"Horrifying" statistics show children under the care of Child Youth and Family are struggling to break free from a cycle of continued abuse and re-victimisation, a major report has found.
A high-level interim report into the systems used by the state carer calls for a complete overhaul of the way it operates.
Children were not being put at the centre of care, and a "fragmented system" lacked common purpose or accountability.
That left a "concerning level of re-abuse for children who have been in care".
A 77-YEAR-OLD foster carer on the NSW north coast has been arrested and charged with indecently assaulting three children in his care.
The man was arrested at his home in Lennox Head on Wednesday and is accused of indecently assaulting three children previously in his care between 2009 and 2011.
Child Abuse Squad detectives have arrested and charged a woman for physically assaulting three children in her care.
Last Friday (10 January 2014), police were informed that three children housed in foster care in the Lake Macquarie area were suffering from a number of physical injuries.
The children – two boys, aged 6 and 7, and a girl aged 5 – had obvious bruising on various parts of their bodies.
An 8-year-old was so badly abused by her foster mother that her body was found covered with uncountable scars, scabs, blisters, and bruises from whip marks when police went to her foster home in Florida on May 16.
The child was forced to put a rag in her mouth while her foster family beat her so no one could hear her screams, reported the Sun Sentinel.
When police arrived at the home, foster caretaker Duane Fletcher, 56, interrupted the child’s interview with the investigator. In his presence, the child denied that her injuries were from beatings.
The Queensland government spent more than $1 billion last year to save children from neglect and abuse.
But almost 6000 youth aged up to 17 years of age were still sadly the subject of substantiated complaints to Child Safety in 2017-18.
These two attorneys represent the maternal grandmother and paternal grandfather of a two-and-a-half-year-old boy who has been in the custody of Child Protective Services for almost his whole life.
That makes no sense, the attorneys say, when you have suitable blood relatives wanting to adopt.
"The child is in foster care. He's a ward of the state and the grandparent is actually getting foster care payments. It makes no sense whatsoever," said attorney Steven Pook.
SEVENTY Northern Territory kids who had been removed from their families and placed in out-of-home care were subjected to harm or exploitation last year.
The NT Children’s Commissioner’s annual report shows there were 81 cases in 2015-16 in which children in out-of-home care were harmed.
Of those cases, 10 children were the subject of multiple cases of abuse.
A Territory Families-approved carer accused of making a foster child drink sour milk "as a form of punishment" was allowed to continue in the role despite 10 investigations into her suitability, a report by the Children's Commissioner has revealed.
EDMONTON—Alberta’s Ministry of Children’s Services released an action plan Thursday designed to overhaul child interventions in the province, promising to bring an end to a painful history of unnecessarily separating children from their communities and cultures by working to keep more families whole.
The plan, A Stronger, Safer Tomorrow, includes 39 actions to be implemented by 2022 with 16 immediate actions to be executed by April 2019.
“It involves decisive steps to create the child intervention system that Albertans expect, to improve safety, to increase accountability, to strengthen supports for children and youth and to transform how we work with Indigenous families and communities,” said Danielle Larivee, minister of Children’s Services in Lethbridge, Alta., Thursday.
‘They already had a foster parent in the room, to remove my son... before they ever proved there was an emergency situation.'
Outraged by cases of child protective services taking children from their competent, loving parents on flimsy medical grounds, a group in Minnesota has filed a motion in federal court to do what their organization's name suggests: "Stop child protective services from legally kidnapping children."
Fox 9 reports that Dwight Mitchell, the founder, had his child taken away from him "unfairly" for 22 months. His group now has over 1,000 members. One of them is Amanda Weber, whose son was taken from her for a week after she brought him to the hospital to be examined for a cough:
Australian children are removed from their families more often than anywhere in the Western world, nearly twice as often as in the US and almost three times the rate in New Zealand, a parliamentary inquiry into child welfare has heard.
There is also “a culture of removal and a culture of victim blaming”.
Mary Moore, convener of the volunteer Alliance for Family Preservation and Restoration, told the NSW parliamentary committee yesterday that children were being taken into care based on the opinion of case workers where no harm had occurred “but because they have concerns the child might suffer harm in the future, and they’re then in care until age 18”.
A 31-year-old Parkes woman was sentenced to seven years’ jail today in Parkes District Court after assaulting a five-year-old foster child in her care.
Brooke Roberts of Middleton Street, appeared before Judge Stephen Hanley on the charge of reckless grievous bodily harm, an offence that carries a maximum sentence of ten years.
