Community views on ‘Can perinatal services safely identify Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents experiencing complex trauma?’

Family and extended kinship systems which nurture healthy, happy children are central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Since colonisation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have been impacted by intergenerational cycles of trauma, stemming from colonial violence, genocidal policies and discrimination, including the forced removal of children from their families. Becoming a parent offers a unique life-course opportunity for trauma recovery and preventing intergenerational trauma. However, identifying or ‘recognising’ complex trauma carries significant risk of harm for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents due to reactive prenatal child protection involvement potentially compounding experiences of trauma, and limited benefits due to lack of culturally appropriate support. The Aboriginal-led participatory Healing the Past by Nurturing the Future project aims to co-design safe, accessible and feasible perinatal awareness, recognition, assessment and support strategies for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents experiencing complex trauma. This paper presents views of 38 workshop participants to determine prerequisites for ensuring benefits outweigh risks of assessment to safely recognise parents experiencing complex trauma, consistent with screening criteria. Six essential elements were identified from thematic analysis: high-quality holistic care; cultural, social and emotional safety; empowerment, choice and control; flexible person-centred approaches; trusting relationships; and sensitive, skilled communication

Supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Families to Stay Together from the Start (SAFeST Start): Urgent call to action to address crisis in infant removals

Reducing the rate of over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care (OOHC) is a key Closing the Gap target committed to by all Australian governments. Current strategies are failing. The “gap” is widening, with the rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in OOHC at 30 June 2020 being 11 times that of non-Indigenous children. Approximately, one in five Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children entering OOHC each year are younger than one year. These figures represent compounding intergenerational trauma and institutional harm to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and communities. This article outlines systemic failures to address the needs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander parents during pregnancy and following birth, causing cumulative harm and trauma to families, communities and cultures. Major reform to child and family notification and service systems, and significant investment to address this crisis, is urgently needed. The Family Matters Building Blocks and five elements of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle (Prevention, Participation, Partnerships, Placement and Connection) provide a transformative foundation to address historical, institutional, well-being and socioeconomic drivers of current catastrophic trajectories. The time for action is now

Nurturing children's development through healthy eating and active living: Time for policies to support effective interventions in the context of responsive emotional support and early learning

Fostering the growth, development, health, and wellbeing of children is a global priority. The early childhood period presents a critical window to influence lifelong trajectories, however urgent multisectoral action is needed to ensure that families are adequately supported to nurture their children's growth and development. With a shared vision to give every child the best start in life, thus helping them reach their full developmental potential, we have formed the International Healthy Eating Active Living Matters (HEALing Matters) Alliance. Together, we form a global network of academics and practitioners working across child health and development, and who are dedicated to improving health equity for children and their families. Our goal is to ensure that all families are free from structural inequality and oppression and are empowered to nurture their children's growth and development through healthy eating and physical activity within the context of responsive emotional support, safety and security, and opportunities for early learning. To date, there have been disparate approaches to promoting these objectives across the health, community service, and education sectors. The crucial importance of our collective work is to bring these priorities for early childhood together through multisectoral interventions, and in so doing tackle head on siloed approaches. In this Policy paper, we draw upon extensive research and call for collective action to promote equity and foster positive developmental trajectories for all children. We call for the delivery of evidence-based programs, policies, and services that are co-designed to meet the needs of all children and families and address structural and systemic inequalities. Moving beyond the “what” is needed to foster the best start to life for all children, we provide recommendations of “how” we can do this. Such collective impact will facilitate intergenerational progression that builds human capital in future generations

More questions than answers: a focus on reunification for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in out-of-home care, in The Family Matters Report 2020

The disproportionate rate of entry into out-of-home care (OOHC) is well documented for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and youth throughout Australia (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) 2020a; Lewis et al 2019). However, less is known about children and youth who exit out-of-home care by returning to the care of their parents or former carers. This special report reviews the literature, and the publicly available data for 2018-19, about reunification for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and non-Indigenous children in out-of-home care systems. It was found that in 2018-19, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were less likely to have case plans that included reunification as a possibility compared to non-Indigenous children, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were also less likely to be reunified with family compared to non-Indigenous children. Reunification rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were highest in Victoria, however, entry to care rates were also highest in Victoria compared to other states and territories. Except for the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia, once reunified, there was no marked difference between rates of re-entry to care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children compared to non-Indigenous children. Examination of differences in reunification patterns across states and territories were also limited by the low numbers of children reunified in some states and territories (such as the Northern Territory), as well as absent data from New South Wales and Queensland. Ultimately, questions concerning reunification casework practices across the nation remain, while reunification data from 2018-19 has generated more questions than answers

Researching social work with Indigenous people in Australia: Across worldviews, across time, across the table

The use of comparative research by social work dates back to the profession's origins. However, its nature has changed over time, reflecting the profession's changing contexts. With the globalisation of social work, professional practice has expanded outside of the profession's western origins to encompass cross-worldview settings. Each contextual expansion has meant a greater complexity of the comparative research factors to be considered. In this chapter, the key conceptual and process challenges encountered while conducting the Australian Research Council-funded project From Colonisation to Conciliation: A Collaborative Examination of Social Work Practice with Indigenous Populations will be examined. This overview will explore the myriad complexities encountered in a project that endeavoured not only to compare characteristics, attitudes and positions of populations from different cultural worldviews, but also to explore the legacy and dynamics of the sometimes contentious relationship between their members: western-trained social work professionals and the social work academics responsible for their training on the one hand and Indigenous recipients of social work services on the other