Working for the Welfare: Support and Supervision Needs of Indigenous Australian Child Protection Practitioners

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are disproportionately represented in all parts of the child protection system in Australia. The recruitment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners into child protection systems to work with Indigenous families at risk underpins the government strategy to reduce this over-representation. However, little is known about the experiences of Indigenous people who undertake child protection work or what their support and supervision needs may be. This research is centered on Indigenous Australian child protection practitioners as experts in their own experiences and as such includes large excerpts of their own narratives throughout. Practitioner narratives were collected via qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews. Critical theory and decolonising frameworks underpinned the research design. The study found that Indigenous child protection practitioners have a unique place in the families, communities and profession. Many viewed their work in the child protection field as an extension of their Indigeneity. This coupled with the historical experience of state-sanctioned removal of Indigenous children during colonisation and contemporarily, informs the need for child protection workplaces to re-think the support and supervision afforded to Indigenous practitioners.

Redressing ‘unwinnable battles’: Towards institutional justice capital in Australian child protection

Australia’s history of negative child protection outcomes for children in state care highlights the sustained, systemic nature of serious harm. Situated in emerging conversations on structural challenges and state violence for parents involved in child protection systems, we trace the resources and barriers to responsive and ‘just’ child protection practice, highlighting how institutions can serve to compound disadvantage and injustice. We argue that addressing challenges such as access to advocacy at the level of the individual is to miss the underlying politics of oppression that serves to keep families marginalised. Instead, we need to rethink how parental rights and responsibilities are best facilitated at institutional levels – what we term institutional justice capital. This requires public conversation about thresholds for child removal, transparent treatment of families, access to mechanisms to challenge the determinations of child protection authorities, and inter-organisational respect and collaboration to support families to navigate complex and multiple systems.

State tactics of welfare benefit minimisation: The power of governing documents

This article draws on interviews with 41 Australian separated mothers, and the government forms, information and instructions used to administer their child support and benefit entitlements, to reveal four tactics through which women’s decision-making was coordinated to produce financial benefits to the state. The state pursued its preferred outcome by foregrounding women’s obligation to seek and collect child support, while at the same time, information on alternative choices was made deliberately opaque – making the state’s foregrounded option more likely. If women were entitled to, or sought, options that lay outside the default choice, the onus was on them to investigate, instigate and persevere with what was made to be a deliberately onerous and opaque process. As a result, the administration of Australian child support policy perpetuated low-income women’s experiences of economic and social inequity, entrenching the feminisation of poverty in single parent families.