The little children
It’s 10am in Grey Lynn, and the social workers in Lisa Burnett’s team have gathered around her desk. When a member of the public calls in to report a child, social workers at the national call centre are responsible for triaging the cases. They use a risk analysis tool to help decide the best path of action.
It’s an imperfect science. Studies have found social workers of different levels of experience – and across different parts of the country – make varying decisions on exactly the same case. Where one social worker sees a child at immediate risk, another codes the danger as more moderate. Ma¯ ori children are often considered more at risk, and are 20 per cent more likely to be taken into care after their first contact with a social worker than a Pa¯ keha¯ child.
‘‘The response you get from the state might be determined by an accident of where you were born,’’ University of Otago says senior lecturer in social work Emily Keddell, who investigates decision-making in child welfare. ‘‘Are we paying enough attention to the context of people’s lives? For Ma¯ ori, particularly, given our long history of colonisation, we’ve got to understand how they might be disproportionately affected.’’
On Burnett’s triage list, there’s a medical neglect case in which a girl, 4, has had to have four rotten teeth extracted. A 3-year-old who has said she doesn’t like the way Daddy touches her. A suicidal pre-teen, whose parents are suspected of abusing her.
‘‘Uplifting would be a last resort – almost always we would try and embed the child within a network of safety in their own home,’’ Burnett says. ‘‘It is a constant balancing act . . .’’
There are times when Burnett’s team must act immediately. Last year, they received a report at 4pm on a Friday of a child living in a filthy basement. Social workers found a 22-month-old who had spent the majority of his life living in a portacot in a windowless room. His legs were so bowed from a lifetime on a mattress that he couldn’t walk.
When they arrived, he was fossicking in bags of leaking rubbish for food scraps. They sought an urgent order to uplift the child.
His single mother, a sex worker with borderline personality disorder, was considered by the Family Court to be incapable of looking after him. He was placed with permanent caregivers, and now, at 3, has almost caught up developmentally.
Across all her social media accounts, which are set up in her son’s name, his mother posts a continuous stream of pictures and videos of him. ‘‘Help me get Derek* back!’’ she implores her small group of followers. My baby, she writes, under others.
She will never have custody of that child again, Burnett says.
In 2015, the biggest reforms in child protection services since the 1980s were ushered in by children’s minister Anne Tolley under a Nationalled government. The ensuing transformation of the beleaguered Child, Youth and Family into Oranga Tamariki began in April 2017 and is projected to take five years.
Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft likes to compare the task to doing repairs on a Boeing 747 while it’s in the air. He thinks it’s possible, as long as the Labour-led Government commits to the extra $524 million it was earmarked to cost.
‘‘The fundamental issue is how do we genuinely turn off the tap [to state care], and it’s got to start way earlier,’’ Becroft says.
‘‘The new team is committed to making the change but, as of yet, we have not seen significant changes at the coal face, and that’s where the battle is won or lost.’’
New laws due to take effect in July next year will place a ‘‘very clear and new emphasis on earlier intervention’’, he says. This means wrapping services around a family when it looks as if a child might be at risk of removal, rather than acting after the fact. Tikanga Ma¯ ori concepts of mana tamaiti, whakapapa and whanaungatanga will be enshrined in the laws.
Oranga Tamariki chief executive Grainne Moss says the agency has a renewed emphasis on keeping families together, and intervening much earlier to try and see this happen.
The organisation is working on an intensive support programme that will target up to 6000 children considered ‘‘on the edge’’ of care, providing social workers and therapists to work closely with families.
‘‘What children tell us, and what their behaviour tells us, is even when they come from the most distressed situation, they still love their parents and they want to be with their wha¯ nau,’’ Moss says.
‘‘What New Zealand does actually quite well, and has done for some time, is have very strong wha¯ nau care. We’re continuing to support this and looking at ways of taking a different approach.’’
Oranga Tamariki and its predecessors have been restructured 14 times in the past two decades. The current reform is a much bigger dream than that – but last year’s funding was about 10 per cent of what was needed in the next few years, Moss admits. ‘‘It’s definitely a journey. If something could have been changed overnight, people would have done it years ago. We’ve got great momentum, we need to really accelerate that. We need this to continue.’’ * Names have been changed.