For Kids’ Sake

Forkidsake is an ACL child advocacy ministry committed to serving the best interests of Australian children.

Forkidsake seeks to mobilise ACL’s constituency to pursue political and practical outcomes on behalf of children.

It follows an ACL-commissioned research report showing a continuing deterioration in the wellbeing of many Australian children.

The report, For Kids’ Sake: Repairing the Social Environment for Australian Children and Young People, was authored by Professor Patrick Parkinson AM, professor of law at the University of Sydney.

The report tracks the deterioration in the wellbeing of many children and young people – especially adolescent girls – in Australia over the last ten to 15 years and examines the extent to which this is the result of the increasing fragility of Australia’s family life.

Some of the research findings include:

• The number of children in out-of-home care has more than doubled in a decade to a record 35,000 children.
• While around the same number of children are coming into care each year, they are staying longer because parents have such serious problems that it is becoming increasingly impossible to return them to home.
• More than a quarter of young people aged 16-24 years have a mental disorder compared with one in five (20 per cent) in the general population.
• The total number of children in out-of-home care has more than doubled between 1997 – 2009.
• A 66 per cent increase in the rate of hospitalisation for self-harm for 12-14-year-olds between 1996 and 2006.
• Self-harm for teenage girls 12-14 years of age leading to hospitalisation is six times the rate for boys.
• A doubling in the rate of hospitalisation for alcohol intoxication for women aged 15-24 between 1998 and 2006.
• An increase from 28 per cent to 38 per cent in female school students experiencing unwanted sex between 2002 and 2008.
• About 25 per cent of children born between 1981-85 had either been born to a single mother or experienced parental separation by the age of 15, nearly three times the rate of the post-war baby boomers.
• The report pinpoints the decline in the marriage rate since 1989 from seven per 1000 population to five and a half – and the rise in children born to couples living in de facto relationships – as fundamental to the fraying social environment. It argues that marriage makes a difference, not just the characteristics of a child’s parents, because of the commitment involved.
• The number of notifications of abuse and neglect and substantiations has declined but a closer look at the definitions of notifications, and how individual states investigate and count complaints, show there is no reason to suggest there is less abuse and neglect.
• Various research shows that children do best in a happy, stable family in which they are raised by their biological parents.
• Children from other forms of families generally do poorer in a range of measures including social, behavioural, educational and cognitive.
• Child abuse and neglect is two and a half times more prevalent in single-parent families and twice the rate of intact families. Children, and especially girls, are more likely to be sexually abused when living in homes with men who are not their biological fathers.
• There is more conflict in step and single-parent families than intact families; and while separation and divorce may ease conflict within the home, it may be replaced by another form of conflict as estranged parents continue their fighting in the course of divorce proceedings, custody disputes and the practicalities of shared parenting.
• And while divorce rates have increased in the past 25 years, most separations affecting children are within de facto relationships.
• Cohabitating families are far less stable and therefore temporary than intact families. They break up multiple times more than marriages, subjecting children to a series of changes in living arrangements.

There were some significant recommendations in the year-long research project, including:

• A Families Commission reporting to the Prime Minister’s office with the goal of encouraging parenting and relationship courses, overseeing legislation affecting children and families, and coordinating ongoing research and promotional activities.
• Community trusts established in every Local Government Area to raise and distribute funds to community organisations delivering goods and services to children. The trusts would be able to issue tax deductible receipts.
• An expanded role for Family Relationship Centres to accredit and facilitate parent-child and relationship training and education programs.

In light of the research findings, Forkidsake seeks to have these recommendations introduced into public policy.