Contrasting national jurisdictional and welfare responses to violence to children.

AuthorWaldegrave, Charles

Abstract

This paper describes some approaches to addressing maltreatment of children in OECD countries and explores whether these approaches could be used to improve outcomes in New Zealand. Comparisons are made between the Anglo-American model of child protection, which New Zealand uses, and the Continental European model of family services. The child protection model is based on the adversarial legal approach, where social workers' focus is on removing the child from potentially harmful family situations and gathering evidence for legal proceedings. The family services model is focused on maintaining the family unit wherever possible, and the social workers work with families to sort out their problems. This model uses the inquisitorial legal approach, where specially trained judges lead teams of social workers to help the child by enabling changes in family circumstances to equip parents to meet their obligations to their children. New Zealand's use of Family Group Conferences, which is developed from an indigenous Maori structure, is more akin to the family services approach. This is because it encourages early intervention, with a wide whanau/family focus, without the need for gathering legally admissible evidence. However, if New Zealand wanted to adopt a more holistic family services approach to child protection, there would need to be a substantial theoretical and procedural shift from seeking to punish "unsafe" families to ensuring parents are assisted to meet their obligations regarding the wellbeing and safety of their children.

INTRODUCTION

The Social Report (Ministry of Social Development 2005), which records New Zealand's official indicators of social wellbeing, referred in its "international comparison" section to "a UNICEF study of child maltreatment deaths in rich nations in the 1990s [which] reported that New Zealand had the third highest maltreatment death rate (1.2 per 100,000) behind only the United States and Mexico" (p.107). The report noted that care should be taken with this finding because of the small numbers involved and the possible differences in the ways in which countries classify death by intention. Nevertheless, the result is sobering. In a second league table in the same UNICEF document, the figures for children under 15 years intentional death and death of "undetermined intent" were combined, and the results were not much different: New Zealand moved from third highest death rate to sixth highest out of 27 OECD nations (UNICEF 2003).

The UNICEF league tables are interesting because they offer one of the only accepted international comparative outcome data sets for violence to children, crude though they may be. In fact, apart from road deaths, the league table is the only international comparative database cited in the entire "Safety" section of the Social Report. This is because violence and abuse reporting systems and processes vary so widely in countries that comparisons lack credibility. Child deaths identify an objective outcome at the extreme end of the violence continuum, and they may or may not reflect the levels of abuse in a particular country.

Countries vary greatly in their jurisdictional and welfare responses to violence to children, according to their cultural conventions and political histories. Surprisingly, given the seriousness of the topic, there are few comparative studies that systematically explore the differences in terms of both their processes and outcomes. It is extraordinary when one considers the costs of violence to countries financially and in the loss of wellbeing. Yet many similar countries have developed quite different philosophical, legal, organisational and operational responses to violence and abuse. Given that all these countries encounter many of the same problems, an analysis of the relative merits of the different aspects of each system should be a fruitful ground for research and evaluation in this vexed area.

New Zealand is an English-speaking country that has inherited its essential traditions of law and welfare from the United Kingdom. Until 1989, it practised, for the most part, a traditional child protection model approach common to the Anglo-American world. In 1989, with the adoption of the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act (the Act), an indigenous Maori element was introduced into the heart of the jurisdictional and welfare system through the use of the family group conference. This approach, based on a traditional Maori "whanau hui" (gathering for meeting involving extended family members), was designed to strengthen family agency and participation, and mobilise community and government resources more effectively (Dalley 1998, Love 2000). It introduced a broader ecological dimension into the responses to the maltreatment of children.

Unfortunately, the Act's early life was accompanied by a period of economic restructuring and substantial constraints on social expenditure during the 1990s. The Department of Social Welfare, like other social ministries, had its budget substantially reduced and along with it much of the early resourcing of the family group conferences. Thus, it can be argued that the mixed cultural approach never really had the opportunity to develop in the way it was intended. Important elements of the family group conference were incorporated, but its application is probably more fully practised outside of New Zealand (Burford and Hudson 2000).

The international comparative research studies in this area, small though they are, offer some important points of reflection for policy in New Zealand. Like almost all English-speaking jurisdictions (Cameron et al. 2001), New Zealand continues to experience dramatic increases in reported child abuse (Department of Child, Youth and Family Services 2004), high levels of stress and job turnover among front-line workers, some loss of public confidence in the ability of public services to adequately address the safety needs of children, and a primary legal and resource focus on detection that constrains its welfare ability to deliver ongoing services to the families where violence has occurred (Ministerial Review Team 1992, Brown 2000, Ministry of Social Development et al. 2003, Connolly 2004). By contrast the family services focus of many European countries, though facing the same problems of child maltreatment, do not report a similar set of difficulties (Cooper et al. 1995, Hetherington et al. 1997, Cameron et al. 2001, Cameron and Freymond 2003). This is not to suggest that the European countries have developed some utopian formula to the vexed problems of violence, but that their predominant focus on "families" appears to have prevented a number of the persistent problems experienced by Anglo-American countries whose primary focus is the investigation and assessment of risk to children.

The purpose of this paper is to explore a number of differing national jurisdictional and welfare approaches to addressing the maltreatment of children as they tend to operate in a number of OECD countries and tease out important implications for improving outcomes in New Zealand. The paper will initially summarise important comparative research between the contrasting approaches of the French and English welfare and legal systems as they relate to the maltreatment of children, and identify differences between the Continental European and Anglo-American typologies. It will then explore the principles that underpin these contrasting models as they relate to the family services model of the Continental European countries and the child protection model of the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Finally, the paper will consider the significance of the findings of these comparative studies for New Zealand as they relate to strengths and weaknesses in the country's approach when responding to violence to children. Particular focus will be given firstly to the role of family group conferencing in as much at it captures aspects of both contrasting models, and secondly to the types of changes New Zealand would need to make to its welfare and legal structures if it decided to incorporate a family services approach.

The paper is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis of countries' welfare and jurisdictional approaches or a full description of their systems, but rather a window into some exploratory research that has begun to investigate the assumptions behind the systems in various countries, the way they operate and the public's mandate and expectations of services.

CONSENSUS AND CONFLICT IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND

The early comparative work in national jurisdictional and welfare systems involved research into child protection in England and France (Baistow et al. 1996, Cooper 1994, Cooper et al. 1995, Hetherington 1996). This research began at a time when British practitioners and policymakers were beginning to turn away from the United States as the primary role model for the development of child protection systems. Until the early 1990s, the United States was seen as being at the forefront of efforts to combat violence towards children, and European systems were seen as lagging behind the Anglo-American approach. However, it became apparent that the United States and the United Kingdom, along with other English-speaking countries with similar child welfare systems, were heading for crisis. Researchers, looking for new perspectives on the problems they faced in the United Kingdom, found a range of cultural, structural and operational differences between Anglo-American and Continental European systems of child protection.

The findings suggested that French social workers had not suffered the crisis of confidence of their English counterparts. Public perceptions of them were generally good and the media tended not to vilify them when abuse cases came to their attention. Client families, social workers and the judiciary displayed mutual respect and shared...

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