Community Capacity Building in Child Protection Projects

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Looking After families Project

Capacity building is a key goal for child protection services. Child protection workers need to build the capacity of parents to care for their children, the capacity of communities to support families, and the capacity of young people to look after themselves. However, these aims are often undermined by a range of factors. These include:

Child protection intervention often occurs in contexts where there is limited knowledge about the extent of the problem and where what is considered acceptable parenting is contestable.

Interventions are often perceived as threatening by families and sometimes as unjust, which can affect the degree to which trust and cooperation are developed.

Substantial increases in reporting rates mean that services often struggle to identify which cases require the most attention and cope with mounting caseloads.

Intense scrutiny and criticism often means that child protection services need to justify every decision they make, meaning that risk assessment procedures and child protection laws are often relied upon to justify interventions rather than providing frameworks for best practice.

These projects draw on various theories of responsive regulation, empowerment, restorative justice, shame management and defiance, and hope to explore how institutions can overcome these challenges in order to build the capacity of parents, communities and young people.

News Highlights

A National Survey on Perceptions of How Child Protection Authorities Work 2010: The Perspective of Third Parties
A report of preliminary findings from a survey of 427 people who work alongside child protection agencies in Australia explores how well government is doing in overseeing the child protection system and how well government works with third parties

Out-of-Home Care Standards Submission.
National consultations were held by the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs (FaHCSIA) to seek input on the development of nationalout-of-home care standards for children in the statutory child protection system. Mary Ivec and Valerie Braithwaite contributed a submission.

Special Issue of Communities, Children and Families Australia
A Special Issue of Communities, Children and Families Australia has been published which pulls together papers by leading child protection scholars on the regulatory principles that guide child protection interventions. In this special issue participants responded to an article written By Valerie Braithwaite, Nathan Harris and Mary Ivec on "Seeking to Clarify Child Protection’s Regulatory Principles".

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