Australia to Investigate Children Abused in Foster Care

“A national inquiry is about to lift the lid on foster care – a mostly hidden system in which more than 20,000 children are potentially vulnerable to abuse.

In March the royal commission into child sexual abuse will hold public hearings in Sydney into the abuse of children who were placed in out-of-home care (OOHC) by government agencies.

The hearings follow two years of private sessions and research during which foster care survivors told harrowing stories of abuse.

The public investigation comes as the number of children needing foster care grows and those willing to take on the job declines.

The commission’s focus was welcomed on Friday by Melbourne-based author and academic Nell Musgrove, who is two years into a research project on foster care in Australia.

She and Dr Dee Michell at the University of Adelaide have Australian Research Council funding to examine the history of foster care based on the experiences of foster children and carers.

Musgrove said their research showed people abused in foster care were less likely to find a way of reporting the abuse.

“We can definitely say there is more evidence of children in institutions finding a way to try to tell someone that something was wrong than we can find evidence of foster children finding ways to do that.”

She said this was often because of the psychological hold foster parents had over children or because foster carers found ways to be in the room when a child was being interviewed by a case worker.

In its interim report last June, the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse carried nine stories of people who had been abused while in out-of-home care.

OOHC includes kinship care and family group homes as well as foster care for children aged from new born to 17.

A commission issues paper on OHCC abuse prevention attracted 63 submissions last November.

Musgrove said the matter needed careful handling because major issues now were the shortage of foster homes and the retention of foster carers.

She said foster carers were motivated by the desire to do good work but did not always get the support promised or were assessed for one job – looking after teenagers – and given another such as caring for an infant. She welcomed the critical examination of the issue.

The commission will ask whether there is effective regulation, training and support for foster carers and how states and territories handled complaints when they were made.”

Royal commission to investigate children abused in foster care[The Guardian 1/17/15 by Australian Associated Press]

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