Page 4750 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 10 November 2009
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message to give children and young people—really all people. The words “I believe you” and “it is not your fault” are also fundamental in ensuring that we support and care for children and young people in our communities.
Child Protection Week was a strong reminder that when the issue seems too large and too hard to deal with we need to go back to the strategy of talking about it, and keeping on talking about it, with our colleagues, our children, our neighbours, our teachers, our police, our sports teachers and anyone else in the community who will listen. We must make sure that everybody listens to this message.
It is clear from all the research and evidence that early intervention and prevention strategies, programs and services play a vital role in countering child abuse. Prevention is our ability to anticipate what is coming. We have had plenty of research, advocacy and debate about these issues over the past two decades, yet we still struggle to anticipate what is coming. Many community organisations that run family support programs, child health workers and teachers do understand the critical place that these programs have in prevention. Yet prevention is still not given the priority that is essential if we are to keep children safe and support families to break the abuse cycle.
Speaking as a parent, I can say that we know that many, if not all, parents have at some stage in their life with their children had moments when they have felt close to doing something harmful to their children. Positively, most of us manage to step back from this. But knowing this, we need to understand the importance of developing and maintaining family support services for all parents, to allow them to seek information, support and knowledge that will allow them to move forward positively in their roles as parents.
In Australia, 20 years of child abuse prevention efforts have not resulted in a drop in the frequency and incidence of child abuse. Investment in primary prevention has been very limited, as the majority of funding is spent on secondary and tertiary forms of intervention. Traditionally these interventions have targeted the poor, and thus implicitly have located the burden of abuse in impoverished and marginalised communities, when we know that abuse occurs across the whole community.
We have all spoken to our friends; we have all talked about the issues we have had as children and parents. As noted by Professor Alan Hayes at the recent NAPCAN breakfast, the public health model triangle has been inverted. The majority of funding and resources goes to the tertiary pointy end of the triangle when it should be spent on the preventive measures, including family support programs. While our focus remains on the crisis end, the number of cases will continue to grow, requiring more and more resources to deal with increasing reports of abuse.
As elected representatives of the ACT, we need to lead the community in breaking down the barriers and the walls that will help us to bring child abuse into the open and help us to improve the situation. We need to listen to children and to young people. And they need the adults in their world to step up and protect them. We need to shift the balance so that prevention of abuse for families and children is paramount and that the need for cure becomes only a small part of our work. We need to encourage all adults to take part in the national survey, to ensure that NAPCAN and others are
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