ABSTRACT
The Australian Law Reform report on children and the legal process found that Australian child welfare legislation fails to address the practical concerns of child protection (ALRC 1997). Child protection in Australia is framed as a socio-legal enterprise and this has significant implications for the legal and welfare professionals responding to children who need care and protection. The lack of agreement about what is considered harm has meant that, in Australia, the legal system looks for clear incidents of child abuse to confirm that a child is at risk or has been harmed and needs statutory help. Yet child abuse is not an absolute concept (Farmer and Owen 1995). What Messages from Research, the Department of Health (HMSO 1995:26) study in England, Wales and Northern Ireland of child protection practice found was that for the most part child maltreatment is a continuum of longer term emotional and physical harm to a child, that sometimes includes sexual maltreatment. Child maltreatment is rarely a single event and most behaviours that place children at risk need to be looked at in context: at the child’s needs according to their age and developmental needs, at parenting style, at family structure, for example. Despite current understandings that it is a combination of social, economic and environmental factors that contribute to child abuse and neglect, the child protection and legal systems are ‘preoccupied with abusive events rather than the processes that underlie them’ (Messages from Research, HMSO 1995:22).
