For 40 years, Children Australia (and previous incarnations) has provided an enormously valuable space for research, practice and policy to delineate challenges, successes and innovation on issues pertaining to the wellbeing and welfare of children and their families. Articles published in the Journal during this period have been incredibly influential and have added to our collective knowledge of children, young people and their families. Nowhere has this been more evident than the area of out-of-home care (OOHC). This paper will explore and reflect on some of the issues that have been articulated in papers published in the journal over the last 40 years – with a specific focus on Australian Kinship, Foster, Residential and Therapeutic Residential Care. Past issues that are still presenting current challenges will be described and opportunities for change and future improvement identified.

This study examines the use of section 106A of the Children and Young Persons (Care and Protection) Act 1998 in the New South Wales in Children's Court. Section 106A was inserted into the Act by way of an amendment in November 2006. This amendment establishes that if a child has previously been removed from parental care and not restored to the parents, then that is prima facie evidence that any subsequent child born to these parents is in need of care and protection and can be subject to removal. The parents must then rebut this evidence if they are to recover or retain custody of the new born child. To date, no data exists about the use of this section of the Act, hence this study. The only significant finding was that if section 106A was cited in Court documents, then restoration of a child to family is less likely. The analysis did not show any significant relationship between Aboriginality and any of the other variables in the study.

The Sanctuary Model (Sanctuary) is a trauma-informed model of care for human services. The model is made up of tools, norms and theoretical underpinnings that form the basis of building safety and promoting recovery from adversity within the context of communities. Sanctuary focuses on healing those who have experienced trauma, by being purposeful and deliberate about the well-being of the system as a whole, including the client, staff, the organisation and more broadly the community. Churches of Christ Care Pathways have been implementing this model within the Australian out-of-home care context including Foster and Kinship Care, Intensive Foster Care, Residential, Supported Independent Living and Intervention Services for the past three years. This article provides a brief description of components of the model, including the SELF model, Community Meetings, Safety Plans, Psycho-Educational Group Work, Self Care Plans, Red Flag Meetings and Team Meetings; detailing practice examples from its use within an Australian context. This article aims to make the link between the model and practice.

The neurological, psychological, emotional and social effects of abuse do not stop when the actual abuse has stopped. These affects are likely to be significant, pervasive, and long-lasting. Children who have experienced abuse at the hands of their parents tend to mistrust both their parents as well as subsequent carers who are making efforts to keep them safe. They avoid eye contact, comforting touch, reciprocal activities and communications that might facilitate a sense of safety and the development of a secure attachment. Those caring for such children need to find ways to patiently and gently help these children to begin to experience relaxed, reciprocal interactions with them along with the more intense experiences of comfort and joy.

Finally, when children have begun to trust their carers, but are returned to those who previously abused them, only to be abused again, they are at high risk to have even greater difficulty learning to trust. These more severe symptoms secondary to repeated trauma then cause their subsequent carers much greater challenges in helping them to begin to trust once again. This places the carers at risk for developing blocked care which further compromises the child's psychological development.

During recent years a significant change has occurred in child welfare policy in New South Wales as a large component of the government's substitute care program has been, or is in the process of being, shifted away from direct government provision to non-government agencies. Analysis of some aspects of the policy process by which this change has occurred illustrates the complexity of social policy development. In particular this analysis highlights the importance of the ideological and political context of child welfare policy development and the way in which this contributes to contradictions between official policy statements and policy as experienced by the recipients of the implementation of these policies.

With attention focussed on child abuse and measures for child protection in many countries around the world, efforts have been made to understand something of the nature and dimensions that lie behind abuse. Now the time has come to look at domestic violence in its other manifestations - not only parent to child as in child abuse, but also husband to wife or cohabiter to cohabiter. What, however, has been missing from this widening of concerns has been a focus on parental behaviour toward their children which involves the use of physical punishment in child rearing but which may fall short of the legal definition of abuse. This gap is about to be considered with the emergence in Australia of the EPOCH campaign in which Oz Child is to be a leading participant.

This article presents the argument for the development of a national research agenda for out-of-home care and what is needed to make this agenda work. The need for a commitment to research, adequate funding and access to reliable data, plus the rapid transfer of research findings, into practice, is outlined. It also reports on the outcomes of a research agenda-building workshop sponsored by the National Child and Family Welfare Research Coalition and held in September 2002. This workshop provided an opportunity to generate a list of research question that researchers, service providers and practitioners saw as significant priorities in a national research agenda.

This article describes one agency’s strategies in developing benchmarks for best practice outcomes in fostering. Workers have used current literature, research and reports to identify optimum outcomes, and have then compared the performance of their own foster care program to these points. Future directions and current needs in research in this area are identified.

The introduction to this article provides a brief overview of current issues in kinship care. This is followed by transcripts of two speeches given by kinship carers at a Kinship Care Forum held in Brisbane in 2020. In these speeches, the speakers described how they became carers, their commitment to the children in their care, the challenges they have faced, the children’s development over time in their care and their struggles to achieve the support they needed.

Sleep disturbances such as bed refusal and resistance, sleep-onset delay, night waking with crying, and unwanted co-sleeping with parents affect 15% to 25% of families during their infant's first two years. A program is described that involves structured pre-bedtime activities, putting the child into his or her own bed awake at a regular time, and responding to subsequent waking and crying with planned ignoring and minimally-arousing checks when necessary. This programme was demonstrated in four families and shown to resolve infant sleep disturbances to a clinically significant degree and to the satisfaction of the parents.

Most packaged parent education programmes available in Victoria teach some underlying principles about children’s behaviour and offer specific skills or strategies for managing children. Whilst parent education is seen as an important part of a treatment plan for parents who have abused or neglected their children, these parents are rarely at a stage where they can make use of the information or strategies taught in the packaged programmes. Acutely vulnerable parents, who themselves have been hurt as children, must first heal some of their past before being able to learn and use new approaches to parenting. This paper considers the characteristics of acutely vulnerable parents and proposes some approaches that can be employed to assist these parents reach a point where they can respond to parent education and develop new positive ways relating to their children.

If you go down to the woods today…

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), the nineteenth-century English poet, wrote about the live murmur of a summer’s day’, presumably referring to bees, birds and other bugs humming around the countryside. A twentieth-century American (whom I believe to be a poet though not all would agree) wrote that The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1963). Nowhere have they changed more than in the English countryside. In 1991, it was the ‘live murmur’ of the summer’s night that was more likely to be heard. Out in fertile rural England the English people have discovered crop circles in their cornfields.

It is good to be in England in (the admittedly all-too-brief) summer, but quiet evenings in cornfields sleeping off the effects of English ales are a thing of the past. These days, find a cornfield and you will find half the media and a sizeable chunk of the English population. In some country areas, they say, it is quieter sitting in the middle of the road because you avoid the crowds. Crop circles in cornfields have seized the imagination of the public.

The research aim was to discover the circumstances, if any, in which contact with the parent who had abused them, could help survivors of intrafamilial child sexual abuse (ICSA) to recover from the inherent relational trauma. Thirty-five (31 female and 4 male) participants were recruited from across Australia and New Zealand to speak about their experience of post-abuse contact. The research methodology was primarily qualitative, and analysed in a contextual framework. In the Pre-Contact stage, themes such as the need for empowerment versus the fear of the response, linked to motivations for and against contact. Emotional reactions, and issues of acknowledgment and apology were core themes in the Contact stage. Post-contact themes related to evaluation of the overall experience. The majority of participants believed that their contact experience had helped more than hindered their recovery. Participants articulated the need for more public education about the complexity of ICSA, more options for dealing with the crime, and access to non-judgmental professional help for all the family at disclosure. The emergent themes provide a valuable guide for future research, policy and practice and perhaps most importantly, insight into the needs of victims and their recovery processes.

This article (the first of a series of three) reviews the research and literature on the connections between non-biological care (adoption, permanent care, foster care and residential care) and mental health and relates this to the policy context in Victoria.

The implications of the over-representation of children who have experienced non-biological care in a mental health setting are explored.

Developmental trauma is a term that describes the impact of adverse childhood experiences that results in the loss of capacity to integrate sensory, emotional, cognitive and relational information into cohesive, trusting and safe lived experiences. Infants’ and children's brain, nervous systems and neural development are vulnerable to these traumas. Trauma is stored in the implicit memory and is manifest through body gestures, breath, body behaviours, sensory perceptions, emotions and thoughts. Play therapy, sand tray therapy and creative arts therapy are all offered as interventions for childhood trauma. Work at the Clay Field®, is a sensorimotor art therapy and differs from play, sand and visual arts therapy as it focuses on haptic perception, the use of the hands and touch as a tool of perception. Touch is one of the most fundamental human experiences and is the basis of secure attachment, linked to our earliest body memories. Work at the Clay Field® is grounded in theories of developmental psychology, object relations, sensorimotor therapy and haptic perception. Haptic object relations as skin sense, vestibular sense of balance and depth sense are presented as the underpinning principles of Work at the Clay Field®. Children from the age of 2 years old onwards are enabled through work at the Clay Field to satiate developmental needs, in particular those from the preverbal age of early infancy. They also can complete trauma-related fragmented or incomplete action cycles through safe touch and restore their developmental path.

Discourses about child abuse are usually adult centred. In the research described in this paper young people were asked to give their perspectives on abuse. They described abusive behaviour as that perpetrated by persons who use their power to control those they consider as lesser.

The young people described two forms of abuse. One was feeling let down by those with whom they are in an emotional relationship. The other was feeling discounted because of their age. The children and young people considered the right to negotiate or to have ‘two-way compromise’ as essential to the prevention of abuse. The power to disclose or not to disclose abuse was described as an important issue for children in enabling them to maintain some control over their situation.

The research process and findings highlighted the way in which the institutionalisation of adult power over children as legitimate, excludes children’s knowledge on issues concerning them by preventing their participation in knowledge creating forums, and by discounting their competency as children to contribute.

Existing research findings indicate that young people from state care backgrounds experience higher rates of substance use and misuse than the general population. This study explored the nature of this relationship via semi-structured, qualitative interviews with four young people who had recently transitioned from state care and three workers in the out-of-home care field, plus a focus group with seven out-of-home care and leaving care workers. The findings suggest that a range of individual, interpersonal and systematic factors contribute to problematic substance use. They include the use of self-medication to address past and present trauma, a lack of meaningful and stable relationships, and state care policies and practices that lead to young people experiencing premature and unplanned exits from state care. Some significant implications for policy and practice are identified.

Working from a background in child protective intervention and staff training and development, the authors sought to address two commonly reported deficits in child protection – the lack of a risk management framework and failures in interagency collaboration. This paper reports their approach to locating a risk and safety factor matrix and their evaluation of its use in a series of interagency workshops designed to improve collaboration.

This paper combines clinical and research insights to systematically explore the experiences of infants and children through the course of repeated attachment disruptions and loss. It sets out core findings from a phenomenological study of the experience of multiply placed foster children, focussing on the experience of self that children accumulate in their journeys through long term care, as they lose, find and re-form their primary attachments. Findings point to what constitutes ‘good enough’ foster parenting for children with histories of traumatic attachment and loss.

In Australia, it is commonly reported that rates of child protection notifications have increased over time. More and more children in any given year are subject to a child protection notification. On the whole, these conclusions have been based on cross-sectional notification counts or rates recorded in a given year (e.g. AIHW 2009). Although useful, such analyses are limited in that they do not account for the fact that child protection incidents are unevenly distributed across individual cases. Crosssectional analyses also do not indicate the incidence of notifications within a given cohort of children.

In this paper, we summarise the longitudinal and comparative analysis of data relating to children born in 1991, 1998 and 2002. The results highlight the increasingly early involvement of child protection systems in children's lives, higher annual incidence rates, as well as increasingly steep cumulative involvement curves for cohorts tracked from their year of birth. The implications of these findings for mandatory reporting policies are discussed.