Suchergebnisse

This article reviews initial findings from an Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute [AHURI]-funded research project examining housing outcomes among Australian young people who have been in state out-of-home care. Our findings suggest a linkage between incidents of in-care abuse and poor postcare housing outcomes among our research participants, including primary homelessness. Not attending school when leaving care was also highly associated with having experienced in-care abuse. The authors postulate that adverse in-care experiences may have contributed to poor postcare housing outcomes among the research participants; and this article raises a number of specific concerns related to neglect, abuse and assault while in care. It is also argued that support in the transition from care needs to be strengthened to mitigate poor post-care outcomes, as does accountability for in-care adversities.

Child welfare policy making is a highly contested area in public policy. Child abuse scandals prompt critical appraisals of parents, professionals and the child protection system creating a tipping point for reform. One hundred and six transcripts of debates in the West Australian Parliament from August until December 2006 relating to child welfare and child deaths were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The analysis found that statistics about child deaths were conflated with other levels of childhood vulnerability promoting blame, fear, risk and an individual responsibility theme. The key rhetorical strategy was the use of numbers to generate emotion, credibility and authority to frame child maltreatment narrowly as a moral crime. Rhetoric and emotions is about telling causal stories and will remain ubiquitous in social policy making. So, in order to guide policy debate and creation, ground their claims and manage ambiguity and uncertainty, policy makers, researchers and practitioners working with complex social issues will do well to step into this public and political discourse and be strategic in shaping more nuanced alternative frames.

AbstractGrandparents become custodial carers of their grandchildren for a variety of reasons, including love, fear of losing the children to the system, efforts to protect children while managing relationships with the adult child (parent), policy impetus, and even for the convenience of child protection systems. As obvious candidates for care provision, grandparents report feeling pressured to take on care, and yet many grandcarers are poorly supported and feel taken for granted. Drawing on a mixed method study of grandparent carers and service providers located in Western Australia, we argue that there are important issues of inequity and injustice associated with being a grandcarer, in particular due to systemic and discursive failures to recognize the complexity and challenges of care provision. Misrecognition and epistemic injustice result in further marginalization and disempowerment, compounding barriers to accessing services and supports, which in turn impact upon child and family wellbeing. The aim of this article is to analyse the complex circumstances described by grandcarers and service providers in interview and survey data, highlighting issues of inequity and injustice and therefore areas for improving policy and services to support grandfamilies.