Improving the safety and wellbeing of vulnerable children
Children's Rights
This report is based on analysis of over 3,000 recommendations from 61 state, territory and Commonwealth reports and inquiries into child protection and youth justice between 2010 and 2022. It was written by researchers at the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS), with funding from The Ian Potter Foundation, in partnership with the Commission.
Key findings
Existing evidence suggests that investment in prevention provides the best opportunities for change in child protection and youth justice.
Most of the recommendations analysed were focused on supporting the needs of children and young people once they were already in contact with child protection or youth justice (also referred to as tertiary responses). Specifically, the content analysis employed as part of this study indicated that:
- Just over 19% of recommendations were focused on prevention and early intervention strategies.
- Over 50% of recommendations were concerned with supporting children and young people in child protection and youth justice systems.
- Approximately 4% of recommendations focused on supporting children and young people in their transition from care or supervision.
First Nations children
Around one-fifth of all recommendations were focused on supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and families at all stages of the child protection and youth justice system. This finding not only speaks to the over-representation of First Nations children and young people in out-of-home care and youth justice supervision but highlights the need to work in genuine partnership with First Nations children, families and communities to reduce this over-representation.
Six themes
The thematic analysis component of the study identified consistent repetition of 6 themes representing systems-level issues, showing that these core issues have not yet been successfully addressed by governments. The repetitiveness of these themes also illustrates the complexity of addressing such systems-level barriers, these being:
- inadequate cross-system information sharing, collaboration and coordination across child protection and youth justice systems
- limited First Nations partnership and self-determination across child protection and youth justice systems
- lack of mechanisms for oversight, monitoring and transparency across child protection and youth justice systems
- limited child protection and youth justice workforce capacity and support
- inadequate levels of investment across child protection and youth justice systems
- limited opportunities for child voice and participation within child protection and youth justice systems.
The consistency of these systems-level themes over this 12-year period suggests that there is a wealth of knowledge, insight and data on the services and supports that would be effective in reducing the contact that vulnerable children and young people have with child protection and youth justice.
These findings emphasise the need for stronger governance and accountability in monitoring the implementation of previous recommendations and highlight the need for a strong focus on their implementation.