaint in January 2019 about the girl not having linen in resi-care.

Reports by this newspaper a month later, on a separate case, outlined how taxpayers were coughing up on average $400,000 to $650,000 a year for each child for these contracted agencies, which in some cases had staff failing to provide enough food for kids.

Other emails confirm Ms Palaszczuk’s office was contacted and her staff “assured” foster carers that Ms Farmer’s office would “undertake action regarding your concerns in due course”.

The Child Safety South East Region office undertook an internal review after complaints and was “satisfied that the region did appropriately respond to the concerns” raised about the girl’s safety.

Ms Farmer said on Friday: “It is distressing and heartbreaking to hear tragic stories of young women in such terrible circumstances. The department works with children and carers to maintain stable and permanent placements for children who are unable to live at home safely.

“While the department and myself can’t comment on specific cases, I know Child Safety works closely with police, nongovernment agencies and family to support and return missing children safely to their placements including residential care as quickly as possible, even if the child or young person is in phone contact with staff.

“I am advised by the department it is incorrect to state young people need only to call to be classified as present and safe.”

Ms Farmer said the department, carers and residential care workers were unable to physically restrain a young person to prevent them leaving a home or residential care. Children could be moved from foster care for several reasons, including a change in their care and support needs or to ensure the child’s immediate safety and wellbeing.

The decision was made after a thorough investigation and foster carers could seek a review of department decisions at QCAT, Ms Farmer said. Several police sources, aware of the girl’s case, are furious with Child Safety, saying police will be blamed if something happens to a teenager on the run.

“By their nature, children in residential care or care of the state are highrisk individuals and should be reported as missing straightaway if they’re not in care,” a police source said. “Kids fall through the cracks and it’s up to the diligence of residential care but DOCS are responsible for these children.” Another police source was scathing of Child Safety’s record with high-risk children. “The problems with DOCS is you have kids straight out of uni who don’t know what they are doing. They are put in a situation they don’t understand and cannot deal with the needs of these kids.”

The girl’s foster parents were approached for this story but they cannot comment for legal reasons.

But opposition frontbencher and Mudgeeraba MP Ros Bates said: “This is another heartbreaking story of a child who has fallen through the cracks of a broken child safety system. It’s a miracle that she is still alive and she is in need of urgent intervention and support. What makes matters worse is both the Premier’s office and Child Safety Minister’s Office were made aware of complaints and it seems nothing was done about them. The girl’s friends are seeking an independent review.

SOMETHING is seriously wrong when the State Government and agencies that are supposed to look after at-risk children have a polar-opposite view to the community on the meaning of “safety’’.

As revealed in our report today on the shocking case of a pre-teen girl pleading for help as she slips between the cracks, in Queensland a child under the age of 12 must not be left alone for “an unreasonable amount of time’’.

But friends of the girl allege Child Safety and those who run a residential care home from which the child has fled to take her chances on the streets, have an arrangement whereby she is considered safe if she either texts or phones each day. Child Safety Minister Di Farmer denies this would be the case.

This is the same child who, based on emails seen and interviews with people who know her conducted by the Bulletin, has been desperately unhappy since being removed from the foster family she loves and has pleaded to be reunited with them. She has self-harmed, attempted suicide and in her time on the streets been threatened, choked and sexually assaulted. Safe? How can this be?

In what universe do the Department of Child Safety, its minister and the organisations paid well from the public purse to care for such children exist? Because that child’s circumstances do not comply with the definition of “safe’’ in our world.

Bulletin investigations reveal attempts have been made to appeal to the minister and indeed the Premier to act to protect the girl, but it seems to no avail.

Last year a Bulletin investigation found Queensland taxpayers were forking out up to $1.4 million a year for some individual children in resi-care, run by agencies under the watch of Child Safety. On average, the public had been paying $400,000 to $650,000 a year per child in such facilities.

We accept many of the children have come from tough circumstances and/or exhibit difficult and complex behaviour.

But also last year, the Bulletin learned of empty shelves in care fridges at some houses and texts from “carers’’ telling children to get a job and feed themselves.

In what world is any of this acceptable when children’s health and wellbeing are in danger, yet millions of dollars are being spent from the public purse?

In recent weeks, as more details emerged in the tragic case of Mason Jet Lee, Queenslanders were reminded of the deaths of 16 children under the jurisdictional control of Child Safety since 2015. There have been reviews by the department into these terrible cases.

And hardly a week goes by without more cases of neglect and injury being reported. Parents and extended families have a lot to answer for, but sadly it is also evident that despite denials, a Child Safety department crisis continues and children are suffering.

There must be a major review but for the children’s sake, it has to be an urgent and external investigation. The minister has to seek and make public independent answers, rather than allowing her department to investigate its own practices.

This shameful situation is a blight on all because if a society is unable to protect its most vulnerable, it has lost its worth.