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Child protection
making impact
The number of notifications of child abuse and neglect to child welfare departments across Australia continued to fall in 2010–11 according to a report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW).
Spokesperson for AIHW, Tim Beard said the report, Child protection Australia 2010–11, showed a 13 per cent fall in the number of children subject to notifications of possible child abuse or neglect compared with the previous year.
Mr Beard said during the same period, the number of children in substantiated cases was stable - rising by less than 1 per cent.
| Report finds numbers down |
“After investigation, a notification to a department is considered to be ‘substantiated’ when it is concluded that the child has been, is being, or is likely to be abused, neglected, or otherwise harmed,” Mr Beard said.
He said in 2010–11 there were 237,273 notifications of potential child abuse or neglect involving 163,767 children and of these, over half were investigated and just over a third were substantiated.
“There were 31,527 children involved in substantiated cases during 2010–11, or 6.1 for every 1,000 Australian children aged 0–17,” he said.
“This is the same rate that was reported in 2009–10.”
He said children aged under 12 months were most likely to be the subject of a substantiation of child abuse or neglect.
“However, over the past five years we have seen a large fall in reported rates of abuse and neglect for those under 12 months of age, from 17 to 12 per 1,000 children,” Mr Beard said.
“Age is one of the factors child protection workers take into consideration when responding to a notification, because younger children are regarded to be the most vulnerable, and most jurisdictions have specific policies and procedures in place to protect younger children.”
He said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children continued to be over-represented within the child protection system with the report showing they were 7.6 times as likely as non-Indigenous children to be the subject of a child protection substantiation, and 10 times as likely to be in out-of-home care.
The full report is available at this PS News link.
Edition 121, 24 January 2012
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