The truth of the matter is more nuanced. The National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, tells us that 22 per cent of Australians had a mental disorder in the previous twelve months and 43 per cent within their lifetime. Large numbers, no doubt, but no larger than the 20 per cent and 45 per cent figures obtained when the study was conducted in 2007.

But hidden in these aggregated figures is a worrying trend. Among young people aged sixteen to twenty-four, the twelve-month prevalence of mental disorder rose from 26 per cent to 39 per cent, and that increase was especially steep for young women, up from 30 per cent to 46 per cent. When half of this group has a diagnosable mental illness — an underestimate, because the study only counts a subset of the most prevalent conditions — something is clearly very wrong.

A similar story of age- and gender-biased deterioration is told by the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. When an index of mental health is tracked across iterations of the survey from 2001 to 2021, older and middle-aged adults hold relatively steady but people aged fifteen to thirty-four, and especially young women, show a relentless decline beginning around 2014. The pandemic, the usual all-purpose explanation for recent social trends, can’t be held responsible for a rise in psychiatric misery that preceded it by several years, so what can?

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation offers a provocative but compelling answer to this question. Haidt, an American social psychologist known for influential books on well-being (The Happiness Hypothesis), moral psychology and political polarisation (The Righteous Mind) and upheavals on US college campuses (The Coddling of the American Mind, written with Greg Lukianoff), argues that some of the usual explanatory suspects are innocent. They don’t account for why declining mental health disproportionately affects young women, why it is occurring now or why the trendline started to dive in the early 2010s after a period of stability.

The prospect of ecological catastrophe, for example, weighs most heavily on younger people but every generation has experienced existential threats. Wars, natural disasters, and economic crises are conspicuous reasons for distress and despair, but world events have always been terrible. It is not obvious why they should disproportionately make young women anxious and depressed while leaving older and maler people unaffected. The stigma of mental illness may have declined so that people have become more willing to acknowledge it, but increases in the prevalence of mental ill-health among young people are not confined to subjective reports but also found in rates of hospitalisation and suicide.

The chief culprit, Haidt proposes, is technological. Smartphones and social media have rewired young minds to an unprecedented degree, replacing “play-based childhood” with “phone-based childhood.” Portable devices with addictive apps and algorithms engineered to harvest attention and expose children to damaging content have wrought havoc on young people’s mental health. They have done so in ways that are gendered and most severely affect generation Z. Born after 1995, these young people are the first to have gone through puberty in the virtual world.

Haidt marshals high-quality evidence for the decline in young people’s wellbeing over the past decade. Graph upon graph show inflection points in the early 2010s when mental health and related phenomena such as feelings of social connection or meaning in life start to trend downward. These trends are not limited to the United States but occur more or less in lockstep around the Western world. Their timing indicates that it is not the internet or social networking sites themselves that are damaging, but the transformation that resulted from the advent of smartphones, increased interactivity, image posting, likes chasing, algorithmic feeds, front-facing cameras and the proliferation of apps engaged in a race to the bottom to ensnare new users.

Haidt argues that the near-universal use of smartphones in children and especially pre-teens is driving the increase in mental health problems among young people. Coupled with over-protective parenting around physical risks in the real world has been an under-protection around virtual risks that leaves children with near-unfettered access to age-inappropriate sites. Like Big Tobacco, the developers of social media platforms have designed them to be maximally addictive, have known about the harms likely to result, have made bad faith denials of that knowledge, and have dragged their heels when it comes to mitigating known risks that would have commercial consequences.

There are many reasons why phone-based childhood has damaging effects. It facilitates social comparisons around appearance and popularity, enables bullying and exclusion, exposes young children to adult-focused material, and serves individualized content that exploits their vulnerabilities. It fragments attention and disrupts sleep, with implications for schooling as much as for mental health. Smartphones also function as “experience blockers,” reducing unstructured time with friends and the opportunities for developing skills in synchronous social interaction, conflict resolution and everyday independence.

Haidt is emphatic that the problem of phone-based childhood is not just the direct harms it brings but also the opportunity costs: the time not spent acquiring real-world capabilities and connections. Added to a prevailing culture of safetyism that attempts to eradicate risk and prescribes structured activity at the expense of free play and exploration, the outcome is a generation increasingly on the back foot, worried about what could go wrong and feeling ill-equipped to deal with it. Well-documented developmental delays in a range of independent and risky behaviours are one consequence, and the rise of anxiety is another.

When many children and adolescents report that they are almost constantly on their phones we should therefore not be surprised that they feel disconnected, lonely, exhausted, inattentive and overwhelmed. Haidt argues that many of these emotional and social effects are common to young people as a group, but some are gendered. Girls are more likely to be entrapped by image-focused networking sites that promote perfectionist norms, decrease their satisfaction with their bodies, and expose them to bullying, trolling and unwanted attention from older men. Boys are more often drawn into videogames and pornography, which foster social detachment, pessimism and a sense of meaninglessness, sometimes combined with bitter misogyny.

Haidt reminds us not to think of children as miniature adults, but as works in progress whose brains are malleable and developmentally primed for cultural learning. “Rewiring” may be an overstatement — brains never set like plaster and cultural learning continues through life — but the preteen years are a sensitive period for figuring out who and what to look up to, a bias easily hijacked by influencers and algorithm-driven video feeds. Older adults can be moralistic about adolescents who won’t disengage from their phones, but when those phones are where life happens, and when the brain’s executive functions are only half-formed, we should understand why shiny rectangles of metal and glass become prosthetic.

What to do? Haidt has a range of prescriptions for parents, schools, tech firms and governments. Parents should band together to encourage free play, promote real-world and nature-based activities that build a sense of competence and community, limit screen time for younger children, use parental controls, and delay the opening of social media accounts until age sixteen. Schools should ban phones for the entirety of the school day, lengthen recess, encourage unstructured play, renormalise childhood independence and push back against helicopter parenting. There is a social justice imperative here, Haidt observes, as smartphone use seems to disproportionately affect the academic performance of low-income students.

Responsibility for intervening can’t be left to individuals and local institutions alone. Governments and tech firms must recognise their duty of care and come to see the current state of affairs as a public health issue, much like tobacco, seat belts, sun exposure or leaded petrol. Tech firms must get serious about age verification and increasing the age of “internet adulthood” at which young people can make contracts with corporations hell-bent on extracting their time and attention. Governments can legislate these requirements, design more child-friendly public spaces, and remove penalties for healthy forms of child autonomy such as going to a playground without a parent, currently criminalised in the United States as “neglect.”

The Anxious Generation is a passionate book, coming from a place of deep concern, but most of it is written with the cool intonation of social science. The work is accessible and clearly intended for a wide readership, each chapter ending with a bulleted summary of key points. There is a refreshing humility about the empirical claims, which Haidt accepts can be challenged and may sometimes turn out to be wrong, referring the reader on to a website where updates on the state of the evidence will appear.

The part social media plays in mental ill-health is in dispute, for example, although the evidence of a correlation with heavy use is not. Haidt offers up studies supporting the causal interpretation but acknowledges that nothing is straightforward where human behaviour is concerned. Nevertheless, he is justified is arguing that his “Great Rewiring” hypothesis is now the leading account of the origins of the youth mental health crisis. No other contender appears capable of explaining why things seemed to start going wrong around the globe somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

Critics of The Anxious Generation are likely to argue that Haidt’s hypothesis is simplistic or that it amounts to a moral panic. Both charges would be unfair. A single explanatory factor rarely accounts for something as complex as a major social trend, of course, but identifying a dominant cause has the pragmatic benefit of prioritising interventions. If phone-based childhood is the problem then we have a clear target for possible solutions.

As explanations go, Haidt’s isn’t quite as simple as it might seem in any case. The advent of smartphones and all-consuming social media may take centre stage, but earlier cultural shifts that amplified the sense of risk and promote over-protection set the scene and compounded young people’s vulnerability. Haidt’s account of the elements of smartphone use that are most damaging is also highly specified rather than a wholesale rejection of the virtual world.

The mental health field often extols the complexity of its subject matter, which sits at the jumbled intersection of mind, brain and culture, but that recognition can hamper the search for agreed interventions. The usual calls to boost clinical services are understandable, but solutions that address individual distress in the present fail to tackle the collective, institutional and developmental sources of the problem.

Some proposed solutions, such as efforts to build online social connections, may be ineffective because they fail to foster the embodied, real-world connections that matter. Other supposedly compassionate responses, such as accommodating student anxiety with diluted academic requirements and on-demand extensions, may make anxiety worse by enabling and rewarding avoidance. Haidt arguably overlooks how much mental ill-health among young people is being inadvertently made worse by well-meaning attempts to accommodate it and by backfiring efforts to boost awareness and illness-based identities.

The charge of moral panic is equally problematic and doesn’t stick for three reasons. First, evidence for the harmful consequences of phone-based childhood is now documented in a way that past worries about new technologies were not. Second, Haidt’s proposal focuses on the welfare of young people rather than social decay. Although he argues that phone-based life can cause a form of spiritual degradation, his critique is primarily expressed in the register of health rather than morality. Third, although Haidt articulates a significant threat, with the partial exception of social media companies he is not in the business of lashing villains so much as promoting positive, collective responses and a sense of urgency.

The youth mental health crisis is real, and it shows no signs of abating. The human cost is enormous. If rates of mental illness among Australians aged sixteen to twenty-four had remained steady since 2007, around 350,000 fewer young Australians would be experiencing one this year. The Anxious Generation is vital reading for anyone who wants a sense of the scale of the problem and a clear-eyed vision of what it will take to tackle it. •

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt | Penguin | $36.99| 400 pages

The post Virtual anxiety appeared first on Inside Story.

At my Catholic high school our science teacher drew images of fallopian tubes that looked like languid tropical flowers and sperm resembling frisky tadpoles. He said the words penis and vagina, the class erupted in giggles, and he muttered darkly about HIV and AIDS. Of course, I already knew about AIDS from the endless advertisements showing the Grim Reaper knocking down innocents in a bowling alley.

In short, sex education for my generation was not only seriously confusing and terrifying, it was also monolithically heterosexual, innocent of pleasure outside procreation and ignorant of violence, and only referenced queer sexuality to note the dangers attached.

Cut to 2019 and author Katrina Marson meets primary schoolchildren in Shropshire walking towards each other and learning to say when physical proximity makes them uncomfortable, children in the Netherlands touching feathers, sponges and other materials and expressing how these physical sensations make them feel, children in Yorkshire being shown slides of two girls hugging with the caption “Sometimes two girls will grow up to be women and love each other and that’s called lesbian,” and high-school students in Australia demanding better relationships and sexuality education to prevent sexual assault.

In her new book Legitimate Sexpectations Marson argues that a direct line exists between inadequate sex education and sexual assault. Encouraging children to be literate about their feelings, teaching them they are entitled to pleasure, and showing them how to inquire about, listen to and respect the emotions of their peers is, she says, crucial to their understanding of consent and to their sexual wellbeing as a whole.

Marson joins a panoply of feminist theorists in arguing that consent is a low threshold for sexual autonomy. What children need — and what they are entitled to as a matter of health, safety and human rights — is full sexual citizenship. Judged against this standard, Australian students are woefully disenfranchised. If we are serious about reducing rates of sexual violence in Australia, she says, then we need to begin not with the criminal justice system, which is little more than an “ambulance at the bottom of a cliff,” but with holistic sexual education. We need prevention and pleasure, not simply responses to coercion and crimes.

Marson’s book is ultimately an argument in favour of comprehensive sex education, but her background as a criminal prosecutor lends a fascinating dual perspective to her work, bringing courtroom and classroom into dialogue with each other. Tired of the grim “conveyor belt” that was dropping sexual assault files on to her desk each day, she set out in 2019 to investigate what could be done to stop the damage.

To do that, she revisited an argument she originally made in her honours thesis: that sex education was more effective than law in preventing sexual violence. Then, courtesy of a Churchill Fellowship, she met with teachers, sex-ed experts, researchers and public policymakers involved in innovative relationships and sexuality education programs in Europe, the United Kingdom and North America.

Part memoir, part fiction, part policy paper and part chat with a friend over cocktails, her book makes a compelling argument for Australian parents, schools and governments to adopt a form of sex education for children that goes beyond “don’t get raped” to teach children critical sexual literacy.

Each of Marson’s nine chapters begins with a fictional vignette taken from real situations she has encountered in her work. With ten years’ experience in the criminal justice system, she has an intimate understanding of sexual harms in their most banal and brutal forms, and of the inadequacy of law to redress them. She explains the violence underpinning what might once have been seen as a fumbling in a car or an unwanted romantic encounter at a party by imagining the internal monologues of each person: whether they believed they were entitled to pleasure, what their definitions of consent were, and the social scripts they had been given about masculinity and femininity or about heterosexuality and homosexuality. She showcases a vast spectrum of sexual harms, from cases where consent is clearly lacking to sex that may have been consensual but was ultimately unwanted, a product of social pressure.

I imagine most readers will find these vignettes uncomfortable reading, less because of the anatomical detail with which they are narrated than because of their familiarity. What for so many generations was passed off as bad sex reflects gendered asymmetries of power embedded in scripts about what sex should look like. From cinematic sex scenes entirely oblivious to the clitoris, to reality television shows where women worry more about how they are seen than how they feel, to compulsory heterosexuality, to parents telling a daughter to pull her skirt down or smiling that “boys will be boys,” we learn bad sex in a lot of places.

But what has been learned, Marson argues, can also be unlearned. The need for better communication — mutuality, literacy in knowing and expressing your own feelings and asking about and listening to your partner’s desires — runs through every story, as does the need to challenge binary notions of gender. Australian young people need critical literacy in sexuality that is best offered through relationships and sexuality education.

This is much more than sex education as most of us knew it. At its most comprehensive, it is a form of pedagogy that “aims to provide adolescents with knowledge, skills, attitudes and values.” It views sexuality “in a holistic manner, as an integral part of adolescents’ emotional and social development.” It dispenses with humanistic myths of childhood innocence and embraces young people’s right to sexual knowledge as a human and civil right that ensures sexual safety and wellbeing. It is also one of the most highly politicised and controversial areas of any national educational curriculum.

Remember Scott Morrison saying that a sex-ed program in Victoria made his “skin curl” or the furore that erupted around Safe Schools, an anti-bullying program designed to make schools inclusive for queer kids? At their heart, these moral panics reflect paternalistic notions that children, if given sexual knowledge, will indiscriminately leap on each other with lascivious intent. Like Adam and Eve eating the apple of knowledge, they will be cast out of the garden of childhood innocence, forever sinners, forever corrupted.

This reflects, at least partly, the role school plays in socialisation. Because it is the place where future citizens are moulded and shaped, the nation and the public have a stake in pedagogy, and any recognition of queer sexuality is immediately seen (in conservative columnist Miranda Devine’s words) as a “sexual indoctrination program.” It is why sex education has tended to envisage heterosexual, cis-gendered, married couples as the ideal.

Although data suggests that most parents are in favour of comprehensive sex education that includes recognition of sexual diversity, Australian schools are vulnerable to pressure from conservative and religious minorities because there is no national regulated standard of sex education, unlike in some European countries. Every Australian school in every state has the autonomy to determine sex-education content and delivery, with wildly varying standards of teaching.

Public schools have the additional problem of being vulnerable to the funding whims of governments at state and federal level. Marson contrasts this with Germany, where the Federal Centre for Health Education employs “qualified experts to conduct research, develop teaching packages and online platforms.” This government body then works with the education department in each state to deliver top-quality, standardised and well-resourced modules.

Unlike Australia, where sex-ed programs are framed in negative terms around risks of pregnancy, disease or sexual violence, German sex education is framed in positive terms. As Marson puts it, “They recognise the harm that comes from… failing to set a standard of holistic sexual wellbeing, from failing to paint a picture of what that looks like and what young people should expect: a picture of joy, fun, fulfilment and connection.” Germans start from this baseline and include violence prevention as a supplement. It’s a form of sex education that works with an affirmative model of consent, where consent is based less on a simple yes or no and more on ideas of pleasure and intimacy, where, as Marson puts it, “everyone present is really into it, wants to be there and is getting a lot out of the experience.”

It is the institutionalisation of sex education — as a matter of public policy rather than private values — that explains the title of the book. It’s a play on the administrative law notion of legitimate expectations, under which citizens can hold government to account for certain promises. If we promise children a life free of sexual violence then, as a community, we need to be responsible for funding and developing sex education. Reared in a culture of prudery, most teachers and parents are ill-equipped for the task. We need specialised teachers or qualified professionals if we are not to let our children down on this promise.

While I agree wholeheartedly with Marson’s linking of the institutional with the intimate, there is a certain paternalism to her tone throughout the book. “If anyone is at fault, it is us. As the village that raises you, we have let you down,” she self-lacerates. The rhetoric reflects a top-down model of sex education and is premised on an exaltation of childhood innocence. (We sexually literate adults need to teach you sexually innocent young people.)

Unlike scholarly literature in the field, particularly that of Kerry Robinson and Bronwyn Davies, Marson doesn’t address the myth of childhood innocence that underpins the moral panics around sex education, and in one instance claims that better education “protects” their innocence. This is not just a missed opportunity to examine the class- and race-based nature of a myth that emerged with the privatisation of the Christian middle-class home in the nineteenth century — excluding working-class and non-white children, who were seen as too sexually knowledgeable to be considered real children. It also explains why no young people were interviewed for the book.

At the level of policy, there is significant research, as Marson notes, that suggests the most effective sex education programs are those written alongside young people or indeed conducted by them. And given that adults are not particularly literate in the various forms of social media that are teaching adolescents about sex, it seems odd not to have included their voices and perspectives.

Equally troubling is the omission of any non-white interviewees. While I can accept that Marson decided to focus on North America and Europe, where the education systems are similar to Australia’s, I am baffled by why she would not have interviewed people of colour in the countries she visited, many of which are just as multicultural as Australia. Notions of childhood and sexuality differ across cultures and, as Marson herself notes, “shame around sex and sexuality… are colonial and patriarchal concepts.”

Marson confesses to this deficiency, which I think hints at the broader problem with books written as a “research journey.” As memoir, they can fall short of scholarly standards because the genre is personalised, intimate, vulnerable and confessional. Rather than organising more interviews to redress the problem, Marson simply admits her sin — “my research is the poorer for it” — and carries on. It’s not just a problem in terms of the book’s findings, but also makes me worry about the kinds of books currently being churned out in Australia, where sloppy research passes under the cloak of personal epiphany.

These reservations aside, Marson has written an important book that you will want to thrust into the hands of every parent and educator you know. It is a significant intervention into a field overly dominated by legal perspectives, and I have no doubt that comprehensive relationships and sex education can do far more to prevent sexual violence than changing the legal standard of consent. More than this, it will help raise a generation for which violence, disease or pregnancy is not the prompt for sex education but rather an essential element of a conversation about pleasure, intimacy, fun and desire. •

Legitimate Sexpectations: The Power of Sex-Ed
By Katrina Marson | Scribe | $32.99 | 258 pages

The post Pleasure and intimacy appeared first on Inside Story.

The interview hit home: suddenly the political class was talking about children. Until a few days ago, children seemed the last priority in the public debate over vaccination. Not a whisper had come from the NSW government about the hundreds of children now contracting the virus every week. The Sydney Children’s Hospital Network has been treating more than 700 children, most as outpatients, but some in Covid wards. Even at home, as Gallagher’s testimony suggests, infected children will have to spend most of their time alone.

Aside from drawing attention to the very real dangers of Covid for the young, Gallagher’s interview pointed to a gaping hole in a plan that some governments are now championing as the pathway out of the pandemic. Most media attention in recent weeks has naturally focused on Sydney, which its faltering premier is now enjoining us to see as presaging our collective futures: here, apparently, is a community learning to live with the virus. But the reality may well be that Canberra provides as good an indication of at least one of the things that is likely to occur if both Gladys Berejiklian and Scott Morrison get their way: the infection of large numbers of Australian children with the Delta variant.

ACT chief minister Andrew Barr has become increasingly critical of both the risks being posed to us all by the failures of the NSW government, and how the Doherty Institute modelling is being simplified for blatantly political purposes. “I just see young people being horribly exposed by the decision of another government and I don’t know what I can do to protect my community against that,” he told the Guardian on Friday. He also argues that the Doherty modelling is more nuanced than simply envisaging “Freedom Day” as soon as particular vaccination rates are achieved.

As of 20 August, 43 per cent of Canberra’s eighty-three cases were under seventeen. The median age of those infected in the Territory is nineteen-and-a-half. Several schools have experienced clusters, including a large one at Lyneham High School in the city’s inner north. A nightclub has also been a significant site for infection.

Recall how in the early stages of the pandemic, in those simpler, pre-Delta times of 2020, a spirited debate took place about how infectious, and how vulnerable, children were in relation to Covid. Schools, we were eventually told, were safe spaces. The problems were supposedly teachers in small communal lunchrooms and parents gathering at school gates. Morrison wanted schools kept open; some states and territories — and most prominently Victoria — were equally insistent that they should shut, and most children should learn from home.

In March 2020, Peter Collignon, a leading infectious disease expert at the Australian National University, supported schools remaining open, arguing that children were less likely to be infected. “Children will undoubtedly get infected,” he predicted, “but the probability that they will come to serious grief from this seems very low.” Only last month, with the Delta variant running rampant in Sydney, Collignon was urging governments to look for ways to reopen schools, especially primary schools, even if there was still community transmission.

We wonder how Gallagher and the many other families now directly affected by Canberra’s school clusters would react to his claim that “schools are not a big vehicle for transmission.” Worryingly, in Melbourne, where schools have been closed for more than a fortnight, one in four cases are now under nine years of age. This month, Collignon is saying that Delta “is behaving differently, but a big factor here is immunisation, with few people under twenty vaccinated and nobody under ten immunised.”

Indeed. And it appears to have taken the experience of Gallagher’s daughter Evie to awaken the political and media class from its slumber. The belief that Covid poses little risk to children has been reinforced by persistent advice from some health experts that has given the impression to the non-expert among us — like the authors of this article — that young people could catch Covid and get over it rather as one might a common cold. Just keep them away from their grandparents, and all would be well.

There is something odd about the way children have been marginalised during these discussions. The whole thrust of modern history has been to invest more and more value in the lives and wellbeing of children. This was the accompaniment of smaller families and a growing urban middle class. It was also both a cause and consequence of the movements against child labour. Globally, it has resulted in significant investments in prenatal and infant healthcare and the expansion of educational opportunity for children, and especially for girls. It has been accompanied by the development of a rights regime, embodied, for instance, in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, signed in 1989 and ratified by Australia in 1991.

Yet, leaving aside the efficient vaccination with Pfizer of senior students at one of Sydney’s exclusive private schools and an ill-fated NSW government plan to vaccinate Higher School Certificate students (but not their teachers) in Sydney’s twelve “LGAs of concern,” it apparently took until mid August 2021 for Australia’s political leaders to give more than passing attention to where children actually fit in their pathway back to Covid normal.

This is despite warnings from countries such as India and Brazil where large numbers of children are falling seriously ill, and many have died. That the political and media class have so unquestioningly gone along with the idea that children were at such low risk up to now must be counted among that large and growing list of things that we only half-understood about ourselves before Covid came along to upend our lives: that kids don’t really count for as much as we thought. Delta has dramatically changed the risk profile of the virus for children, but the risks were present even in the early months of the pandemic.

How can we explain so much indifference up to now? How can a country like Britain have an official policy that implicitly accepts letting a dangerous virus loose on an unvaccinated population of children? Should we really contemplate the same thing? How can we make sense of plans to end lockdowns predicated on vaccination rates of 70 and 80 per cent that leave out people under sixteen?

Pfizer, in short supply, has not yet been recommended for use by most children in that age group, while AstraZeneca, the vaccine with which we are best supplied, is only approved for over-eighteens. The general effect of Australia’s mismanagement of the vaccine procurement, rollout and messaging has been to concentrate the vaccine most in demand and least in supply, Pfizer, among the middle-aged. This privileging of adults is a familiar enough story in public policy more generally — think of housing.

The Doherty Institute modelling being used (and arguably misused) by the federal government emphasises the importance of vaccinating those in their twenties and thirties because of their physical mobility. It does contain some modelling based on the vaccination of twelve-to-fifteen-year-olds, but otherwise argues that “the enhanced indirect protection achieved by the ‘All adults’ strategy results in a substantial reduction in symptomatic infections and severe outcomes across all age groups, including unvaccinated children.” In another reference to younger people, it recognises the intense mixing of those aged from fifteen to twenty-four, but its authors are less concerned about “intense school-based mixing” among children aged five to fourteen because of “the relatively low observed infectiousness of this age group, associated with a high proportion of asymptomatic infections.”

It is true that on average a child is far less likely than an older person to die from Covid. But should death be the ultimate measure in such matters? From Britain, we have reports of infected children being ill for more than a year with so-called Long Covid. Some recent reports are indicating that up to 13 per cent of children with the virus are experiencing Long Covid symptoms for many weeks. This is an alarming statistic. Advocacy groups have already begun to mobilise around this issue, and there is growing scepticism about the science informing government policy.

With so little known about the long-term effects of the virus on those infected, including children, is it wise to wind down restrictions that are preventing potentially significant numbers of children falling seriously ill? All this needs to be balanced against the entirely reasonable point that many children are being harmed, in terms of their development, education and mental health, by lockdowns and other restrictions. Much will depend on whether we can get the daily infection rates to lower numbers than anything likely to occur in Sydney any time soon.

Scott Morrison has now announced that Pfizer will be available for all Australians aged sixteen to thirty-nine at the end of the month. This welcome if belated announcement, like all Morrison commitments, is best treated according to the Beach Boys principle: “wouldn’t it be nice?” Let us also speak the language Scott Morrison understands best: people are becoming frightened and there is plenty of political capital in shifting the messaging towards the protection of children, in getting vaccines to everyone twelve or older as soon as possible, and in bringing closer the moment they can return to school with a seriously reduced fear of contracting the virus, or at least of getting seriously ill from it.

Leaving aside the electoral politics, it would be a terrible indictment of our governments if children under sixteen are only being factored into wider plans for ending lockdowns as an afterthought. Andrew Barr has called for more attention to be given to effective vaccination rates, including bringing the rates of children into those population-wide percentages being thrown around by politicians as indicators of what needs to occur before we can all go back to watching the Sharkies.

Yet, for us as historians, the puzzle remains: if children do hold the same social and cultural value that historians claim they have acquired, why have governments not taken more initiative in mobilising them in their public health messaging? The rather sad exception may well be the Victorian government, whose decision to shut Melbourne’s playgrounds led one Liberal MP to take his three-year-old daughter to a closed playground as a photo stunt.

There has quite rightly been considerable anger about the slackness and inefficiency of governments in looking after the elderly during this pandemic. There has also been an alarming callousness among some media commentators about the rights of the old and frail to be protected from harm. This is a group that is known to be highly vulnerable to the virus. It is a lamentable failure of public policy that there are still many aged care workers who are not vaccinated.

The elderly differ from the young in that they have votes. But they share with the young a remoteness from many of the major platforms used by those who have interests to protect and views to broadcast. Would we have seen such a casual attitude to children and the virus if they had votes and the means to amplify their voices in public debate?

Before the pandemic, the voices of children were being heard on climate change around the world, including in Australia — despite the efforts of politicians, police and right-wing media to silence them. Covid has done what the authorities could not. It has silenced children in mainstream media discourse in a profound way. They have been subsumed within the “family unit” as just another member of a locked-down household, as the object of “home schooling” (as it is erroneously called) and as a distraction for adults “working from home,” perhaps while making cameo appearances in the background of a Zoom meeting.

We might be learning another lesson from the pandemic: while we might be all in this together, some of us seem to matter a great deal more than others. •

The post The kids aren’t alright appeared first on Inside Story.

Helen Frances (Nell) Malone was born to Irish immigrants Mathew and Margaret Malone at a miners’ camp in Stannifer, on the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, on 20 December 1881. One of ten children, she grew up at Fletcher Vale, near Charters Towers in Queensland, on a property her father had bought with his brother. In this environment, she developed a nonchalant approach to danger: in Childhood at Brindabella, Miles Franklin includes an anecdote from “a Queensland girl friend” who had “told [Franklin] that she was so fond of her carpet snake that when she found it coiled on a flourbag in its residential quarters she would stroke it in passing as one does a cat.”

Malone worked as a governess but became frustrated by the limited opportunities available for women in northern Queensland. She left for the United States in July 1914, armed with an inheritance of more than £1000 from her uncle and a letter of introduction to Miles Franklin from a mutual acquaintance.

On 4 September, as the first world war loomed over Europe, she called on Franklin at her Chicago office, bringing flowers. This was the beginning of a friendship that would endure over more than forty years. The bond between Malone, Franklin and a third friend, the Brisbane-born writer and illustrator Kathleen Ussher (also profiled in this collection), can be traced through Franklin’s archives and is described in Ross Davies’s Three Brilliant Careers (2015). With the war continuing, the three women reunited in London in late 1915.

For the Malone family, the trenches stretching across the Western Front had special significance. Two of Nell’s younger brothers, Edward (Ted) and John, would serve with the Australian Imperial Force as it fought its way across France and Belgium. After Ted was wounded at Messines on 7 June 1917, he and Nell were reunited at the 3rd Australian Auxiliary Hospital in Dartford, England. It was the first time the siblings had seen each other since Nell had left Charters Towers three years earlier. Ted was wounded again by gas at Villers-Bretonneux, but both brothers survived the war.

Possibly influenced by her brothers’ service on the Western Front, Nell volunteered as a hospital orderly with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. Founded in 1914 by Dr Elsie Inglis as part of a broader suffrage effort, these frontline medical units were run and staffed entirely by women. Malone and Ussher served with the Girton and Newnham Unit in Salonika, the northern Greek town that had become an Allied centre on the Macedonian Front. There, according to an account published in 1916, women served variously as “women orderlies, sisters, chauffeuses, clerks, matrons, cooks, sanitary inspectors, and medical women.”

The Salonika camp — a double row of tents separated by a pathway known as “Regent Street” or the “Champs-Élysées” — occupied a flat stretch of ground near the sea. Although they mainly looked after French patients, the Scottish Women also assisted Serbian, Senegalese, Chinese, Montenegrin, Romanian and British casualties.

In 1915, an anonymous member described the scene for a pamphlet entitled The Call of Our Allies and the Response of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service. Across the bay, she wrote, Mount Olympus was clearly visible, while the city itself “looked like a jewel set upon a hill.” Despite the difficult conditions in which the Scottish Women were expected to serve, she recalled that “the reds and blues of the horizon and the countless white minarets and the fine old city walls surrounding it make a charming view.” At the entrance to the camp, the Union Jack, the French Tricolour and the Red Cross flag were displayed.

Malone proved deeply devoted to service. Following the Armistice, she remained in the Balkans until at least 1922, providing humanitarian aid to Serbian orphanages before a period with the Serbian Relief Fund and then the American Educational Home for Serbian War Orphans.

After returning to London, she accepted a position as governess for Maud Linder, the daughter of Max Linder, an immensely popular French silent film star, and Ninette Peters, his young wife. Linder had been the highest-paid film star in the world in 1912, making a salary of over a million francs a week, but his depression and substance abuse was exacerbated by his wartime service. On 31 October 1925, in a hotel in Paris, he allegedly killed Ninette before taking his own life. (Although the inquest concluded it was a murder-suicide, Linder’s family claimed it was a double suicide.) Maud Linder was fifteen months old.

Malone moved with Maud to Colwyn Bay on the Welsh coast, living for several months under an assumed name while Ninette’s mother, Mathilde, and Max’s family pursued a high-profile custody battle. When Maud was sent to the Linder family home in Cavernes, Malone went with her, and she accompanied her again when the custody decision was reversed and Maud went to live with her maternal grandmother. By the time the second world war began, Nell, Maud and Mathilde were living near Versailles.

On the evening of 5 December 1940, during the coldest winter of the second world war, all women with British papers in Occupied France were rounded up. Malone was removed from the home she shared with Maud and Mathilde and sent to an internment camp at Caserne Vauban in Besançon, near the Swiss border. Sharing a room with up to forty British women — nurses, couturiers, dancers and nuns — she demonstrated the same strength she had shown at Salonika and while caring for Maud Linder. She appears briefly in Katherine Lack’s Frontstalag 142: The Internment Diary of an English Lady (2010). Lack’s great-aunt, Fanny Twemlow, recorded a short poem about Nell:

In Vauban
I first set my eyes on dear Helen Malone
She wheeled her wheelbarrow
Past drains wide and narrow
Singing work yet more work again and again.

After the war, Malone continued to work as a governess in Paris, but her life remained entwined with Maud Linder’s. She would reunite in Paris and London with her friends from the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, but never returned to Australia.

In 2012, Maud Linder opened a retrospective of her father’s life at the Louvre. She made special mention of the Australian governess who had remained with her throughout her turbulent childhood.

Nell Malone died in Paris in 1963 and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery, sharing a burial plot with Ninette Peters. In 2017, Maud Linder, the child she had so ardently protected, was buried there too. •

Further reading

Three Brilliant Careers, by Ross Davies, Boolarong Press, 2015

Her Brilliant Career: The Life of Stella Miles Franklin, by Jill Roe, HarperCollins, 2008

A History of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, by Eva Shaw McLaren, Hodder and Stoughton, 1919

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At present, the federal government subsidises fifteen hours a week of preschool for four-year-olds through a deal with the states and territories called the Universal Access National Partnership. But it has still not committed any funding for 2020, preventing preschools from signing long-term leases and contracts or preparing their budgets. Meanwhile, it shows no sign of following Labor’s lead and extending the subsidy to three-year-olds.

Under attack in parliament last week, education minister Dan Tehan was keen to change the topic. The real point, he said, is that the Coalition is able to fund services because it runs a strong economy, at which point he segued into the story of a self-funded retiree aggrieved by Labor’s dividend imputation policy. Warming to the theme, assistant children and families minister Michelle Landry told the House, “We are building a strong economy, and part of that is because we are not afraid to stand in this place and say a certain four-letter word, and that four-letter word is ‘coal.’”

Among the many shortcomings of the government’s response has been its failure to engage with the compelling economic and fiscal case for investing in early childhood education. As their erstwhile Coalition colleague Adrian Piccoli told the Press Club, “There are significant economic benefits, both from a workforce participation perspective as well as economic benefits from improved performance in education.” Or, as Susan Pascoe and Deborah Brennan write in Lifting Our Game, their report for the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence, “there is considerable and consistent evidence that investment in quality early childhood education has a strong return on investment.”

One of the numerous examples cited by Pascoe and Brennan is a study of the impact of Spain’s decision to include three-year-olds in public preschools in the 1990s. The study, conducted by researchers at Utrecht University, found that the Spanish reform ultimately returned four dollars for every dollar spent. While increased workforce participation was a factor, the researchers concluded that “the gains for children are the major driver of the total societal gains of universal ECEC [early childhood education and care].”

To understand why this is so, we need to recognise that “the past twenty years has seen an explosion of research on how brains develop and a wholesale rethinking of how children learn,” says Stacey Fox, a leading Australian early education researcher who spoke alongside Adrian Piccoli at the Press Club. “We now know that in the first five years children learn more and learn faster than at any other time in their lives,” Fox said. “By the age of five a child’s brain has reached 90 per cent of its total growth.” So what happens before primary school even begins will shape the fundamental architecture of a child’s brain, forming the foundation for all future learning.

In this critical developmental window, play-based learning is an extension and enrichment of the natural tendency of children to explore, discover, improvise and create. By way of example, Fox referred to children building a castle out of blocks, an activity that in itself will develop their fine motor skills. But if the castle falls down because it lacks a stable base, an educator might prompt the child to ask why or to rebuild it in another way. The activity might even evolve into an impromptu experiment to compare the stability of two castles. Then, when another child comes along and knocks the castle down or wants to build something else, “the educator helps mediate that moment; helps coach them in how to resolve that conflict; gives them tools and tips on how to manage their emotions: take a deep breath; think about what’s going on for the other child.”

If everyone gets interested in building a castle, it might be possible to develop a sequence of learning that extends children — the history of castles; how bridges work; an excursion to see a bridge — and gives them a chance to try, practise and consolidate new know-how. “It’s really skilled early childhood educators who create those opportunities and extend the learning that’s going on moment for moment for each of the children,” Fox observed.

The evidence of the longer-term significant impact of interventions like these is essentially beyond dispute. As the Productivity Commission outlined in its most recent five-yearly productivity review, “There is evidence of immediate socialisation benefits for children, increased likelihood of a successful transition into formal schooling and improved performance in standardised test results in the early years of primary school as a result of participation in preschool programs. The benefits are even greater for children from disadvantaged backgrounds and can persist into adulthood.”

The Longitudinal Survey of Australian Children came to a similar conclusion. It found that preschool attendance was associated with improved performance in Year 3 NAPLAN tests in numeracy, reading and spelling, equating to fifteen to twenty weeks of schooling. Across its member economies, the OECD’s Starting Strong 2017 report found, the average advantage in science performance among fifteen-year-olds who attended two years of preschool equated to half a year of formal schooling.

These findings support the conclusions of seminal studies like Britain’s Effective Provision of Pre-School Education (EPPE) project, which tracked 3000 young people over a decade and a half and found that, at age sixteen, students who attended two years of preschool achieved higher overall exam scores and better grades in English and maths.

Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are overrepresented among the 22 per cent of school starters who are considered to be developmentally vulnerable, and stand to gain the most from access to two years of early childhood education. A critical challenge lies in the fact that enrolment and consistent attendance are not the same thing. Ninety-six per cent of four-year-olds are enrolled in preschool, but around 30 per cent are not regular attendees. As Dan Tehan told parliament, “35 per cent of vulnerable and disadvantaged children and up to 41 per cent of Indigenous children are not attending for the fifteen hours on offer.” It is a very real problem, even if it is unclear how the minister believes the government’s refusal to commit funds will help.

In this connection, Stacey Fox praises the Victorian government’s Access to Early Learning program, which identifies barriers to attendance and assists families to locate, enrol in and engage with early childhood programs. “They actually work in the local community to work out what those barriers are and to get rid of them, and really work with families to help them understand why early childhood education is every bit as important as school,” Fox said. “I’ve seen the evaluation results of that particular model and it was really effective.”

In their report, Susan Pascoe and Deborah Brennan highlighted the NSW government’s Start Strong program. It requires at least three-quarters of any funding increase to providers to be passed on in fee reductions (a government-imposed discipline that is almost unimaginable in dealings with fee-charging primary and secondary schools). The requirement, as Pascoe and Brennan noted, saw some preschools dropping their fees to the levels of a quarter of a century ago (again, pretty much unimaginable in the compulsory school sectors).

At heart, Adrian Piccoli’s message to Minister Tehan (and the treasurer and the prime minister) is a simple one. “Budgets are moral documents. They say what you think this country should be about.” If the Morrison government doesn’t heed the moral and policy imperative to expand early childhood education, it might be forced to reckon more closely with the political considerations. As Piccoli pointed out, “early childhood resonates with voters; it’s a major cost-of-living issue.” Public support for Labor’s position is at 77 per cent, according to polling conducted by Essential Media, and even higher among the 11 per cent of voters with children under five. It might pay for the government to bring more than coal and franking credits to the debate when it returns to parliament in April. •

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The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, set up in the dying days of the Gillard government, is scheduled to hand its final report to the Turnbull government this Friday. As well as scrutinising 1.2 million documents, the commission has held fifty-seven public hearings over 444 days. It has heard from 1300 witnesses, many of them offering gut-wrenching accounts of what they have endured, and its impact.

In private sessions, the commissioners have listened to testimony from almost 8000 survivors of child sexual abuse. On Thursday the commission’s chair, Justice Peter McClellan, will present a selection of these accounts, Message to Australia, to the National Library of Australia, where it will be publicly available.

To casual observers, the royal commission’s work might have seemed like an inquiry into the Catholic Church. Equally if not more disturbing, though, is the evidence of the sheer range of institutions that have failed children. As well as by institutions run by various denominations and faiths, children have been failed by governments of all political persuasions, schools both private and public, non-government welfare agencies, the judiciary, sporting bodies, the scouting movement and the Australian Defence Force.

Amid the extensive media coverage of the royal commission’s work, much attention has been paid to the testimony of individual victims of abuse. Institutional figures have been subjected to searching, sometimes searing, cross-examination by Gail Furness SC, the counsel assisting the royal commission. The news media’s abiding interest in the personal and the immediate, though, means far less attention has been paid to the structural reasons why institutions have failed to protect children, and why institutions have then ignored, deflected, doubted or even covered up revelations.

On these questions, the commission has much to offer. On its website are not just transcripts and lists of exhibits about each of the fifty-seven case studies, but also fifty-two research reports. Ranging in length from forty to 300-plus pages, they examine the causes of abuse in institutions, how to better identify it, the best examples of institutional responses and treatments for survivors, and how governments should respond.

Drawing on this research, we want to try to answer the question posed right at the beginning of the article. Before that, two caveats. First, it is important to remember that the great majority of sexual abuse of children happens not in institutions but within the family home, or in the community at the hands of relatives or family friends.

Second, sexual abuse of children is by no means a modern phenomenon — inquiries into child prostitution and incest were held in Sydney in the mid nineteenth century, for instance — but child sexual abuse has, in the words of Harvard University psychiatry professor Judith Herman, a history of “episodic amnesia.”

In her path-finding book, Trauma and Recovery, Herman writes that attention to child abuse and other psychological traumas has oscillated between periods of intense activity and periods of inertia. Why? “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma.” The study of psychological trauma also brings people ineluctably into contact with human vulnerability and the human capacity for evil.

Sympathising with the victims of a natural disaster is easy, but when people are responsible for the trauma, by sexually abusing a child for instance, those who bear witness are caught between victim and perpetrator. To sympathise with the victim we must take on part of the burden of their pain, and do something about it. But the perpetrator makes the opposite demand, says Herman, and he (it is overwhelmingly men who sexually abuse children) usually occupies a position of power and authority. Speaking out demands not only will but courage.

With all this in mind, we focus here on a particularly useful research report written for the royal commission by Donald Palmer in collaboration with Valerie Feldman and Gemma McKibbin. A professor in the University of California’s business school, Palmer drew on the knowledge he accrued studying the dysfunctional culture of the business organisations that contributed to the global financial crisis.

The first thing their report makes clear is how little academic attention has been given to examining why institutions fail children. A search of the academic literature yielded 4400 articles about child sexual abuse but only forty-one — or 1 per cent — looking at the role of the cultures of institutions.

Mapping Palmer’s framework and the existing literature onto the commission’s case studies of seven institutional settings, the report found that children in institutions were sexually abused in one of two ways. They were attacked suddenly, with little prior interaction, as the commission heard was the case for inmates at the Parramatta Training School for Girls and the Institution for Girls in Hay. These attacks were easier for the perpetrators because the girls were imprisoned and subject to their absolute authority. The second type of abuse, seemingly more common in Australian institutions such as the Catholic Church, boarding schools and sporting clubs, unfolded over time, and inevitably involved grooming and secrecy. According to Gemma McKibbin, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, “You can’t have child sexual abuse in institutions without secrecy or grooming or both.”

Unrelenting routine and hard labour: Parramatta Training School for Girls in the mid 1960s.

With most cases of child sexual abuse taking place in the home or perpetrated by people they know, though, a third approach involves a “slippery slope of boundary violations.” Researchers say this abuse is more “haphazard” than the deliberately planned attacks commonly seen in institutions. Each time a social or personal boundary between the adult and the child is transgressed, the abuser is encouraged to escalate his or her behaviour. This is not to suggest that such abusers are any less responsible for their actions. Rather, the gradual shifting of boundaries is a variety of the grooming process.

Regardless of the pathway taken, though, the research is unequivocal: perpetrators are culpable for their actions and the children are victimised in equal measure.

Within institutions, researchers found that the perpetrators are more likely to plan their abuse carefully. Integral to this planning are the special attention, privileges and gifts given to planned victims. Critically, this grooming extends to the perpetrator’s own colleagues and the child’s parents and caregivers, and is designed to shore up his or her reputation as someone to be trusted. As a consequence, victims are less likely to report the abuse and, if they do, they are less likely to be believed.

This leads to the broader question of why child sexual abuse isn’t detected by those working in institutions, for which the research identified a series of reasons.

First, institutions’ hierarchical structures mean that they compartmentalise duties, encouraging employees to focus on efficiency rather than the merits of the tasks they carry out. This, says the report, is a root cause of “organisational misconduct,” whose most infamous expression was in the defence that they were just following orders used by Nazi officers at the Nuremburg war crimes trials.

The Caringbah Outside School Hours Care program staff handbook shows how the laudable aim of creating positive relationships between staff and children can mask grooming behaviours, making it difficult for staff to identify and report abuse. “You are doing a good job,” the handbook said, “when… your children are always hanging on you, holding your hand, or asking for piggyback rides.”

Second, so insidious is grooming that the child, by accepting gifts such as drugs or alcohol, can be accused by the perpetrator and those representing the institution as being complicit.

Third, the more status and power the perpetrators and their allies have in an organisation, the harder it is for the victim and those who observe the abuse to be heard and believed. They may even be punished by both the abuser and the institution.

The effect of this power imbalance is starkly illustrated in the case of a thirteen-year-old girl who swam for the Scone Swimming Club and was coached by Stephen Roser. His position of authority obliged her to follow his instructions when he told her to “float stomach down in the water in front of him and to wrap her thighs around his hips and stroke with her arms without using her legs”. While she was in this position he sexually abused her.

Palmer’s research found at least five other hurdles to the detection of abuse.

The first is known as “motivated blindness,” the tendency we have to overlook or downplay events that might affect us badly. This could explain why so many of the royal commission’s case studies include differing accounts of the same event. For example, a mother of a Geelong Grammar boy said she told the principal that a teacher, Jonathan Harvey, had made “sexual advances” towards her son. But principal John Lewis testified that she had only “complained” that Jonathan Harvey tried to massage her son’s thigh after a rugby injury.

The second is a variation of the first; “cognitive dissonance” occurs when staff in an institution observe behaviours in workmates that are, on the face of it, disturbing but don’t square with their existing perceptions. In these instances, Palmer says, staff either dismiss the behaviour as accidental or a one-off, or they alter their own perceptions to see the behaviour as benign or insignificant.

The royal commission heard how a worker at the Caringbah Outside School Hours Care program didn’t report her suspicions about her superior, Jonathan Lord (who was convicted of having sexually abused twelve children), because she did not feel comfortable making a complaint against a supervisor, even though, “on reflection, John did sometimes have children on his lap,” as she later testified. “At the time I didn’t think it was suspicious in itself, but I did think that it wasn’t a good look, as it made it look to the other children that he had favourites.”

Third, people have a simple desire to get along in the social setting of the workplace. This desire to bond, or “in-group bias” as the researchers call it, is the key to the fourth factor stopping the reporting of child sexual abuse. It happens when members think they are better than, or even morally superior to, those outside of their group. This is particularly evident in the Catholic Church’s belief that canon law has higher standing than the laws of secular society. It also helps explain the church’s initial belief that accusations of child sexual abuse were motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment.

Fifth, the imbalance between the perpetrator’s power and status and that of the victim and those who witness the abuse means it is less likely that the institution will either stop the abuse or report the offender.

Beyond these complex social dynamics, other characteristics of what the research report terms “total institutions” work against children’s safety. By their very nature, total institutions — of which a prison is the most obvious model — involve staff exercising total control by enforcing impersonal rules and procedures. These institutions exist in order to transform human beings.

Few institutions that care for and provide services for children have all the characteristics of total institutions. But some, such as the Parramatta Training School for Girls, the Institution for Girls in Hay, and the youth training or receptions centres of Turana, Winlaton and Baltara, exhibited most of the characteristics.

Boarding schools, especially as they existed in the period examined by the royal commission, exhibit a surprising number of these characteristics. They include Geelong Grammar, perhaps the nation’s most prestigious boarding school, which is the subject of one of the case studies discussed in the research report. (One of us, a boarder there between 1966 and 1975, can recall that the toilet cubicles in the primary school boarding house had no doors and that boarding house masters were required to watch over the boys in the communal showers each morning.)

Other organisations that care for children, such as daycare centres, sporting clubs, scout groups, schools and churches, display some attributes of total institutions: they constitute “alternate moral universes” that can hold all-embracing assumptions about human nature; they attempt to extinguish their members’ previous identities; they promote secrecy; they have unique power structures; and they have unique informal group dynamics.

All of these factors are evident in the Catholic Church, an organisation premised on the belief that each human being is flawed but capable of redemption; critically, this includes priests who sexually abuse children. Church doctrine also has its own clearly defined “alternate moral universe,” in which its members are expected to follow specific rules. Fundamental to their faith is adherence to canon law above secular law.

Following these strict rules helps the Catholic Church extinguish the previous identity of its priests by assuming control of every aspect of their lives, from how they dress and where they live to the character of their intimate relationships, as prescribed by the vow of celibacy.

The upholding of canon law also explains — but does not excuse, as the royal commission has made abundantly clear in the release of five reports about the church in the past week — the church’s practice of dealing with offending priests itself rather than reporting their crimes to the police. Among many examples heard by the commission was an account of how John Gerard Nestor, a priest in the diocese of Wollongong, was moved to another parish after offending, and went on to sexually abuse more children. Parishioners were not told of the previous crimes.

But the church’s belief in its own moral universe was also indulged by the wider community, both here and overseas. As late as 2013, in twenty-two out of fifty US states, clergy were exempt from the mandatory sex abuse reporting requirements followed by teachers, social workers and healthcare professionals.

In Australia, the commission heard that the Catholic Church wasn’t alone in receiving preferential treatment. Those in charge at the Parramatta Training School for Girls and the Institution for Girls in Hay may also have been given at least de facto protection, with one survivor saying she was told by the police, “We can’t do anything… It’s a government institution and you have been made a ward of the state and they are supposed to be the ones [who look after you].”

These institutions also tried to extinguish evidence of the girls’ pre-institutional identities by shaving their heads, confiscating their belongings and banning them from speaking to guards unless spoken to. Staff, who saw themselves as transforming lives, told survivors that they would “make you or break you” and branded them “liars.” Apart from being unable to report abuse unless directly asked by a guard, this also meant the girls were highly unlikely to be believed.

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that secrecy also plays a part in child sexual abuse in organisations that don’t have the hallmarks of total institutions, such as schools, hospitals and local organisations including boys’ clubs, sporting clubs and scouts.

There is a paucity of research into these groups in Australia, but material cited in Palmer’s report showed that senior officials of Boy Scouts of America withheld from junior staff details of child sexual abuse by other staff members. Instead, they “quietly” referred abusers to counsellors to “straighten up” and then let them keep working, which, like the treatment of Catholic priests in Australia, allowed them to abuse again.

Total institutions, and institutions sharing some of their characteristics, can have very strong informal group dynamics that may influence the reporting of child sexual abuse. Managers and staff who work for organisations that don’t encourage any discussion of sex or of the problematic behaviour of co-workers may be reluctant to report their suspicions of abuse. Co-workers in these workplaces may see any criticism, however slight, as divisive.

A draft letter written by the principal of Geelong Grammar, John Lewis, intended for teacher Jonathan Harvey, demonstrates this reluctance to discuss child sexual abuse with any real frankness. It also shows the tension between trusting colleagues and looking after children in their care:

A real problem for your continuing work in the school… is that barriers of distrust have grown up between you and a good number of your senior colleagues. Without wishing to find members in that sort of situation several house masters for instance (not just from the current group) have found themselves in situations where they are torn between the trust which they would like to exhibit in a colleague and their responsibility. Their concern is over relationships with some pupils which they do not believe to be in the best interest of those pupils…

One staff member who worked with Jonathan Lord at the Caringbah Outside School Hours Care program said she would feel uncomfortable making a complaint “because although it is really good that we have lots of friendships with the team, things always seem to get back to people even if they are not meant to.”

The researchers found this impulse to trust superiors, peers or subordinates is stronger where there is a shared professional or religious affiliation. The Catholic Church has an elaborate organisational apparatus for dealing with complaints against priests, which includes the Congregation for the Clergy. This organisation is staffed by priests and known to favour fellow priests, as it did in the case of John Gerard Nestor, whose appeal was sustained, slowing his expulsion from the priesthood.

A final important contributing factor is the informal power dynamics operating among children themselves. The royal commission heard, for instance, that when a boy at Geelong Grammar was sexually abused at least some of his peers took part or did not step in to stop the abuse.

Informal power dynamics can also make it difficult for victims to report abuse. Survivors of abuse at the hands of fellow inmates in youth correctional institutions told the commission that they didn’t report the abuse because they feared retribution. It can also stop victims reporting the abuse for years, as appears to have happened with a survivor of abuse by swimming coach, Terry Buck. The victim testified he kept silent about the abuse because Buck, a fellow coach, enjoyed the status of “an Olympian and an Australian sporting icon.”

This article has only begun to sketch the complex set of interacting social, psychological and cultural elements that have allowed so many children in so many different institutions to be sexually abused. What is important to underscore is the fact that at the centre of every instance of child sexual abuse examined by the commission is a socially sanctioned imbalance of power between the child and those charged with the responsibility of looking after them.

The flood of testimony by adult survivors of abuse over the past four and a half years has revealed many things, not least an unintentionally and bitterly ironic illustration of the original problem of power imbalance. When adults testify to their abuse, they are usually believed; when children, especially those in the care of institutions, testify, they often aren’t. Yet that is when they most need to be heard because that is when they are most vulnerable. ●

By the same authors: Creating child-centred institutions

The post Why do institutions fail to protect children? appeared first on Inside Story.

Legitimate concern has been expressed at the government’s plan to cap redress at $150,000 per person rather than the commission’s recommended $200,000. The recommendation that priests be added to the list of those subject to mandatory reporting requirements has been supported by the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, though it was immediately rejected by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.

That there is division within the Catholic Church about how to respond to the commission’s final report is evident — as Joanne McCarthy, the journalist whose work helped spark the royal commission, writes — in the church’s unwillingness to make public the 1000-page report of its Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which it has had since March.

The ceiling on compensation and breaking the seal of confession are questions that spark debate if not outrage among the general public, but they are just two among the 409 recommendations made by the commission in its seventeen-volume report. In fact, the sheer scale of the royal commission’s work — even its executive summary runs to 220 pages — poses a challenge. How do we absorb and debate its many recommendations? Not only has it gathered vast amounts of information, evidence and testimony but the issues it covers are complex and the subject matter distressing.

In an earlier article for Inside Story, we asked how it was that so many children had been failed by so many institutions for so many years, and found illuminating answers in the fifty-two research reports produced by the commission. Given that it is impossible to deal with the royal commission’s work in a single article and that institutional failure was our previous focus, the need to create child-centred institutions will be our subject here.

It’s fair to say that when the royal commission began five years ago the community’s overall knowledge of how to identify, report and respond to child sexual abuse was as limited as the literature on the topic. As a report for the commission by Portland State University’s Keith Kaufman and British researcher Marcus Erooga concludes, “there was no existing empirical evidence or theoretical base on organisational culture and institutional child sexual abuse, beyond recognition that it was important.” An Adelaide research team, Michael Proeve, Catia Malvaso and Paul DelFabbro, found that the “overwhelming majority” of available research is based on known perpetrators, and there is not enough information to “make predictions about the likelihood of being a perpetrator.”

Researchers acknowledge the need for more work on sexual abuse by peers and abuse of children by women, given the large number of women working in education. The latter point was highlighted by the recent arrest of Malka Leifer, a former principal of an Orthodox Jewish school in Melbourne, on seventy-four counts of child sexual abuse. Those allegations are an outlier, however; the royal commission found that all but 6.2 per cent of the 6875 survivors who attended its private sessions were abused by a male.

It is important to remember that far more children are abused within families or by someone they know than they are in institutions, but this does not lessen the gravity of the fact that more than 4000 individual institutions were reported to the commission. Its final report declares that “the sexual abuse of children has occurred in almost every type of institution where children reside or attend,” with some institutions having multiple abusers.

The final report also found that many institutions did not have a culture of prioritising children’s interests; instead, “some leaders felt their primary responsibility was to protect the institution’s reputation, and the accused person.” On the information the royal commission received, “the greatest number of alleged perpetrators and abused children were in Catholic institutions.”

If we are much clearer now about the magnitude of abuse and the urgency of the task ahead, we must not squander the courage of the 8000-plus survivors who told their stories to the royal commission, nor negate the efforts of its 680-strong workforce. We now know that child sexual abuse has been occurring for generations and that to assume it will not continue in the future would be a tragic mistake.

The message from researchers is just as unequivocal: society must demand its institutions redefine what it means to exercise power over children in their care.

How might we achieve this? Some answers can be found in the research reports prepared for the royal commission by Kaufman and Erooga and by Donald Palmer. Each points to the seemingly simple conclusions of two researchers working separately, David Finkelhor and Edgar Schein. The fact that they published their findings more than thirty years ago underscores the need to build stronger bridges between academics, those who run institutions and the community.

In 1984 Finkelhor established four conditions that enable perpetrators to sexually abuse a child. First, of course, they have to be motivated to commit the abuse. Then they have to overcome “internal inhibitors” that they may have, such as thinking child sexual abuse harms the child. The next step is to overcome any external barriers between themselves and the child, such as adult supervision. Last, the abuser has to overcome the child’s own resistance.

This makes one point very clear. We need to make it harder for perpetrators to abuse — regardless of the institution they are in, whether that is a day-care centre, respite service for disabled children, church, school or youth detention centre — by increasing the risk of being caught and limiting the opportunities to offend. It also means — and this critical ingredient was absent in many cases reported to the royal commission — that institutions must ensure that they foster a child-focused culture “led by senior management and wholeheartedly endorsed and owned by staff at all levels,” in the words of Kaufman and Erooga.

The researchers argue that the current system reles too heavily on screening techniques. “The best way to reduce the risk of institutional child sexual abuse,” write Kaufman and Erooga, “is to avoid dangerous practice rather than attempt to screen out allegedly dangerous people.” Screening is important in employing staff and accepting volunteers in organisations that care for children, of course, but it is “far from guaranteed to deter or detect all individuals who might present a risk.”

A 2012 study by Erooga, Debra Allnock and Paula Telford found that only one person in a sample of twenty-one convicted institutional sex offenders had a previous conviction. Perpetrators told the researchers that they took advantage of the “policies, climate, culture and norms” of institutions to gain access to children. Again, research offers guidance, this time from Edgar Schein in 1984, whom Palmer credits with developing one of the “earliest and most authoritative analyses of organisational culture.”

Schein argues that leaders convey a sense of identity in five ways: by the people they hire and fire; by the behaviour they reward and punish; by the issues they choose to focus on; by how they handle crises; and by their own attitudes and behaviour. Palmer’s research shows that organisational leaders who “talk to staff members, parents and children about child sexual abuse outside the context of formal training sessions are conveying that the issue is important to them, and implying that it should be important to others as well.”

Strict screening techniques can be seen as a kind of fire hose wielded by authorities to keep a known threat at bay, but it is more important that the institution itself is fire-proofed, with employees from the ground up equipped to define, deter and report any attempt to abuse children. All those who deal with children should be a fire wardens, identifying themselves as protectors of the children in their care.

Schein says the first step is to “unfreeze” internalised attitudes that otherwise block an organisation’s training efforts. Second, the organisation needs to inculcate the ethic that there is zero tolerance for child sexual abuse. And finally, the new culture must be “refrozen,” which means reinforcing the new attitudes.

Palmer argues that Schein’s concept of “engineering artefacts and practices” could be yet another way for institutions to combat child sexual abuse. Sporting clubs, for instance, could give awards not only for winning races but to recognise children and coaches “for behaviour consistent with assumptions, values and beliefs, and norms that help prevent child sexual abuse.” Older, more accomplished athletes might be asked to serve as “big brothers” or “big sisters” to younger, less accomplished athletes.

The same report argues that there is a strong need to “combat the endorsement of grooming behaviour.” In the case of boarding schools, it suggests purging the organisation of the belief that teachers need to develop close personal relationships with students and instead emphasising strong boundaries and the development of “more professional relationships with students (in which the teacher is viewed as having expert knowledge and the student is viewed as their client).”

What the testimony of survivors to the royal commission laid bare was the fact that one of the greatest barriers to victims’ disclosing child sexual abuse is fear they will not be believed. A 2015 study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies cited by Erooga, Allnock and Telford says that children must be sent very clear messages that they will be believed when they report abuse. The research team recommended that legislation be created to strengthen victims’ rights to privacy, which would foster more humane treatment of victims and encourage reporting of abuse. The team also suggests setting up ways that victims could report from outside the institution, encouraging anonymous reporting and making the process less onerous.

Palmer’s research found that children are less likely to report their abuse when the institution has a “macho culture” that prizes stoicism in the face of harsh treatment by staff or peers. This should be replaced, he says, by the belief that reporting such treatment is a sign not of weakness but of strength, honesty and maturity. The research advocates a cultural shift whereby those working at a residential childcare facility would opt to accept children’s reports of abuse at face value and treat them as “true, until proven otherwise” rather than as untrustworthy.

How does the commission propose that these and other insights be translated into action? In its sixth recommendation the commission proposes that ten Child Safe Standards be adopted by all levels of government and by all institutions and organisations that care for children, regardless of size, duty or denomination.

According to the standards, child safety should be embedded in institutional leadership, governance and culture. Children should participate in decisions affecting them and be taken seriously, and families and communities should be informed and involved. Equity should be upheld and diverse needs taken into account. People working with children should be both suitable and supported. Processes to respond to complaints of child sexual abuse must be child-focused. Staff need to be equipped through regular training with the knowledge, skills and awareness to keep children safe. The physical and online environments must minimise the opportunity for abuse to occur. Built into the Child Safe Standards is a recognition of the need for continuous review and improvement. Policies and procedures must also document how the institution is child safe.

The commission has shown that children are too often terrified to speak out. We must learn to read their silence or at the least create an environment sufficiently open to encourage them to speak up without a fear of being ignored or dismissed. As vigilant and well intentioned as we might be as individuals and as members of organisations, the commission warns that there remain serious, systemic problems that will require a concerted national effort to overcome. We must develop a unified model of reporting child abuse across Australia while simultaneously removing the barriers to reporting. Beyond this, we need to improve the training, education and guidance that informs us what we should report and how we should go about it.

The news media performs a vital role in holding power to account and ensuring that vulnerable people’s stories are heard. In its final sitting day last December, the commission noted that many media outlets had provided extensive coverage of its work but the chief commissioner, Justice Peter McClellan, singled out the value of the ABC’s reporting on every one of its case studies on television, radio and online almost every sitting day.

As the commissioners write in their acknowledgment of the importance of each survivor’s testimony: “The survivors are remarkable people with a common concern to do what they can to ensure that other children are not abused. They deserve our nation’s thanks.” These remarkably heartfelt words from royal commissioners also serve as a stinging call for all of us to ensure such widespread tragedies do not occur again. •

The post Creating child-centred institutions appeared first on Inside Story.

The singular, private, interior world that nurtures us also connects us, the aphorism suggests. The English may be divided by class and politics – Bennett’s forceful views on both appear regularly in the London Review of Books – but family life, with its very eccentricities and embarrassments, is a human canvas and shared route to civic belonging.

It’s a seductive pitch, and one with a growing social and even political charge. Family memoirs and sagas, on TV and in the bookshops, are all the rage. The Guardian devotes a weekend supplement to nothing else. The BBC’s hit series Who Do You Think You Are?, where actors and comedians track down an elusive ancestor and emote at a key moment of discovery, has many imitators. Much of the Great War centenary is built around the same template. Families and their secrets are, more than ever, a big thing.

Every powerful cultural trend comes to seem a good match for the times, and this one is no exception. Many resist the accompanying mawkishness, tracing its origin to “Dianafication,” the outpouring of sentiment in 1997 following the princess’s death. But for a country increasingly networked, self-referential, emotionally open and sexually frank, lifting the covers – especially on the past – more often than not feels like progress.

In the background, however, another note, both discordant and disturbing, has been growing louder in recent years, in the wake of cumulative revelations of sexual abuse of children in diverse areas of British society since the 1970s. Discordant, because it exercises the broader cultural shift towards transparency on behalf of hitherto unheard people whose own secrets are exceptionally painful and hard to communicate. Disturbing, because prominent among those charged have been BBC notables and pop chart regulars familiar to (if not always popular with) millions of Britons.

The BBC’s defensive response was to bury the tainted past deep underground: broadcasts wiped, schedules cleansed, repeats banned, names erased. The people quietly made their own psychic readjustment. Editorial skills having done their job, all the abuse scandals that had emerged around the same time – social, institutional, elite, celebrity – were woven into the rolling 24/7 agenda.

Along the way, though, a new awareness of child sexual abuse had hit home. The monstrous predator Jimmy Savile, long-term host of a classic Saturday tea-time “family” show, was at the heart of it. A retrospective shadow had been cast over the formative years of a generation, and would not easily fade. This time, after all, the family secrets of Britain itself were being revealed.

But once these covers were taken off, what exactly could be done? The problem was accentuated by the vastness of the abuse that had evidently occurred, and its disparate nature. It seemed impractical, even arbitrary, to link such cases as the abuse of young people by their guardians and teachers, establishment figures, prominent entertainers, and men working in the marginal economy of English towns – even more, when the timeframe spans four decades. Justice is always particular, after all. Surely each crime, and each individual’s experience, had to be treated on its own merits?

A mixture of contingency and public horror found answers. In 2012–13, the arrest of a handful of former celebrities and the mushrooming reports about the recently deceased Savile encouraged hundreds of women to come forward with testimony of past abuse. Dormant allegations against former high politicians resurfaced, and gained new traction. So did detailed reports by the feminist writer Julie Bindel, and the Times’s Andrew Norfolk, from Rotherham and other English towns. These had exposed long-term exploitation of white girls, some from troubled families or formally supervised by welfare agencies, by networks of men, many of Pakistani descent, the incidence on a scale of thousands. A child protection expert told Bindel in 2010 that perpetrators “are aware that the police do not want to be accused of racism in today’s climate.”

By 2014, as legal cases unfolded, accusations swirled, and the sheer extent of Savile’s and the urban gangs’ crimes was glimpsed, a shocked public moved towards something-must-be-done mode. Clearly, a one-by-one procedural investigation of every incident had to continue. But the past itself was on trial. Numerous reviews – by parliamentary committees, health bodies, regional police forces, and the BBC – were already under way. But something inclusive was required. In Britain, that can only mean a full-scale public inquiry.

Last July, the home secretary Theresa May announced a wide-ranging “independent panel inquiry into child sexual abuse.” Its terms of reference, beginning with “the extent to which State and non-State institutions have failed in their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse and exploitation,” cover England and Wales, and liaise with parallel inquiries in Scotland (whose details will be announced by the end of April) and Northern Ireland.

The process, however, proved messy. In part this reflected Britain’s disaffected political atmosphere. Leading institutions – parliament, police, local councils, and now the BBC – were already held in widespread distrust on account of derelictions and bloated rewards, a sentiment channelled and amplified by hostile press coverage. Backbench MPs saw a chance, as over phone-hacking, to grandstand on an electric issue. Social media was accentuating the routinely febrile tone of public debate. And over child sexual abuse, as with other systemic failures, spokespersons for victims and survivors claimed an active role both in any formal proceedings and in the media.

Almost instantly, these factors kicked in to besiege the inquiry plan. May – who had won rare respect in handling a tough portfolio that includes security, immigration and justice – initially appointed a retired senior judge, Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, as chair. The decision was immediately contested on the grounds that her late brother, Michael Havers, had served as attorney-general in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet in the 1980s, a period associated with lurid rumours of abuse of children around Westminster, by judges, civil servants, senior military and churchmen as well as politicians.

Butler-Sloss lasted six days. It took seven weeks to choose her replacement: Fiona Woolf, a lawyer who was nearing the end of a year’s term as lord mayor of London (the historic core and financial hub known as “the City,” that is, quite separate from Boris Johnson’s fiefdom). She came under fire after admitting a neighbourly acquaintance with Leon Brittan, also a cabinet minister in the 1980s and himself the target of hearsay. After eight weeks, Woolf too was out.

Suspicion of a close-knit elite with a penchant for cover-ups or stitch-ups was now extended to the inquiry’s top-down format. Pressure to rethink led, by February 2015, to a makeover. The inquiry was made statutory, enabling it to access classified documents and examine witnesses under oath, and given a new set of expert advisers. The profile of the chair, Lowell Goddard – a judge on New Zealand’s High Court and former head of the national body monitoring police conduct – also met any “insiderish” concerns.

Goddard’s declaration of intent for a “long, challenging and complex” inquiry is encouraging:

The many, many survivors of child sexual abuse, committed over decades, deserve a robust and thorough investigation of the appalling crimes perpetrated upon them. It is vitally important that their voices are now being heard.

I am committed to leading a robust and independent inquiry that will act on these matters without fear or favour and will hold those responsible to account.

A trusted chair, informed expertise, buy-in from survivors, rigorous power to call to account – all these are crucial if the inquiry is to be effective. Above all, this will mean having a real impact on the society that has allowed child sexual abuse to occur at all levels of society for many years. In its procedures, in the information it brings to light, and in its eventual findings – an interim report is scheduled for the end of 2018 – the inquiry promises to be a landmark event.

In this respect the far-reaching scope of the statutory inquiry is both opportunity and danger. An ability to map institutional failure and wrongdoing over these decades – insofar as its referrals to police and “findings of fact” begin to measure these – will prove vital. So will public education about sexual abuse of children, incorporating comparative national experience and evolving global awareness of the phenomenon. And finding appropriate ways to offer recognition, apology and reparation to survivors is pivotal.

But there are many landmines, all the trickier to navigate as they are strewn across the same terrain that has allowed abuse to go on in the shadows for so long. Some are technical: vaporised computer files and paper trails, for instance. Several are to do with the worst aspects of Britain’s organisational culture: a pass-the-parcel attitude to accountability, mediocre leadership, instincts of collusion and self-protection. To back its formal powers, the inquiry will need strong political backing to bear down on these. Will it be available, especially after the astringent Theresa May leaves the scene?

Other obstacles are to do with social power. A harrowing report on the Rotherham scandal by Alexis Jay, a leading childcare and social work professor, highlights the indifference of officials and police to the prolonged, vicious abuse inflicted on the south Yorkshire town’s lost girls (they numbered at least 1400 between 1997 and 2013). In most cases vulnerable and with few resources before the abuse, those who sought help were fobbed off after it. Many earlier low-status victims seeking justice for violation in penal or care institutions run by local authorities have been similarly disregarded.

At the same time, the suffering of those of middle-class background – abused in, for example, boarding schools, music colleges or religious institutions – can impose its own type of voiceless agony, and lead to lifelong shame or suicide. Class prejudice, or just the vagaries of public concern, can act as a silencer in different directions. Catherine Deveney’s investigations of abuse within the Catholic church and the musicologist Ian Pace’s blog are among efforts to draw attention to this aspect.

Political and conspiracist agendas, now rampant, will also complicate the inquiry’s work. Most media attention so far is on elite and celebrity abuse: properly so in the case of Savile, whose status as TV benefactor and court jester, the guest of royals and of Thatcher, allowed him unfettered access to hospitals and children, an odyssey tracked by Dan Davies’s chilling In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile. A few lesser stars from the same era are now in prison. But how and why they and he got away with it for decades will, when the story is fully told, reveal much about post-1960s Britain.

The new big hunt is for grandee perpetrators of sexual crime in the 1980s. There is strong evidence against a few dead or aged men, and grounds for suspicion against others. But hacking a path to the truth through growing conspiracist thickets will be hard. Each new headline naming a politically convenient target from the Thatcher era as a likely abuser plants murmurs of a witchhunt and seeds of wider doubt.

Culture wars are a final trap for the inquiry. In 2003, Ann Cryer, Labour MP for Keighley, northwest of Bradford and Rotherham, tried to engage police and welfare agencies in dealing with “grooming” by “young Asian lads” of underage white girls, and hit a wall. When she went public there was more evasion and scorn than support, though the campaign helped tighten the law on sexual offences. Today’s responses are often equally reductive and in bad faith (Islam is to blame; most abusers are white men), and greatly inflated by sectarian media.

There may also, however, be extra willingness to look at what has actually happened, not least in light of Julie Bindel and Andrew Norfolk’s in-depth research. The latter found the Rotherham pattern replicated in a dozen locations: of girls primed, transported, tortured and traded with impunity over lengthy periods by networks of men of mainly Pakistani origin. Years and lives have been lost, and big gaps in society’s knowledge remain. But this exceptional journalism – in Norfolk’s case resourced initially by the Times’s editor, who gave him six months’ leave to follow the trail – has set a long overdue challenge: to tackle child sexual abuse and related crimes without prejudice or fear of offence, and free of conformist pieties from any quarter.

Just clearing the landmines will be a huge job for the inquiry. It also has to think laterally. Relevant data come from economic and social contexts. For example, the sociologist Dick Hobbs, now at the University of Western Sydney, has studied the “night-time economy” of England’s urban centres, a floating world where street kids mingle among low-qualified immigrants operating around fast-food outlets and alcohol joints, taxi ranks and drug deals. Such encounters, and the forces that shape them, belong to the deeper backstory of modern child sexual abuse in one of its dimensions.

So does a wider British history of exporting, using or disciplining its young. The Victorian era’s sexual underworld, with its many thousands of child prostitutes, is one point of reference. Another is the mass removal of children to Australia, Canada and elsewhere that lasted until the 1960s, for which prime minister Gordon Brown apologised in 2010 (following Kevin Rudd’s example). The historian Lucy Delap and colleagues, studying official responses to child sexual abuse, note rising concern in the early 1920s, which led in 1925 to a departmental committee on sexual offences against young people. Its report “challenged institutions to respond to child sexual abuse with something better than ‘ignorance, carelessness and indifference.’” But, the scholars warn:

“Ignorance, carelessness and indifference” remained characteristic of twentieth-century attitudes towards child sex abuse. This was not for lack of concern – earlier generations did condemn child sexual abuse, and periodically, tried to strengthen safeguards. However, history shows that for change to happen, firm leadership and transparent management across government and the voluntary sector is vital. A robust investigative press is also essential. Without these, potentially pivotal moments, like 1925 and 2015, may become missed opportunities.

A formidable task, then, even more when responsibility is so widely shared. Yet that might also prove an asset. Child sexual abuse is modern Britain’s heart of darkness, but the country is now emotionally readier than ever to face it – and to reach out to victims and survivors. Every possible protection in place, a “never again” moment, and a catharsis whose outward form is some blend of national recognition, apology, substantial payment and “sorry day”? Any such outcome is a long way off. But the new family secrets are out there and are not going away. For everyone’s sake, this inquiry has to deliver. •

The post Dirty big secrets appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite the initial support of the children’s mother and most of Winchelsea, the father, Robert Farquharson, was convicted of murder at his first trial. Even after a second trial and failed appeals, people were still arguing about his guilt or innocence. In 2011 the ABC’s Australian Story presented the view of Farquharson’s family and friends that an innocent man had been imprisoned. Last year, Megan Norris published the mother’s version of events with a title that leaves no doubt about its contrary perspective, On Father’s Day: Cindy Gambino’s Shattering Account of Her Children’s Revenge Murders.

Helen Garner followed the case from the first committal hearing, when Farquharson politely held the door of the courtroom open for her. Two years later, she attended the seven weeks of tedious technical evidence and the heart-stopping statements at the first trial; three years on, she was at the appeal retrial; and she stuck it out through a Supreme Court appeal eighteen months later, and then for the thirty minutes it took the High Court to reject an application for a final appeal in 2013. She forced herself to observe and record every detail of these trials over the years – a commitment that raises the question, what is to be gained from this intent raking over of the horror? This House of Grief answers that question with a vivid inquiry into the operations of our justice system, an acute study of human psychology and the language that can become self-mythology, and an account, almost in passing, of the way communal ethics are shared across classes in Australia.

Garner treats the courtroom as the arena where justice is performed in our society, and she watches with the attention of a perceptive theatre critic, noting every gesture, every shift of voice or wandering gaze, every evasive phrase. She has done this before – in Joe Cinque’s Consolation – but there her interest was in the spiritual dimension of justice, in the gap between legal and moral rights, and in the failure of public justice to provide any psychological restitution for the loss of life. In this case, she positions herself in the courtroom from the start, trying to see what jurors learn and to understand their responses. She takes us into the “beautiful” Supreme Court of Victoria with its “soaring ceiling, pale plaster walls, and fittings of dark, ponderous timber,” she gives us brief character studies of the barristers and judge, and she turns the evidence into a narrative stripped of the tedium of the court experience.

For days, Farquharson’s barrister batters away at the technical evidence and the police failures in marking out the tyre tracks. Experts dispute the probability of “cough syncope,” a condition that can lead to a loss of consciousness after coughing. There are arguments about the camber of the road. With their learning and experience of the system, the judge and the barristers orchestrate events, drawing the admiration and trust of the newcomers to Australian state justice. An artificial process makes order from the messy, disordered human lives that come to its attention.

Of course, Garner adds another layer of order – her own sensitivity to language and gesture, and her recognition of the individual humanity of the gowned barristers, the judge and the jurors locked up with their responsibility. She imagines the life of the defendant, turned out of his home by his wife to spend his nights with his father after days working at a dreary cleaning job. As the wife takes up with her new partner, a concreter, she speculates about the glamour to a housebound mother of a concrete pour on the new house, and she watches the terrible grief of the family as the technical experts speculate on the nature of the children’s last minutes.

The evidence is so harrowing that the reader may wish to join Garner in the restorative martini or gin that she drinks with friends at the end of the worst days. From time to time, she dreams a redemptive fantasy in which the little boys come back to life. “Was there a form of madness called court fatigue?” she wonders, revealing “the crazy magical thinking that filled my waking mind, and, at night, my dreams: if only Farquharson could be found not guilty, then the boys would not be dead.” The children’s parents and most people in the courtroom seem to think the same way.

A criminal court is one of the rare places in Australia where an educated class of professionals engages with poorer people in a struggle to find a shared ethics and morality. The judges and barristers here are acknowledged as clever, even brilliant, while many of the rural people who give evidence are inarticulate and financially burdened. The unknowable jurors strike Garner as ordinary people, struggling to pay attention in their casual clothes. She shows an acute sensitivity to class, enjoying the “democratic counter” at the coffee cart outside the court, where even the occasional judge stops by for a takeaway.

Inside the court the eminent professor who has never seen a “cough syncope” case suffers by comparison with the doctor from Geelong steadily compiling a list of cases. The police expert who appears with a giant protractor and calculator draws a wry “I hate a bloke who thinks he knows his job” from the children’s grandfather. Garner gently mocks the absurdity of expert jargon as a counsellor talks about the “the parental dyad” and “suicidal ideation” but, more significantly, she picks up the phrases that the participants cling to as explanations for their lives. Cindy Gambino repeats the mantra that she “loved” her husband but was not “in love” with him; Farquharson clutches at stock phrases: “I loved them more than life itself,” “I was a very loving father.” Garner shrewdly notes the recurrence of “the sentimental fantasy of love as a condition of simple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit region in which we are safe from our destructive urges.”

Garner watches the jurors flag under the weight of detail, then notes how they come to attention when a witness invites their sympathy or appeals to their sense of humour. A rattled policeman comments on the excellence of his colleague’s photographs and the court laughs, partly in sympathy for the pasting he is suffering from the defence barrister. Our knowledge of events must always be incomplete, but Garner concludes that we are more likely to rely on our understanding of human behaviour than trust in science. She quotes Janet Malcolm: “Jurors sit there presumably weighing evidence but in actuality they are studying character.”

In this account, Farquharson becomes responsible for his own conviction. He claims his right to silence in the first trial, but the recorded statements he made to the police in the days after the deaths, with their anxious grasping at excuses and lack of concern for the boys, prove devastating. When he takes the stand in the second trial he can add no details about the events of the night, and claims his bereavement as an unassailable excuse for his lack of recall. As Garner puts it, “the final fortnight of evidence was like watching, in ghastly slow motion, a man slither down the face of a cliff. Sometimes his shirt would snag on a protruding branch, or his fall would be arrested by a tiny ledge, a fragile outcrop; but the fabric would stretch and snap, the narrow shelf would crumble, and down he would go again, feet first, eyes wide open, arms outstretched into the void.”

Farquharson seems to lack any imagination or powers of empathy, let alone any language skill. These are the very qualities Garner brings to the matter, enriching his miserable actions and failures with an understanding that encompasses not only the horrors of this case but also its effect on the psyche of all of us who know about it. It is as if she is trying to fill the terrible absence there. Yet she writes with restraint and tact, managing to avoid what she calls “the tabloid language that can reduce the purest human anguish to a pulp.” There are no photographs in her book, though the newspapers have been publishing one of the three boys sitting on a couch that shows them to be as appealing as anyone’s young children.

Occasionally I meet women who refuse to read Helen Garner’s books since The First Stone, or who read all her subsequent work through its prism – as if, once they’ve categorised her as a traitor to feminism, she can have nothing worth hearing to say. In the context of recent prominent sexual harassment and offence trials, The First Stone deserves rereading for its concern about the incompetent way our institutions handle such matters, and the difficulty of finding just penalties for the perpetrators. Joe Cinque’s Consolation looked more closely at the spiritual damage of crime, and the failure of the legal system to provide any emotional or psychological restitution, but it also noted the effects of the defendant’s silence in court and the absence of a jury.

Here, Garner offers a more positive view of the courts. Lex Lasry, the defending barrister who delivered the most devastating line in the Cinque book (“Duty of care and duty to act are not the same thing”), appears as the scrupulous and sensitive judge in the appeal trial. The barristers battle on through every detail to the point of tedium. The police hold the line against determined attack. The witnesses struggle with the awful burden of their knowledge, and the jury reveals itself capable of making decisions independently of the opinions of the public and journalists in the courtroom.

In the closing pages, Garner insists that the fate of the Farquharson children is a legitimate concern for all of us. The court has been the place where that concern springs into action, and This House of Grief leaves us with the slight hope that our justice system can maintain some of our shared sense of humanity. •

The post Character studies appeared first on Inside Story.

Almost everyone knows someone in at least one corner of the “adoption triangle” – adoptee, birth mother or adoptive parent. Regardless of personal links, though, the permanent transfer of babies or young children from the women who bore them to those prepared to raise them as their own is a compelling narrative. In this fresh look at the subject, three scholars in the fields of welfare history, the history of the family, and public policy, offer a lucid, clearly written account, compact in length but not in scope, of adoption in Australia. Their timeline runs from the early years of white settlement to the entirely different conditions in the early twenty-first century, intertwining expert knowledge, first-person experiences, and key documents and legislation. Well-chosen photos of past practice add to the vividness of the narrative.

The authors view the basic transaction – the transfer of the adoptee from one setting to another, often very different one – through the prism of the market within which it occurs. This approach illuminates much about each stage and stakeholder; particularly revealing is how this latter group came to include governments, social workers, hospitals, churches, charities, and self-help and advocacy organisations. (In recent years, some of these parties have publicly apologised for their earlier assumptions and actions.)

The authors examine attitudes towards “illegitimacy,” as well as notions of “a desire for a child,” “a right to a child” and “the best interests of the child,” and the effects on adoption rates of contraception, abortion and reproductive technology. The provision of state support for single mothers, the influence of the media, the speaking out by previously unheard voices, the rise and eventual decline of the inter-country adoption program – each of these unpredictable factors plays a role in the history that unfolds in The Market in Babies.

FORTY or so years ago, when availability outstripped demand and a buyers’ market prevailed, the situation today would have been hard to envisage. In that period of abundance, adoption was administered “as a service to childless couples,” as the authors put it – a service that increasingly privileged them over birth families and adoptees, whose rights were disregarded. Birth records were sealed and a new birth certificate, designed to expunge the past, was issued.

Further back, the first waves of European settlers had made their own informal and fluid arrangements, handing over children they were unable or unwilling to parent to relatives or other families they knew who were prepared to do so. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century, the growth of population centres led to the real beginnings of the market: newspaper advertisements placed by parents seeking adoption, by persons unknown, of children surplus to their requirements or capacity; and other advertisements placed by those wishing to adopt, for a range of motives, not always unmixed. The relinquishing party would often offer financial inducement to the adopting party.

These private arrangements, with their attendant risks for all concerned, ceased in the 1920s when all states except Western Australia (which had already done so in 1896) passed regulating legislation requiring adoptions to be registered and no money to change hands. By guaranteeing the new parents security of possession and protection from the birth family, these new laws were intended to encourage adoption, regarded as the perfect solution to a double problem: the stain on a child of being born outside wedlock, on the one hand, and the pain of infertility experienced by “respectable” childless couples, on the other. Yet the public response to these moves was far from enthusiastic. Demand for babies did take off during and after the second world war, however, and it remained high – and easily met – for the next thirty years or so. In the ten years from 1968, for instance, some 68,000 children were adopted in Australia.

With more children on the market than approved couples to take them in, a peak was reached for the year 1971–72, when just under 10,000 children were placed with new families. In light of the surplus, adoptive parents could afford to be picky; the child they hoped to make their own may have been a precious commodity but it had to be suitable. Highly valued were blond hair, blue eyes, and an acceptable background or heredity… or at least one that a different and better environment could overcome.

Many would-be adoptive couples could view prospective infants on parade at public events (one organisation “reported great success” as a result of displaying the children in its care at its “regular stall” at the Royal Melbourne Show) or make their choice after looking through albums produced by institutions seeking to place relinquished infants. They might also have been enticed by cinema advertisements asking them to consider coming forward. Magazine and newspaper articles depicted married couples who were prepared to adopt a child bearing the stigma of illegitimacy as “open-hearted and generous,” and birth mothers were promoted as “doing the right thing” for their offspring by giving them up.

During the 1950s and 60s, this market spawned the new profession of social work. With private arrangements outlawed, social and welfare workers bent their skills to assessing couples and playing matchmaker with babies. Satisfied couples would sometimes return to adopt subsequent children. Although parents were expected to tell children that they were adopted, the sealing of records meant there was little or no information they could pass on about the child’s origins. It wasn’t until the unsealing of records in most states in the mid 1990s, after intense pressure by lobby groups of the disenfranchised, that adoptees had the opportunity to identify and perhaps trace their birth parents.

The glut of babies to supply a clamorous market had come at a price of enormous suffering for the overwhelmingly young, unmarried (but not necessarily unpartnered) women who had given birth to them. Myriad stories about their shameful treatment are quoted in this book and can be found in many other books, and on websites and blogs. The women recount their ignorance about their condition, their options at the time and their rights; of being pressured by parents, social workers, hospital staff and others to sign away their babies at birth or soon after. Such decisions were often made under the influence of heavy drugs and as the result of other kinds of appallingly cruel, officially sanctioned duress.

Frequently, birth mothers were not told that they had several days in which to revoke their decision to relinquish, and that there was in fact a small amount of government financial aid available to them even prior to the introduction of the pension for supporting mothers in 1973, which would change the equation so dramatically. Had more single mothers been aware of such assistance in those years, more of them might have been able to keep their babies, albeit with financial and other support from their parents.

The second half of the 1970s saw a paradigm shift in the baby market. By 1975 the number of adoptions of children born in Australia had fallen to about 5000 a year, and was on a steady decline; after 1991 it didn’t reach 1000 a year. Fewer babies were being born to single women because of increased use of contraception and access to abortion, and of those who were, their mothers were likely to keep them. The last decades of the century saw the reversal of community and media attitudes towards the morality of mothers raising children on their own. Unpinning the possibility of single motherhood was the increase in the number of women in the workforce and the concomitant rise in the availability and affordability of childcare.

MEANWHILE, the market in babies had taken off in a new direction with the growing national consciousness of war orphans in Vietnam. The dramatic airlift in 1975 of young children, not necessarily orphaned, from a collapsing Saigon to Sydney put the possibility of adopting from overseas firmly on the agenda of hopeful Australian couples (with the added advantage that the birth family was out of the picture). The countries that came to supply these babies included many in the region as well as some in South America, Africa and even Eastern Europe. Adoptive parents endured long waiting lists, intrusive assessments, strict requirements and much bureaucracy; they also needed to travel to collect the child and, ideally, return to the birth country for later visits.

Between 1970 and 2008, more than 10,000 children arrived in Australia as intercountry adoptees. The authors of The Market in Babies have frank reservations about this practice, not least because it reproduces “the same relationships of power and inequality” that adoption within Australia under the old system had reinforced.

For the tiny numbers of people who presently manage to adopt children born in Australia the environment has totally changed. Those few pregnant women who relinquish their babies at birth have a say in whom they go to. Under the “open adoption” conditions that have prevailed for many years, adoptive parents must be prepared to engage in face-to-face contact and/or exchange of information with birth relatives.

People wishing to raise “other people’s children” are limited to applying for those with “special needs,” which could be a physical or other disability, a difficult background, or simply the fact that they are older than babies and toddlers. For various reasons these children cannot live with their birth families, but those families remain in the picture. The placement is likely to be some form of permanent care or long-term fostering rather than adoption; although these forms of care sometimes turn into adoption, that shouldn’t be the expectation.

IT IS to a quite different way of making a family – via offshore surrogacy – that the authors turn their attention in their closing chapter. With the disappearance of baby adoption here, and in the face of an overwhelming desire for a baby of their own (often underpinned by the belief that a right is involved), some Australian couples and unpartnered people are paying women, typically in India, to bear babies for them. (Altruistic surrogacy is the only kind permitted in Australia, and as such is very limited.) In these cases, reproductive technology has generally not worked or is inappropriate.

Paying to have a child gestated in the womb of a woman overseas is “the newest model in the market for children,” the authors write, and “looks set to take the place of adoption” as a way of acquiring a child. The woman who is commissioned to act as a “gestational carrier” for the pregnancy is not the one who provides the egg; this may come from the would-be mother in Australia or from another woman, in India or elsewhere. The sperm comes from the father. Prospective parents in Australia pay about $10,000, including the surrogate’s fee, for the IVF and other services involved. The surrogate is typically involved in order to educate her family, buy a house, or start a business – investments that were previously out of her family’s financial reach. After the birth, her job is done; she hands the child over and it is brought to Australia, or one of the many other countries from which commissioning parents come.

In 2011, more than 250 Australians paid to have babies created via the large and hitherto-unregulated Indian industry. Very recent legislative changes in India are closing off that market to same-sex male couples and unmarried people from abroad, however, as well as imposing other restrictions. But there are other surrogacy markets in other countries (and a lively international trade in eggs and sperm), which prospective Australian consumers will no doubt be exploring. Judging by websites promoting Indian surrogacy services, and the (generally ecstatic) postings by those whose babies were created in this way, for many people (parents and would-be parents) no moral, psychological, legal or other issues complicate the happy scene. •

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JENNIFER sits poised on the edge of a large leather armchair, one of several plush lounges decorating the expansive lobby of the high-rise building where she works in Melbourne’s CBD. She is composed and smartly dressed. If she’s nervous about sharing the intimate details of her life with a stranger, she shows no sign of it.

She speaks quietly and surely, describing the ups and downs that have shaped her first twenty-one years, and her ambitions to move up the ladder at the call centre where she has worked for the past three years. Eventually, she hopes to establish an IT business with her boyfriend.

“If you see your parents working hard and struggling when you’re growing up, it helps you realise that you do need to work hard to support yourself,” Jennifer says. “That’s why I’m the way I am. I’ve been financially independent since I was fifteen and I started working. I’ve never asked my parents for money since then. A lot of my friends don’t understand that I’ve always wanted to work and support myself.”

Some young people might have been derailed by the events that life has already thrown Jennifer’s way – her father’s bankruptcy when she was a young girl, the separation of her parents, the tough times her mother had bringing up five children. But Jennifer sees her early experiences in a largely positive light, recognising that they contributed to her independence and maturity.

She stresses that many contemporaries have known worse, and cites the Life Chances study, a research project tracking the experiences of children born in inner Melbourne during a six-month period in 1990. The study began with the mothers of 167 babies, and the most recent findings – just released by the Brotherhood of St Laurence, or BSL – paint a rich and complex portrait of the study’s “babies” at age twenty-one.

The findings may not be representative of wider Australia – the subjects were sourced from two suburbs that are unusual in having high concentrations of both low- and high-income earners – but they provide a fascinating study in contrasts. They illuminate the differences, and some similarities, between those whose parents are refugees, unskilled workers, or unemployed, and those whose parents are doctors, academics and other well-to-do professionals. (The researchers ask that the suburbs not be named to protect the privacy of their subjects, given the large amount of personal detail revealed in the study’s reports.)

Tim Gilley, who helped establish the study but now works in education research and teaching at Melbourne University, says the contrast between the study’s subjects is what makes the findings so powerful. “It raises the question, if something is good for these [wealthy] children, why isn’t it available for all children?”

While many families have been on the move over the years – only one-fifth still live in the suburbs where the study began – there has been less social and economic mobility. About half are in the same income bracket as they were at the start of the study, 37 per cent have improved their position, and 14 per cent are now worse off financially.

One reason Jennifer has been such an avid reader of the study’s findings is that they record something of her own family’s history. She began to take an interest from when she was about twelve, and says its reports have made her conscious of the positives in her life. “They showed us what other people had been through. Some people have lost their parents, some are homeless,” she says. “That made me appreciate the fact that I do have a family and a house; that even though we don’t have the money, we still do have some things.”

The importance of growing up in a close-knit family is a recurring theme for Jennifer, who says, “I definitely want my own family like that.” She puts more emphasis on family and relationships than material success, and says the earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand and the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States have had a lasting impact. “Those made me aware of what can happen and to expect the unexpected – so to appreciate the time you do have with people that you care about.”

Jennifer acknowledges, however, that responsibility to family can have a downside. She and her siblings help support their mother financially, and “It does feel like a burden sometimes,” she says. “I do think, ‘We’re the children, she should be taking care of us,’ but we have all found our own jobs, so we’re supposed to give something back to her.”

As well as helping pay her mother’s debts, Jennifer is repaying a $35,000 debt incurred when she was eighteen and crashed a hire car. No one was hurt, but the accident changed the course of her life. Only afterwards did she realise she hadn’t been insured to drive the car. She gave up university to get a job to repay the debt, and says she probably would have stayed at university if not for the crash.

But the accident was her fault, she says, and she has no regrets: “The car accident was a big part of me growing up. It’s helped me gain a lot of responsibility; it was a bad situation but there was a positive outcome out of it.” One of the only regrets that Jennifer expresses during our conversation is that she didn’t spend more time with her grandparents in the United States before they died. “When I was younger,” she says, “I didn’t realise how important it would be to go and visit them.”

It’s impossible not to be impressed by Jennifer, especially for those of us who don’t find anyone nearly so thoughtful or mature when we look back to ourselves at her age. But is she typical of twenty-one-year-old Australians?

A clear message from the study is that searching for stereotypes about young people is foolish. Their lives are diverse, and not always predictable from their early circumstances. The 123 young people (out of the original 167) whose experiences help inform the latest Life Chances report don’t even agree on whether, at age twenty-one, they are grown up. Only 38 per cent said they would describe themselves as adults; 13 per cent said they were not yet adults and 49 per cent answered “yes and no.”

Tellingly, there are marked differences according to their backgrounds. Those from well-to-do families are far less likely to consider themselves as adults, compared with those from lower- and middle-income families. They are also far more likely to be living at home. Eighty per cent of those from well-to-do families receive financial help from their parents, compared with 20 per cent of those from low-income families. Those from families in which English was not the first language are also far less likely to receive financial help from their parents.

While most twenty-one-year-olds are studying or working, some already show the mark of poor health. Fourteen per cent said they had long-term health problems or disability (anxiety and depression being the most common conditions mentioned), with almost one in five saying they had experienced mental health problems during the year they turned twenty-one. Four people – all of whom had grown up in low-income, single-parent families that had experienced multiple forms of disadvantage – had taken on the role of caring for their own parents. Of the 123 young adults, five are now parents themselves.

IN RETROSPECT, 1990 was quite a year. The Cold War was thawing; Germany was reunifying; Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Iraq invaded Kuwait and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. It was also the year when poverty was to have been banished from the lives of Australian children – if Bob Hawke’s (later regretted) 1987 election promise had been kept.

But often the significance of historical events only becomes apparent with the passage of time. The young people born in 1990 tend to see their present circumstances as the result of their own choices, without necessarily recognising the impact of wider events or forces, whether it’s a tight housing supply, changing demographics, economic crunches or world events. It is only towards the end of our conversation that Jennifer mentions that her parents are Chinese and came to Australia from Vietnam thirteen years before she was born. When I enquire further, she is vague about whether they were refugees, but then says they were. She doesn’t know a lot about their history, she explains. “They don’t really talk about it much,” she says. “They don’t want us to live off their life experiences. They want us to live off our own.”

But the study’s reports make it clear that the individual stories – like the factory worker whose job loss sent his family into a downwards spiral and the young people who struggle with part-time, insecure jobs – are also shaped by wider narratives such as changes in the economy and labour market. While the study write-up describes how “structural inequalities of income, ethnicity and gender” influence young people’s experiences, most of the study’s subjects are quite positive about their early lives, often seeing good in what might be judged as hard times.

Whether they grew up rich or poor, mostly they say their family’s economic situation did not affect them. Even those who do recognise an impact tend to see it in a positive light – for example, that it taught them to be independent or to manage money. The researchers see this as reflecting “both the need to put a good face on one’s life story and the optimism of young people starting their lives as increasingly independent adults.”

Nonetheless, the study findings make it clear that financial constraints have had a very real impact, particularly on the children’s access to education and healthcare. Parents from all income groups valued education, but the costs of a supposedly free public school system imposed hardship on many, reducing their capacity to support their children’s education. By age eighteen, a quarter of children from lowincome families had left school early, but none from high-income families had done so. As a previous report from the BSL puts it, “the education system in many ways serves to maintain social divisions across the generations” – an observation that is particularly pertinent given recent state government education funding cuts.

Some children from poorer backgrounds did very well at school. “This raises the challenge of predicting early school leaving from early indicators, and of finding ways to acknowledge both the impact of disadvantage and the resilience of young people in a way that avoids unhelpful stereotypes,” write the researchers. “Our findings suggest the importance of all schools being well resourced to provide extra support at all ages for students with language and learning difficulties, but also to provide a context which does not label certain groups as low performers. The young people experienced very different learning environments, not only in government and non-government sectors, but also in differently resourced government schools.”

According to Michael Horn, a senior manager in the BSL’s research and policy centre, one of the study’s important messages is the need for Gonskistyle reforms to direct more resources towards the most needy children, particularly those from the 5 per cent of families experiencing multiple layers of disadvantage.

“For the foundational issues like education, adequate income, affordable housing, these foundational building blocks need to be addressed with strong universal services, which we currently don’t have,” says Horn. “You also need to target, ideally in an early intervention way, those students experiencing disadvantage beyond the school gate. We need to do more to prevent that group of kids who struggle from dropping out of school.”

Alan Hayes, director of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, has taken a close interest in the Life Chances findings over the years – not least because he also has a child born in 1990. While it may not be as large or representative as other longitudinal studies, he says its in-depth interviews provide rich insights into the diversity of children’s lives and the unpredictability of their pathways through childhood and into adulthood.

“What gives me heart out of the Life Chances study is that some of the children who looked most compromised have remarkable capacities to recover, and part of that resilience comes from those around them and the opportunities they are given,” he says. “Today we can be a bit precious about the capacity of children to adapt and recover.”

Hayes says the findings also reinforce the importance of providing better support to children and families at all stages of development, particularly the middle childhood and the critical years of ten to fifteen, and not only during early childhood. “That’s what Life Chances and other studies show you – how there are many important windows along the way where things can be changed for good or for ill.”

Hayes cautions against placing too much emphasis on the Jesuit maxim about the enduring influence of the first seven years of life – and warns against labelling children if they’ve had a tough start. “Sometimes, it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy in a dangerous way if we change the way we interact with these kids,” he says.

BACK in the late 1980s, when they were lobbying for support for the Life Chances study, the far-sighted researchers hosted screenings of the famous Seven Up! documentary series, which has followed a small group of British children since they turned seven in 1964.

Now some of the Life Chances children feature in an educational DVD that captures glimpses of them at ages thirteen and eighteen. While there are funny moments – as when thirteen-year-old Bernard says, “I don’t really look forward to going to school but it’s better than going to the dentist” – the main impression it leaves is a sadness that some children miss out on so many of the chances available to others.

Even so, money can’t solve every problem. William may enjoy every opportunity available to a privileged white boy, but at thirteen it’s clear in the documentary that he just wanted more time with his father. He says, poignantly, “Money isn’t the most important thing in life and I realise we are really lucky because we’ve got quite a lot of it. I’d rather have not as much money and spend a lot more time with my dad.” William’s father, meanwhile, tells us that he never wanted to be like his own father, working long hours, but adds, “I don’t see much of my own children at all.”

Five years later, the concern still weighs on William as he considers whether to study medicine and follow in his father’s footsteps. “I have always just thought that I don’t want to work as hard as Dad does,” he says. “He works very hard to afford the lifestyle that we keep but it comes at a cost of not seeing him as much, but it also has its benefits, we have the opportunity to give back to the community.”

The film also introduces us to the musically talented Oscar, who shows impressive motivation despite a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles – on top of having no job, no transport and no significant qualifications, he is socially and geographically isolated. He seems determined to create a future, however, and is set on getting a driver’s licence so he can find an apprenticeship.

I watch the film with a friend, Daniel Clements, who has worked with disadvantaged youth for many years. He is impressed by how it lets us hear the voices of the young people (something that the study’s reports suggest agencies like Centrelink and schools often fail to do). “The natural strength of the kids’ voices comes out,” says Daniel, “from the anxieties to the optimism.”

That contrast also strikes Janet Taylor, a researcher on the project since its conception. She says that twenty-one is an age of both anxiety and anticipation, citing one man who spoke of the “quarter-life crisis” but also saw the twenties as “the golden years.” Taylor says many young people worry about studies and job opportunities, and that their lives are completely different from when she was their age. “When I went to uni, there was definitely a job at the end, or at the end of school,” she says. The years do not seem to have dimmed Taylor’s passion for her work; when we meet one morning in a cafe near her office in Fitzroy, her gestures are intense and her eyes alight as she describes the families whose stories she has come to know so well, and what might help improve their lives.

She says that there needs to be a rethinking of policies built on the assumption that young people follow a linear transition from school to higher education or training to employment. These days, for many, the journey is more one of stops, starts and backward steps.

While Taylor is delighted by the resilience of some of the young people, she worries about others, including those young men who left school early with learning and/or behaviour problems and possible mental health issues, don’t seem to have found a niche in life, and have not been engaged in any meaningful way by support services.

“The government’s ‘earn or learn’ policy does not seem to usefully reach these young men,” she says. “I also have concerns about the isolation of a couple of the young mothers in public housing who don’t feel they have friends. And while here I am talking about a few individuals, we know that there will be a much larger number of young people in the wider community facing similar issues.” Taylor nominates housing and the need for youth-friendly mental health services as two other critical areas requiring more policy attention.

Tim Gilley also stresses the importance of housing policy to wider societal wellbeing. “If housing wasn’t so expensive, people would have more resources,” he says. “Housing has an enormous, distorting effect on where people live, go to work, on quality of life and stresses that affect children.”

Any number of reports and inquiries have shown the impact of disadvantage on health and wellbeing. Recent examples include an ACTU inquiry into insecure work; a report from the Australian Social Inclusion Board which revealed that 33 per cent of Australians in the lowest income group experience fair or poor health, compared with 6.5 per cent of those in the highest income group; and a report from the COAG Reform Council showing significant inequities in both health outcomes and access to health services.

What Life Chances adds to statistics like these is the power of storytelling, says Taylor. She and her colleague Malita Allan hope the study will focus more attention on the often-untold stories of those experiencing hardship. Says Allan: “I do think the story of these kids growing up, missing out on school excursions, textbooks etc, just goes unnoticed.” Taylor agrees. “By trying to tell some of the young people’s stories and the families’ stories from their perspective,” she says, “we hope to give people in our wider society more understanding of what some members of the society are going through.”

WHEN the latest Life Chances survey arrived at Lucienne’s family home, her mother wasn’t keen to continue sharing the family’s details. But Lucienne insisted she complete the form. “I was like, ‘You have to do it,’” she says. “It’s extremely important because I’m studying psychology and I really believe in the benefits of longitudinal studies.”

Lucienne, who is thoughtful and articulate, has had plenty of life chances – both parents are professionals and she enjoys good relationships with them and her younger sister. Her parents have been very supportive, helping her financially when she moved out of home and taking the family on many overseas trips.

Only after we’ve been talking for some time does it emerge that there was a time she hated school so much that she wanted to drop out. She was bullied and felt excluded, both at primary and at high school. “I didn’t fit in,” she says. “I was kind of a ratty kid. I wanted to be a writer and a musician and didn’t want to waste any more time studying.”

Her attitude changed towards the end of Year 8, when she started going out with a boy who was academically inclined. “I needed to impress this guy so I decided I wanted to take school a bit more seriously,” she says. “I don’t even know if I would have graduated if I hadn’t have met him.” Eight years later, the pair are saving so they can travel overseas when uni is finished.

Looking back, Lucienne feels her difficult times at school led to her interest in psychology and, if she could go back in time, she would reassure her fifteen-year-old self that “life gets better.” “I think I wanted to be the school counsellor,” she says, “and sit in that room and talk to me and say it’s going to be better when you get to uni.”

Back in the high-rise lobby, Jennifer’s childhood experiences seem worlds away from Lucienne’s. But she also had to deal with tough times at school – suffering exclusion because of her Chinese appearance. “It definitely made me feel left out,” she says. It was a relief to leave school and find less discrimination in the workplace.

While Jennifer stresses that she doesn’t let racism bother her, it clearly has had an impact. “Even though people try to overlook it and say Australia is multicultural, in truth there are a lot of racist people and it’s hard, it’s really hard,” she says. “I’ve grown up here my whole life… Some people treat me very poorly because they don’t think I belong here.” When I ask her what she would like to see flow from the study, Jennifer says a greater acceptance and understanding of diversity, and a “society that helps everyone.”

What Jennifer has learnt in her first twenty-one years is, to some extent, what the researchers have learnt from the study at this landmark stage in its history. “It’s about, what sort of society do we want to live in?” says Janet Taylor. “As a society, how can we give all our kids every opportunity?” •

• Details of the Life Chances reports and the DVD, Life Chances: Turning 13, Turning 18, are on the Brotherhood of St Laurence’s website. The Bokhara Foundation and the Prue Myer Fund helped fund the recent stages of the study.

• This article was jointly funded by Inside Story and Australian Policy Online.

The post Two suburbs, 167 lives: how the Life Chances study turned twenty-one appeared first on Inside Story.

I MUST preface this column with a disclaimer. I have not been experimenting on my baby. Well, only a little bit. Hardly at all.

My daughter was born a year ago, and while many things in my life immediately changed as a result, I could see no special reason to start listening to the Wiggles sooner than was absolutely necessary. In fact I didn’t change my listening habits at all, except perhaps to have the volume a little lower.

A couple of weeks before the birth, I had interviewed the pianist Roger Woodward for The Music Show. His five-CD recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (on the Celestial Harmonies label) had formed a major part of my preparation and I was impressed. Indeed, the interview behind me and fatherhood upon me, I was sufficiently taken with Woodward’s Bach to want to keep listening. He plays this familiar music with intelligence and great, natural musicality. He never exaggerates, has the surest of touches, and he made me feel I was listening with fresh ears. Certainly little Elsie was.

And that was the thing: she did appear to be listening. The music calmed her and held her attention. The first time, it was chance – simply a matter of what was already in the CD player. Elsie was crying and I wondered if music might help. I hit “Play” and out came Woodward’s Bach. It worked on her almost instantly, and thereafter, I’d ensure Bach was in the CD player before going to bed. When Elsie woke crying in the night, her mother or I would take her to the next room and listen to Bach. I dare say the very reasonableness of the music also had a soothing effect on these two new parents, and perhaps some of that rubbed off, but the music itself seemed to connect with her. We tried a few other things – Mozart, Beethoven, Dvořák, Vaughan Williams, even Ford – but the only thing that came close was the viol music of Marin Marais.

Now I’d like to be able to tell you that Elsie’s listening has since moved on from the Well-Tempered Clavier to The Musical Offering, the B minor Mass and the St Matthew Passion; that she plays the piano – and for that matter the viol – tolerably well, and last week composed her first fugue. But at the moment she mostly seems to prefer pop music.

There’s an obvious connection to be made here. Nearly all pop, like nearly all baroque music (Bach and Marais included), involves a steady pulse. The songs/movements tend to be short and employ a consistent rhythmic pattern. Perhaps there’s something hypnotic going on that holds a baby’s attention. The one piece of music that is guaranteed to placate my daughter is Christy Moore singing “The Reel in the Flickering Light.” It was, for instance, on high rotation in the hire car in which we found ourselves lost in Manchester’s one-way system amid rush-hour traffic earlier this year. Possibly part of the attraction is Christy’s reassuring voice, but I’m guessing it’s the continuous semiquavers that really do the trick.

In contrast to the short duration and repetition of most pop and baroque music, a movement from a Mozart symphony is that much longer and employs contrasting musical subjects – the Classical style was all about reasoned debate. Babies, it hardly needs pointing out, are strangers to reason. Certainly, after a minute or two of Mozart, Elsie is looking around for something else to occupy her.

And that’s the problem with most of the music in the series of CDs from the Cala label supposedly aimed at babies. Baby Symphony starts well enough – the first movement of Bach’s third Brandenburg concerto – but by the time we reached the first movement of Ravel’s piano concerto and “Jupiter” from The Planets, Elsie was having none of it. It was the same with Baby Cello, though I had to applaud her taste in refusing to listen to massed cellos playing “El Condor Pasa” (who thought a baby would like that?). We bypassed Baby Harp altogether, because track one – “The Music of the Night” played by The London Harp Sound – would have turned Elsie’s dad into a homicidal maniac. But even music you might expect to appeal, such as Ravel’s Mother Goose on the CD of the same name, really isn’t aimed at children, let alone babies. It’s music for adults after some sort of idealised childhood.

These CDs, in fact, resemble parenting books. You might find the odd useful morsel, but musical taste like everything else to do with babies is a matter of trial and error. Come to think of it, it remains so later in life. •

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AFTER the collapse of ABC Learning three years ago, childcare and early education disappeared from the media spotlight. The rise and fall of ABC was a mesmerising saga, complete with stories of high finance, lavish lifestyles and corporate intrigue. Its aftermath was sober but equally compelling, with most of ABC’s centres quietly taken over by GoodStart, a non-profit consortium involving several of Australia’s major charities, and criminal charges laid against ABC’s former CEO, Eddie Groves, and some of his business associates.

Absorbing as it was, the ABC drama deflected attention from the arduous, unspectacular but crucial work being done behind the scenes. Over the past few years, governments around Australia have adopted a new national policy framework for early education and care, agreed to deliver a year of preschool education to all children by 2013 and endorsed the phasing in of new, nationally consistent quality standards. Since 2006, total government expenditure on early education and care has increased by more than 50 per cent in real terms. Outside the world of early childhood, however, these changes are not widely known.

These are encouraging developments, but there remain traps – both in policy and implementation – that could stymie moves towards more accessible, affordable, high-quality education and care around Australia. And there is a major weakness in the new policy framework: the absence of any articulated link between responsibility for the care of children and gender equality.

IN THE early 2000s the concept of “social investment” began to frame thinking about social and economic policy in Australia. Politicians and public officials increasingly acknowledged the growing scientific and economic consensus about the importance of the early years for children’s later development, and particularly their readiness for school. Some political leaders became strong enthusiasts for these ideas. Kevin Rudd, for example, identified parent and child centres as his “one big idea” for the 2020 Summit. As the emphasis in public policy shifted from competition and microeconomic reform to more socially focused ways of building human capital and boosting labour productivity, social investment played a growing role in national economic reform debates.

It was in this context that the federal, state and territory governments, through the Council of Australian Governments, or COAG, endorsed the wide-ranging National Early Childhood Development Strategy: Investing in the Early Years. The strategy focuses on children from birth to eight years and embraces education, childcare and health as well as housing, child protection and family support. It has a particular focus on reducing inequalities between groups of children.

Building on this broad strategy, the federal, state and territory governments endorsed two national partnership agreements. The National Partnership Agreement on Early Childhood Education aims to ensure that by 2013 every child has access to fifteen hours of high quality preschool education for forty weeks in the year before starting school. Under the agreement, preschool programs can be delivered through a range of services including long day care, preschools, and family day care. The National Partnership Agreement for Indigenous Early Childhood Development includes additional measures to help “close the gap” between Indigenous and other Australian preschoolers. Strengthening this initiative, one element of the National Indigenous Reform Agreement specifically focuses on ensuring that Indigenous four-year-olds in remote communities have access to early childhood education.

Early childhood services have traditionally been regulated by the states and territories, and inconsistent regulations have been a longstanding concern. As part of the national reform agenda, a National Quality Framework will guide the licensing and quality rating of long day care, family day care, outside school hours care and preschools from January 2012. The framework introduces nationally consistent regulations and improved ratios of staff to children and requires a more highly skilled and qualified workforce in all early childhood settings. Parallel legislation will be introduced in all jurisdictions to establish a new legal and regulatory framework for early childhood education and care and lay the groundwork for a unified national system. A learning framework for the preschool years, Belonging, Being and Becoming, forms part of the new quality arrangements; a separate framework, My Time, Our Place, will apply to school-age care services.

Significant changes to staff-to-child ratios and qualifications are to be phased in over several years. By January 2014, all long day care and preschool services catering to twenty-five or more children will need to employ a qualified early childhood teacher. Half of the staff employed in each long day care centre or preschool will need to have, or be working towards, a diploma-level early childhood education and care qualification or above. Other staff in centre-based childcare and all family day carers will be required to have, or be working towards, a Certificate III level early childhood education and care qualification, or equivalent. Achieving these targets and attracting and retaining qualified professional staff in services characterised by low pay, poor promotion prospects and sometimes arduous working conditions may prove to be the critical challenge for the sector. A high proportion of the staff in long day care are currently paid at minimum award rates, have few opportunities for career progression and do not benefit financially from upgrading their qualifications.

Administrative changes at both federal and state levels reflect the emerging culture of a more integrated service system. An Office of Early Childhood Education and Child Care has been established within the federal Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. As its name suggests, the Office has responsibility for both early education and care. The shift in location of responsibility for childcare from the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs symbolises the focus on education and employment (or, at least, human capital development) embedded in current ideas about services for young children. In complementary fashion, all states and territories have now brought responsibility for preschools into their departments of education.

THE agreements, goals, targets and other bureaucratic requirements that underpin the early childhood reform agenda represent a considerable achievement by public officials and build on decades of work by others in the sector. The long-term potential of these initiatives and reforms should not be underestimated. Nevertheless, gaps, weaknesses and inconsistencies continue to characterise Australia’s approach to early education and care.

One of the biggest risks is the reliance on private markets to deliver most Commonwealth-funded childcare services. (Preschool has not been opened up to market forces in the same way as childcare in Australia – this is one marker, a positive one, of the lack of integration between education and care to date.) The transfer of more than 650 ABC Centres to the socially oriented GoodStart consortium has certainly moved the balance of ownership back towards toward the non-profit sector. But even accounting for this shift, two-thirds of Australia’s childcare centres are operated for profit.

Under Australia’s market-based childcare system, parents are seen as consumers who purchase services in a competitive marketplace. The childcare benefit effectively operates as a voucher that parents can spend at an approved service of their choice. This is very different from preschools, where the dominant model around Australia is either a free service provided as part of the school system or a relatively low-cost community service. The issue here is not whether individual, private services can provide excellent care and education – clearly they can. The question is whether there is evidence at a system level that the market can deliver the outcomes for children envisaged in Australia’s early childhood agenda. At this stage, the research evidence suggests we should exercise considerable caution.

Market-based systems rely on the assumption that “consumers” are savvy individuals who can discipline providers by withdrawing their custom and going elsewhere if the service provided is inadequate. For markets to work, consumers need to have access to a range of providers who can provide appropriate services. Evidence suggests that these assumptions do not hold up well in respect of care services. Parents do not go into the market seeking a packaged product called “childcare”; they search for services that cater to the needs of their children (in terms of age, personality, level of ability) and they frequently require hours and days of care that mesh with their employment commitments. For many, proximity to home, work or school will be important considerations. Most parents do not have a choice between services – they are lucky if they can find one that matches their needs. Even if they have a choice, they typically purchase childcare only infrequently, and don’t have extensive experience in assessing information about quality and prices. Governments may seek to aid transparency and assist consumer choice through regulation and accreditation and by providing information about how individual services perform against standards, but not all groups have equal skills in making use of such information: an increased focus on consumerism and choice favours those with more resources and education, who have an advantage in navigating the system.

Childcare markets (and other markets in care) are quite unlike markets for products such as soap or breakfast cereal. A growing body of research shows that the real costs of switching providers are simply too high for many parents to countenance. Parents are aware that there are considerable costs in switching services and that many of these costs – ending relationships with friends and carers/educators, losing familiar environments, having to reinvest time and emotional energy to settle into a new service – are borne by children. Even when they have concerns about quality, many parents are reluctant to impose these costs on their children, and so they find themselves effectively locked in to continuing to purchase from the same provider. The “emotional economy” of care thus limits the effectiveness of market mechanisms.

THE policy-makers driving the new early childhood agenda are building on, and seeking to reshape, a complex historical legacy marked by separate roles for the federal government and the states and territories. Broadly, the federal government has focused on childcare services that meet the needs of working parents and the states have delivered educationally focused preschool programs – although this shorthand characterisation does not do justice to either tradition.

Funding mechanisms, subsidy structures and eligibility rules drive home the division between services supported by each level of government. For example, the childcare benefit and the childcare rebate, the main Commonwealth subsidies that assist parents with the costs of work-related childcare, are only available to users of approved services. To be approved, a service must meet various conditions, including being open for a minimum number of hours per day and weeks per year. Since preschools typically operate only during school terms, and offer only half days or short (six-hour) full days, most are not approved for fee relief purposes and the parents who use them cannot claim the benefit or the rebate even though in some states (particularly New South Wales) preschool can be very expensive.

The reasons why parents choose particular service types for their children are complex and multifaceted. It is far too simple to say that childcare is used to accommodate parents’ needs while preschool is a child-focused system: parents want the best for their children regardless of their own workforce status. For families whose children attend preschool so that parents can hold down jobs, the current system is incomprehensible and unfair.

While efforts to integrate education, care and health are laudable, services for young children also need to be considered in relation to the broader policy agenda. As yet, there is little evidence that this is occurring. For example, there is a notable lack of coherence between Australia’s new national paid parental leave scheme and the approach to early childhood education and care outlined here. The parental leave scheme provides eighteen weeks’ paid leave at the minimum wage for eligible families. From the child’s perspective, we could interpret this as an implicit guarantee of the possibility of six months of parental care, with public support. After that, however, there is no entitlement to care or education until the child becomes eligible for fifteen hours of preschool education in the year before formal school begins. And despite the fact that the majority of mothers are back at work before their children start school, the early childhood agenda contains no targets for providing care for one-, two- and three-year-old children and no mechanisms for linking services to areas of greatest need.

Another striking feature of Australia’s early childhood agenda is the absence of any recognition of the role of children’s services in supporting a more equal division of labour between women and men. The principles articulated in Investing in the Early Years include “a focus on the whole child,” “a focus on the whole service system” and “a focus on respect for diversity and difference” but there are no references to the connections between childcare and the promotion of gender equality. This could, in part, be a reaction by elements of the early childhood community to the perception that in the past the federal government’s focus on childcare has been excessively workforce-oriented and insufficiently focused on the interests of children. Still, the absence of even the smallest gesture towards gender equality is noteworthy. The strategy refers in a general way to “outcomes for families related to workforce participation” and the childcare reform package is featured as a gender equality measure in other government documents such as the Women’s Budget Statement, but there are no clear mechanisms that compel governments to follow through on these statements or to enable the tracking of progress towards goals.

EARLY childhood policy in Australia is undergoing profound restructuring and reform, much of it positive, though some of it less ambitious than it should be. COAG has proved to be an effective mechanism for establishing and maintaining federal leadership in the sector and significant steps have been taken towards improving quality standards, streamlining regulatory processes and strengthening the skills and qualifications of the early childhood work force. But much remains to be done. The new agenda is being built on a legacy of division between sectors, providers and levels of government. Finding effective ways to address the gaps, inconsistencies and pitfalls of this legacy is a major challenge for the implementation of Australia’s new early childhood agenda.

A parallel challenge is to develop ways of rewarding and remunerating early childhood professionals at levels commensurate with the value and importance of their work while ensuring that families, especially the most disadvantaged, are not excluded from services. If the overall goal is to provide all children with the best start in life, and to support the participation of both women and men in social and economic life, additional investment by governments and taxpayers is both inevitable and desirable. •

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TWO NEW REPORTS show that although the Rudd government is tackling some of the most difficult areas of social policy, we may need to borrow fresh thinking from our New Zealand neighbours. On 29 April the prime minister launched Time for Action, the report of the National Council to Reduce Violence against Women and their Children. The federal government will take this report to COAG, the Council of Australian Governments, and turn it into a government plan by 2010. Then, on 1 May, the PM launched the COAG report Protecting Children is Everyone’s Business. These reports join the The Road Home: A National Approach to Reducing Homelessness as part of a social policy reform agenda, with a disability strategy on the way.

We know there is a strong link between these three issues – domestic violence, child abuse and homelessness – and the reports acknowledge it. Reading them side by side, what is striking is the fact that it’s in the overlapping area between these issues that the government response seems likely to be weakest. Both of the new reports acknowledge that Indigenous women and children are being failed in devastating ways by the current system. Yet there seems to be a lack of strength in the response, reflecting a government struggling with the intersection of race and gender. Although the reports were launched by Kevin Rudd, this weakness partly reflects the fact that of the two responsible ministers, Jenny Macklin and Tanya Plibersek, only one – Macklin – is in cabinet and able to influence the policy process more directly. The Minister for Housing and Women is not a cabinet post, and frankly, it should be.

These are landmark reports, yet they have not attracted the coverage they deserve. Perhaps this is because they make for such uncomfortable reading. Or perhaps it is the fact that Australians can still not focus on the lives of women and children or vulnerable families in the same way that we pay attention to swine flu, boat arrivals or terrorist threats.

They provide the figures that should be making headlines. Time for Action states that one in three Australian women will report being a victim of physical violence and almost one in five will report being a victim of sexual violence during their lifetime, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures. Approximately 350,000 women experience physical violence and 125,000 women experience sexual violence each year. And violence against women comes at an enormous economic cost, $13.6 billion a year, although it is mostly preventable.

According to Protecting Children, 55,120 cases of child abuse and neglect were substantiated by child protection services in 2007–08. The rate has more than doubled over the past ten years. Indigenous children are six times more likely to be the subject of abuse or neglect than other children (although 'neglect' in this context is contested). It is also clear that removing children is not always in the best long-term interests of the child, with children in out-of-home care experiencing significantly poorer long-term outcomes. Despite this, the numbers of children removed from their parents more than doubled over the past decade. On 30 June 2008 there were 31,166 young people in out-of-home care.

In New South Wales alone, one in five children will be reported to statutory child protection services by the time they are eighteen. No public administration system, no matter how well funded, can cope with such numbers. Morgan Disney’s 2006 report on the transition from care revealed the huge cost to government and the community – an estimated $2 billion a year – of young adults coming out of foster care with poorer prospects for housing, mental health, employment, education, criminal justice and more.

Twenty years after the Brian Burdekin’s report for the Human Rights Commission report, Our Homeless Children, our policy responses on homelessness, violence and state care should have made more progress. The facts in 2008 remain unchanged: a substantial number of children and young people become homeless while still under state guardianship. In other words, coming into care, or attempting to have a child committed to care, creates a clear path to homelessness. In a 2007 radio interview, Burdekin reiterated that state care is the single predictive factor of homelessness. This is unsustainable both in economic and in human terms.

THE PROBLEMS both national plans tackle are therefore “wicked” in scale and complexity. The good news is that there are lots of good ideas and resourcing in the plans. Protecting Children comes with an extra $61.6 million over four years in Commonwealth funding. Commonwealth agencies such as Centrelink and Medicare are brought into information sharing arrangements with the states and territories. The report’s framework promises that children in foster homes will receive a better basic standard of care, and that child-protection workers will get more training to combat child abuse and neglect. The much-longed-for National Children’s Commissioner seems close to reality at last.

Time for Action sets clear targets and reads like a sensible, energetic way to make real progress against domestic violence, based on a commitment to the human rights and equality of women. There is $12.5 million for a new twenty-four hour domestic violence and sexual assault telephone and online crisis service, $26 million for “respectful relationships” programs for schools, and $17 million for social marketing focused on changing attitudes and behaviours that contribute to violence. The plan sets out a national scheme for registering domestic and family violence orders allowing enforcement across state and territory borders. The Australia Law Reform Commission is given a reference to look at reform in the area, which is sorely needed. Time for Action also takes special note of the role of alcohol. In 2007 the Australian National Council on Drugs reported that 13 per cent of children – over 230,000 individuals – live in households where they are at risk of exposure to at least one adult binge drinker.

What neither plan does well enough is address the current flaws in the system of child removal and the nexus with domestic violence. All the incentives encourage child protection workers to avoid those terrible cases of death and neglect that make the headlines. But the system provides very little natural justice for anyone wishing to challenge a removal, and removals are increasingly in force until the child turns eighteen. It is very much an all-or-nothing system, with all the legal weight on the side of the Department; the removal of a child often happens very quickly with very little notice or discussion with the parent. The best interests of the child are meant to be the paramount consideration, but this is very often interpreted in a very thin and short term manner.

Authorities can and do get it wrong – especially those authorities that are in the business of “protection.” When the consequence of a wrong decision is removal of a baby until age eighteen, then a measure of natural justice is clearly necessary. Recently, in a 2008 judgment in the NSW Supreme Court, Justice Palmer referred to the NSW Department of Community Services’ “intransigent refusal to acknowledge a mistake, regardless of the consequences to the children” in a case where children were removed on the basis of the parent’s recreational cannabis use. The Palmer and Comrie reports into the Department of Immigration show that public administration in such difficult areas functions best with more rather than less accountability and transparency, which then builds public confidence in the law.

The other challenge for both plans is to strengthen the actions to protect Indigenous women and children on the basis of their rights and full citizenship. “Healing centres” in remote areas, providing Indigenous perpetrators with culturally appropriate counselling, are a good idea, but not at the expense of justice available to other Australian women. The focus must be on access to justice and providing a broader range of choices to women, wherever they live in Australia, whatever their race. In fact, it may be the current moves to reform the legal profession and improve access to justice which may have the most impact, including calls to provide incentives for lawyers to practice in rural and regional areas, and better funding and conditions for ATSI legal centres.

Both reports also fail to squarely address a very real failing of the current system. After a woman reports domestic violence to police, or asks social services for help, her children can be removed. Once that happens, the woman often loses the right to public housing. Women tell of their reluctance to report violence due to the automatic trigger to child protection services. As Time for Action acknowledges, in some cases child protection authorities tell women that unless they leave a violent relationship and apply for an apprehended violence order their children will be removed.

This no-win cycle continues when parents are ineligible to stay in government accommodation because they no longer have the children. Some parents report being required to give up housing in order to attend a residential drug program. It is nearly impossible to get back into housing without your children – Housing says “you don’t have your kids, you’re not eligible” and Child Protection says “you can’t get your kids till you have suitable housing.” In one NSW case a woman with three children, aged eleven, eight and four, living in a two bedroom government unit had her eleven year old daughter removed. After eighteen months the child was returned on the basis that she would have a room of her own, but Housing was unable to provide suitable accommodation. The mother was told that if she put the four year old and the eight year old in her own bedroom, leaving the second bedroom for the eleven year old, she could have her daughter back. The mother complied with this request.

Women therefore often face difficult choices. “The government” – in the form of police, schools, women’s support services and other agencies – must make automatic notifications, and this creates a monolithic source of risk and threat rather than refuge. The instruments in our toolkit are too blunt, and we need to consider more creative ideas and acknowledge true community responsibility for the safety of women and children.

THE ANSWER to this dilemma may lie within the reports, but it can be made clearer. The Road Home aimed to help women and children who experience domestic violence to stay safely in the family home to prevent homelessness. Protecting Children states that Australian governments “will expand models of integrated support to enable women and children experiencing domestic and family violence to remain at home safely.” Part of this expansion must include new policies so that women reporting violence do not risk losing their children. This is the point of the triangle which is not yet joined up.

Tasmania and New Zealand could offer us some innovative and cost saving ways forward. The Tasmanian Department of Justice runs a progam called Safe at Home, based around the Family Violence Act 2004. Section 3 states that “in the administration of this Act, the safety, psychological wellbeing and interests of people affected by family violence are the paramount considerations.” This translates to a pro-arrest policy by police on first contact with a domestic violence situation. The review of the policy in 2008 reveals some real promise, but again, the concern was the 30 per cent increase in notifications to child protection authorities.

For almost two decades New Zealand has made working with families and extended family members a core principle in their legislation, policy and procedures for dealing with child safety. Family Group Conferenceshttp://www.aifs.gov.au/nch/pubs/issues/issues27/issues27.html, based partly on Maori practices, provide families with a greater say in resolving both child protection and juvenile justice matters. When a notification is made to child protection services and the social worker has formed a belief that the child is in need of care and protection, a mandatory family group conference begins a process in which families are offered support to explore the option of caring for the child within the biological or extended family. It’s estimated that more than 50,000 conferences had been convened since 1989, reflecting the central role they play in New Zealand’s child protection system.

The national action plans are full of good ideas, and both promote research to investigate even more good ideas. What we need now is some coordinated political clout. Getting the Minister for Women and Housing into cabinet to complete the points of the triangle might be the single most important step to achieving these plans. We need to always foreground the complex linkages between the areas of family violence, child protection, alcohol abuse, and homelessness. This does not fit into a headline, but it is the big news of 2009. •

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This discussion is based on Deborah’s article for Inside Story, Reassembling the Childcare Business.

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GOOD POLITICS and good public policy can be difficult to align. Dealing with the fallout from the collapse of ABC Learning presents a case in point. The parents of 120,000 children enrolled in ABC centres and the 16,000 employees are asking important questions. Will the centres be open in 2009? Will staff receive their holiday pay and other entitlements? Should parents and staff seek alternative places and jobs? These questions need answers. But the resolution of immediate political issues must not be allowed to overwhelm the longer term objectives of good public policy. Clear-headed, strategic thinking is needed to reform and strengthen the early childhood sector. Before the collapse of ABC, important initiatives had begun in relation to standards and accreditation, workforce reform and Commonwealth–State relations. These initiatives must not derailed; rather, they should be expanded by adding in the possibility of a greater role for the non-profit sector.

The Rudd government’s approach to early childhood education and care is different in fundamental ways from that of previous governments. Under Howard, childcare was treated as little more than a commodity to be bought and sold – and, indeed, traded on the stock exchange. The Commonwealth gave no serious attention to the lax regulations administered by state governments and took a unduly complacent approach to its own weak accreditation system – perversely citing the high levels of “success” in gaining accreditation as evidence that quality care was being provided in Australian childcare centres. Influenced by recent research into early childhood development, and also by British New Labour’s approach to the early years, the Rudd government sees early childhood education and care as important to its long-term social and economic strategies – including productivity, labour force participation, skills formation, social inclusion and the “education revolution.” Early childhood services are also seen as important elements of “closing the gap” between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children.

Labor’s agenda for early education and care includes universal access to preschool education in the year before school and the development of parent and child centres which will act as service hubs, bringing together health, education and childcare and providing targeted services for particular groups. This ambitious agenda was always going to be difficult to deliver, given the scale of corporate provision in this country (unparalleled even in the United States). With the collapse of ABC there is an extraordinary opportunity to reconsider the fundamentals of Australia’s approach and to reinstate a national program focused on the needs of children and families. Such a program will require sound policy underpinnings, quality standards (including workforce development), planning processes and responsible stewardship of public resources.

How did Australia, once regarded by international observers as having an enviable childcare system, become a case study for other countries in what not to do? In the wake of ABC’s collapse, Julia Gillard blamed the previous government for having “let the market rip,” for having no workforce plans, no quality plans and no plans for market development. There is some truth in this statement, but it is far from the whole story. It was the Hawke government, in 1991, that introduced market forces into early childhood and promised that the market would lead to greater choice and lower fees. Labor extended childcare assistance (the forerunner to the Child Care Benefit) to the users of for-profit care, marginalised the community sector and encouraged provision by private businesses. It decreed that private entrepreneurs, not governments, should determine the location of services, even though huge public subsidies were involved. Labor introduced accreditation to allay the anxieties of those concerned that profits were incompatible with high quality care of children.

But under Labor’s system, there was no cap on the number of long day care centres that private operators could set up, no guidance about needs or planning, no cap on public subsidies. Instead, “market signals” were to guide these processes. The Hawke government retained small operational subsidies for community-based care, in recognition of the sector’s significant role in caring for babies, working with non-English speaking families and caring for children with disabilities, but this was its only concession to Australia’s tradition of non-profit care.

Labor’s responsibility for the “turn to the market” in early childhood is a relatively familiar story to those who follow Australian childcare politics. What is not so well known is that one of the major reasons that the Hawke government pursued the path of private, for-profit care was to contain the small advances that had been made towards increasing the qualifications of workers in childcare and improving their professional status. Labor’s finance minister Peter Walsh and his supporters were scathing about the employment of trained teachers in early childhood. They argued that efforts to extend the employment of teachers were intended “to make even softer the nests of bachelors of early childhood education and their middle-class well-feathered friends” and they accused childcare workers of crippling the system with “creeping credentialism.” The private sector’s resistance to the employment of well-trained staff was a major reason for Labor’s support for the sector. The lack of attention to workforce planning and qualified staff referred to by Julia Gillard was not an accidental by-product of the shift to the market; it was a design feature introduced by a Labor government.

The Howard government intensified Labor’s market focus. It ended operational subsidies to community-based care and abandoned plans to expand the non-profit sector. Many community-based childcare services closed and the pressure on sponsoring bodies, particularly local governments, intensified, leading some of them to vacate the field. The most significant policy shift in terms of laying the ground for corporate providers occurred in 2000 when, as part of a suite of family policy measures introduced in connection with the GST, the Howard government introduced the Child Care Benefit. The benefit is effectively a voucher that parents can use at any “approved” childcare service (mainly long day care and family day care). The amount depends on family income, the hours of care used and the type of care. The benefit positions the parent as a consumer who chooses from a range of “products.” Since many types of childcare are in short supply, however, and since starting a child in care is a time-consuming and sometimes emotionally fraught activity, there is little real prospect of parents using their power as consumers to “discipline” the market. Most parents elect to have the benefit paid directly to their provider, entitling them to reduced fees. Direct payment also provides a cash stream to providers and minimises their exposure to unpaid fees, especially on the part of low-income families who gain the most from the Child Care Benefit.

ABC Learning listed on the stock exchange shortly after the introduction of the benefit and Eddy Groves has explicitly linked the growth of his company to the possibilities opened up by this new benefit. ABC grew rapidly, snapping up small independent providers and community-based centres around the country, particularly in Victoria and Queensland, and later expanding internationally. As well as owning more than 1200 centres in Australia and New Zealand at its peak, ABC had substantial holdings in the United States and Britain. It also owned a training college for early childhood staff and had substantial interests in other businesses, including a toy and equipment provider that had an exclusive contract to supply ABC-linked centres around the world.

The Commonwealth does not publish data that would enable us to see the scale of ABC’s presence in individual states. Figures published by the Productivity Commission show that 73 per cent of long day care places across Australia are owned by private, for-profit operators. There are significant variations between the states: 83 per cent of long day care places in Queensland are run privately for profit compared with 29 per cent in Tasmania. But we do not know how many of the private places are owned by independent businesses and how many are run by corporate providers. ABC’s annual reports provided inconsistent data from year to year, so it has not been possible to get an accurate picture from that source. We do know, however, that as ABC increased its share of the market, the “choices” in many communities diminished. At the same time, the costs of care grew far more quickly than general consumer prices — fuelled by generous Commonwealth subsidies.

The Child Care Tax Rebate has also been integral to the rapid expansion of the Australian childcare market. This measure, introduced in a slightly different form by Labor in 1994, was originally intended as an alternative to tax deductions for childcare expenses. It was seen as fairer than both tax deductions (which provide most to those with the highest marginal tax rates) and tax rebates (which deliver nothing to those outside the tax system). Under Howard, the value of the rebate grew to cover 30 per cent of “out of pocket” expenses – the difference between what parents paid and the amount they received back from the Child Care Benefit. Labor has increased the value of the rebate to 50 per cent of out of pocket expenses up to a ceiling of $15,000. Parents who use “approved” care for work-related purposes are now entitled to a taxpayer subsidy for half their childcare costs up to this limit (which applies per child, not per family). The rebate was an open invitation to providers to increase their fees, and most did. ABC attracted criticism for the sharp spike in fees that coincided with the implementation of Labor’s new policy, but no one should have been surprised.

The demise of ABC Learning could result in the Australian childcare landscape being fundamentally reconfigured. Deputy Prime Minister Gillard has encouraged private providers and not for-profit organisations to register their interest in buying or managing ABC centres. The inclusion of not-for-profit organisations in the expression of interest process suggests that the government is considering an enhanced role for community-based providers, even if these providers do not have the capital to purchase ABC centres. Such a scenario suggests the possibility of re-instating a measure of diversity into a sector dominated by private interests. A number of other strategic considerations need to be addressed.

For a start, the role of markets in this sector should be acknowledged. Private providers will continue to play a major role in providing services – with almost three-quarters of all long day care centres now in private hands, there is no going back to the 1970s. But the Commonwealth government, in partnership with providers, unions, educators and other stakeholders, should resume responsibility for the planned provision of services that meet community needs. In other words, it should reinstate something like the Children’s Services Program. The current system, which places all power in the hands of entrepreneurs, while sending the bill back to taxpayers, has to end.

ABC Learning’s demise also presents a great opportunity to think more sensibly and creatively about the division of responsibility between the Commonwealth and the states. In most parts of Australia, services for children below school age are split into “education” (state-funded) and “care” (Commonwealth-funded). “Educational” services such as kindergartens and pre-schools usually employ degree-qualified teachers, but their hours of operation do not suit most working parents and they do not cater for babies and toddlers. Running in parallel, we have a system of childcare services intended to meet the needs of working parents. These generally do not employ teachers, and their working conditions are more onerous than those of preschools. While staff in both systems do a wonderful job, this is an old-fashioned system that does not reflect contemporary thinking about children’s development. It is a system that cannot meet the Rudd government’s objectives for integrated education and care. These days we know that high quality care and education are inseparable. And the division into separate service types certainly does not reflect the reality of busy parents’ lives.

Finally, there is a great opportunity to bring the skills and talents of the non-profit sector back into childcare policymaking. The headlong rush to the market and to private profits that has characterised this sector since the early 1990s has marginalised community-based childcare. This short-sighted approach needs to end. The challenge for the government will be to manage the politics (and economics) of ABC’s demise, without losing sight of the medium and long-term public policy objectives to which it is committed. •

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