The complaints of child abuse and child sexual abuse being reported to Child Protection and how they address the issue, had been the subject of public and parliamentary discussion for a number of years.

The outcomes for children who spent their formative years in government care can be disastrous. Workers say suicide attempts are not uncommon among young people in residential care. 

A report from the Queensland Family and Child Commission shows 69 children who were known to the child protection system died between July 2021 and June 2022, an increase from 53 children the year before. 

The deaths of 55 children in the same period have been investigated by the Child Death Review Board.

Almost 70 per cent of the reviewed cases were under the age of four.
Of the 55 children, 31 died due to external causes, including six children who drowned and another six who died by suicide.

The report found a "cluster of cases" in regional areas where agencies were unable to sustain "meaningful service engagement" with Aboriginal children. The board recommended skill shortages be addressed, and a focus on increasing the number and expertise of foster and kinship carers. 

Child Abuse & Child Sexual Abuse

Far from being safe, some of these children are then preyed upon by the very people the government has vetted to look after them.

• We hear stories of children being placed into the foster care of a paedophile. This abuse is reported to the department and other types of abuse in the home with no action taken.
• Another story of a teenager in government care was moved 46 times, staying with foster carers and in residential homes before being sexually abused in a motel room by a departmental youth worker.
• We also hear children constantly being beaten up and bullied by other children. Within 6 months, they were talking about wanting to commit suicide. The excuse that the department was lacking was time, money and resources.
• The department receives complaints of child sexual abuse prior to a Family Court proceeding commencing. These allegations are often dismissed, and never investigated as the child safety officer often display a biassed attitude that the parent complaining is of a vindictive nature in order to gain leverage in their court matter. 

Mandatory Reporting not being actioned

Schools are often the safest environments for children to disclose abuse, away from the perpetrator. Stories would be reported to the department in accordance with Section 10 of the Child Protection Act 1999. However, nothing was ever done about it.

Alot of families have complained that if they were given a lot of support, a lot of help, they could have taken care of their kids, but it was easier for the state to remove the child than to provide the resources necessary for that family.

What we're showing is the failings related to the interaction between systems and the lost opportunities for intervention when people who are responding to that child or to the family don't understand what other frontline workers are working on.

It’s not about the best interest of the child anymore. It’s all about being able to have an annual report that shows we’ve opened this many cases, we reacted to this many things. 

There is also a need for the continuing development of effective government regulation, improvement in governance and increased community awareness of child sexual abuse in child care centres and mandatory reporting. This follows the recent arrest of Qld Man charged with 1,623 sexual offences against children at childcare centres in Brisbane, Sydney and overseas. 

Whistleblower - Malpractice

Ex-workers have come forward to advise their treatment they received when challenged how a child’s case is handled can find themselves ‘performance managed’ out of the departments. Approx 200 current and former workers, many of whom say they are unable to keep children safe in departments where management is more concerned with cutting corners and manipulating statistics to manage public opinion than protecting children.

It’s also alleged that the department also engages in a practice known as ‘sleeping cases’ opening investigations so they’d disappear from the ‘unallocated’ case list, which is released to the public. It’s done so it looks better when there’s a parliamentary inquiry.

Departmental workers often appeared in court with documents that had been copy-pasted from another child’s file, bearing little, if any, relevance to the child in question.

Denied Access via Request For Information (RFI)

The rights of access under Right to Information Act 2009 are subject to certain exclusions and exemptions specified in the act which may, in certain circumstances, provide grounds for refusing to grant access to information held by the government. It is not possible to give absolute assurances that information could not be released under Right to Information Act 2009 in any circumstances. However, in relation to child protection issues, there are very strong arguments in favour of exemption for: 

• Documents relating to suspected or actual child abuse, and 
• Documents revealing the involvement and deliberations of a SCAN team in relation to a specific patient

This becomes problematic for families when dealing with the department as access to their records is usually denied without cause.

It is the responsibility of our entire community to acknowledge that children are vulnerable to abuse. The tragic impact of abuse for individuals and through them our entire society demands nothing less.

Victims and survivors of child sexual abuse, and those who represent and support them, had advocated consistently for government action.

Please support this petition so a Royal Commission into Child Protection and Child Sexual Abuse can be investigated. 

These complaints don’t even scratch the surface of how many we actually need to put forward. The department should be dismantled and completely reconsidered from the ground up, Generations of children continue to be lost, stolen and broken.

If your Child Protection complaint of Child Abuse and/or Child Sexual Abuse was handled inadequately, ineffectively or not handled at all and you would like to put your story forward - please get in touch by emailing your story to melwatsonofficial@gmail.com

This petition is supported by the following parties Mel Halliday, Mel Watson & Mel Gregory.