Kids lose if team goes, say agencies

Ray Smith. Photo / Alan Gibson

Child advocates say children's lives will be at risk because of a Government decision to close down a specialist team promoting public awareness of what to do about child abuse.

Child, Youth and Family Services (CYFS) said yesterday that the team of 18 community social workers would be dismantled as part of cuts axing up to 200 jobs in the wider Ministry of Social Development.

The staff work with schools, preschools, health services and other agencies dealing with children,

CYFS head Ray Smith said the team's public education role would move to "every one of our 3000 staff". The agency's call centre would check frequently with important services partners, such as schools, to ensure they were receiving all the support they need".

But Liz Kinley of the national child abuse prevention network Jigsaw and a former CYFS social worker, said other CYFS staff struggled with urgent caseloads and would not have time for public education.

"These people [the specialist team] are focused on building relationships and getting to know the people in their areas such as early childhood, medical services and hospitals," she said.

"Heaps of organisations and groups who have worked with children all the time, but didn't have specialist knowledge about how to pick up signs that a child was being abused or neglected, could ring up the person they knew - the community liaison social worker - and get them to come and talk to new staff.

"At a time when we are trying to up our game, it does feel very sad to have this role taken out. We have no idea how that will impact, but we can suspect there will be some children who won't get picked up and could get seriously harmed because the places that they frequent haven't had the education and support."

Women's Refuge national manager Heather Henare, who helped to set up the specialist teams in the mid-1990s, said dismantling them created a risk that community knowledge would decline again and "children's lives could be at risk because of it".

Ms Henare's boss at the time, former CYFS chief social worker Mike Doolan, said the teams were set up after a public debate over whether to require mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse.

The Bolger Government of the day eventually decided against mandatory reporting, instead giving CYFS a legal responsibility for public education.

"The department entered a whole range of agreements with hundreds of organisations including every school in the country and every hospital and every organisation that deals with children," he said.

The teams started out with "30 or more" specialist social workers.

But Mr Doolan, now an academic at Canterbury University, said the teams had gradually dwindled to the present staff of 18 and he supported the decision to hand the work back to frontline social workers.

"Now that the protocols have had 10 or 15 years to bed in, we're no longer talking about something that's new, we're talking about the maintenance of those protocols," he said.

"I think every social worker has that responsibility and every social worker should be talking with their communities."

Angie Lloyd, of Hamilton's Parentline, said non-government agencies like hers were now doing the community education work.

"So by taking it away from CYFS I don't see that it's going to have a great impact," she said.

A CYFS document distributed to staff yesterday said public awareness was now high, with notifications to CYFS of suspected child abuse or neglect up from less than 30,000 a year through the 1990s to 107,585 in the latest 11 months to the end of May.

It said CYFS regional public relations staff would develop "operational engagement plans" to help the service's 59 branches engage with their local communities.

"This will include a practical matrix so sites can identify the key groups in their community, how they would like to work with them and who from the region is the best person to take care of the relationship."