Strained welfare system fails children in need

THE Social Development Department should order a “lockdown” for as long as a month to let overburdened social workers deal with the huge foster care backlog, a summit has heard.

Crystal Theron, a social worker and a former deputy director in the Presidency, said the social welfare system is overburdened.

“Every one should be involved, even the administrators, for three to four weeks, to locate files… to make sure when we hand over to the Department of Justice, it’s on a clean slate,” she said at a foster care summit convened by the Gauteng Social Development Department “to find solutions to blockages in the system and sustainable foster care interventions”.

Theron, who has been involved in a survey of social services from 2010, said: “We found a lack of effective foster care supervision services, poor case management from the intake level right through to after-care, and that compounds the backlog.

“There is limited capacity in managing foster care cases and inadequate service delivery for children in the child protection system… There is poor management of court orders and… little follow-up of children.”

In a policy brief last year, Nicole Breen, Joburg Child Welfare advocacy manager, said since 2002 the number of orphans had risen drastically and the demand for foster care placement had soared. “Overburdened, and some may argue, on the brink of collapse, foster care placement has been the subject of litigation and much debate.”

Under a new section of the Children’s Act, a foster care order must be reviewed by the children’s courts every two years. But this “added to the pressure social workers and the children’s courts were already under”. By June 2010, 299 089 foster care orders had lapsed, so children were no longer being legally placed in foster care nor were they eligible for grants. This prompted the Centre for Child Law to bring an urgent court order stipulating all foster care grants that lapsed because of the backlog could be extended administratively until the department created a “systemic solution”. This expires at the end of next year.

Makhenkesi Shibambu, of the national Social Development Department, said: “Currently orders are left to lapse as social workers are not sure how to proceed.”

The Gauteng Social Development Department said “silo information management systems”, lack of synergy between legislation, undocumented children and different interpretations of the Children’s Act were problematic.Theron said: “Foster care parents must be accredited as proper foster parents before children are placed... Currently foster parents are coming with the child and saying the mother passed away and there’s no sign of the father.

“They don’t realise the responsibilities they have. They need to have a passion for caring for children.”