Asserting a Culture of Child Safety Book Excerpt

The multilayered nature of child protection in Victoria is echoed in similar and different ways throughout Australia and overseas. There is a common factor: children are vulnerable and need protecting. We uphold children’s rights through policies, procedures and practices, but these need to be child focused, trauma informed and culturally appropriate. Only by working together as partners, families, practitioners, professionals and with children themselves will we be able to offer children the protection and care they truly deserve.

Abuse and neglect are a global issue, proliferated since the world has been affected by the latest pandemic. The ill treatment of children is prevalent in all societal groups, more so in those marginalised, but let’s be clear – abuse does not discriminate, and every child can become a statistic.

So, why is it then, that professions such as those in the early childhood sector are not excelling in this area of health and safety? The National Quality Standard (NQS) (Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority, 2018) is a component of the National Quality Framework (NQF) that Australian children’s services are required to work towards. In Quality Area 2.2, under the standard of Safety ‘Each Child is Protected’, there are three elements: Supervision (2.2.1), Incident and Emergency Management (2.2.2) and Child Protection (2.2.3).

To ensure “children are protected from harm and hazard, adequate supervision and reasonable precautions” are necessary. Preventing physical injury is a fundamental focus for educators, however:

1. Are we allowing our gaze to include the possibility of abuse?
2. Are we considering how to prevent abuse occurring?

This is a concept educators may not have considered when assessing risk within their environments.

Incident and Emergency Management focuses our attention on plans and procedures in case unforeseen situations arise. Once we develop these protocols, we make them clear to all stakeholders, however:

• Are we, as an organisation, making arrangements clear to everyone of how abuse will be managed? What will the consequences be?

This is something educators may not have made known to the centre community, even if there is a Reportable Conduct Scheme sanctioned for the jurisdiction in which the centre operates.

Annual training updates for child protection are designed to help educators ensure that services fulfil their obligations, so “Management, educators and staff are aware of their roles and responsibilities to identify and respond to every child at risk of abuse or neglect.” However, many educators are still not confident with traits of abuse and who they actually contact if concerns arise, both within the service and beyond.

When identifying children who might be at risk of abuse or neglect, customary thinking is that harm is coming to them when away from the children’s service. We need to realise that:

• Every child is at risk.
• All children are vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, but there is the prevalence of those children who are disadvantaged, who are so often more exposed, such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, those who are home-schooled or living in under-resourced households, children living out of home, children with disabilities, children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, asexual (LGBTIQA+) children and young people, and other sexually or gender-diverse people.

We need to be trying to identify all the possible circumstances where children could be in a position where they could be taken advantage of when they are in the care of the children’s service.

Risk assessing the possibility of abuse occurring within a service is a concept that educators find confronting. Guilt is felt for not realising there were potential dangers present while undertaking their daily routines and transitions in their children’s service. There is, however, great relief through eliminating these risks, which is doing more to protect children in care and education settings.

The existing state of affairs:

1. When I undertake professional development training sessions on this subject matter, it is not uncommon that educators are not familiar with abuse indicators, and many are surprised that neglect actually constitutes abuse.
   
2. Educators often fail to differentiate the locality of their reporting department – is it the details of the one in which the children’s service is located? Or is it the one where the child resides if they are not living local?
3. The prospect of reporting suspected abuse of a child is distressing for educators. The fear of being wrong no doubt slows down a response rate, but I question: whose wellbeing is taking precedence? Is the discomfort associated with revealing harm of a child a deterrent for making queries in the initial stages? The sureness of needing to action making a report is often impeded by wondering who should be notified first.
4. Educators also grapple with whether they are mandated to report. During Quality Assessment and Rating (to determine a service’s competence against the NQS), it is common practice for educators to be asked (Quality Area 2 Children’s Health & Safety, Quality Area 7 Governance and Leadership) what the difference is between child protection and how their service provides a culture of child safety (NQS, 2018). Consequentially, educators fail to differentiate the two-part question, the child protection information is hazy and then the latter part of the question is confusing, rendering them speechless. This status quo is not acceptable, so again, we need to do more to uphold our professional responsibility towards children.

All these reasons have prompted me to collate the information in this book, so it can be used as a practical tool for all educators to use as a guiding light towards improving outcomes for children.

Early childhood professionals need to know and be confident in:

• Knowledge about what abuse actually is
• When to seek advice
• Where to obtain guidance
• Who to contact to make a report
• Who can report
  

The first part of this book is made up of the following:

1. Child abuse – the actualities
2. Child abuse – terminology and indicators
3. Child protection – unpacking sector regulators
4. Child protection – responding and reporting
   

The second part will provide what you need to know to create and maintain a strong culture of child safety. It is made up of the following:

5. Child safety – working in the forefront mitigating risk
6. Child safety – children championing their safety and wellbeing
7. Child safety – auditing your space
8. Child safety – governance and leadership

Our services must be regarded as grounds for perpetrators, or else we will neglect children in our care, and we will fail in our responsibility towards providing adequate supervision. We must take our ethics of care more seriously so that our actions execute the policies we have in place to keep children safe. This angle of thinking about what could go wrong has to saturate our considerations when assessing our places of education and care. This attitude goes against the dominant discourse of having a positive view and lens of seeing. Unequivocally, child safety isn’t a subject where we avoid offending and assume the best in people. 

This frame of thinking encourages us to see far-reaching, and be open to, possibilities, because we can no longer work with blinkers on when it comes to the safety of children. The truth is, if you continue to clear the way for these painfully defining moments in children’s lives, you will be operating in a deficit approach to your service provision, in regard to child safety. By using an appropriate range of transformative pedagogies and learner-centred curricula, you can be working with a positive model of protecting children.

Your thoughts and ideas to make your setting the safest place possible need to be consuming and deeply considered. Be obliged to have your procedures and experiences meticulously planned and executed if you are going to be attentive to your service provision in its entirety. 

This book will give insight into being astute – mitigating risk and developing a long-lasting capacity for safety. Discover how to act with perception so that ‘children’s wellbeing is at the forefront of all your thoughts and decision-making’, and therefore the organisational culture takes on a zero tolerance to abuse and neglect.

There are National Standards that states and territories have aligned with when creating their own Child Safe Standards, however, the same variable surrounding these mandates is that educators need to be interested in children’s safety, rights and their wellbeing. As Liana Buchanan, Principal Commissioner for Children and Young People, described in a communities of practice meeting I attended by the Victorian Commission for Children and Young People (CCYP), new standards allow you to broaden your understanding, with a “refresh, rev up and deeper push for child safety”.

There needs to be a strong force of proactivity for minimising risk of harm coming to children with better accountability for the quickest and most effective response, and for providing children with the tools to know their own self-worth.

Interestingly, the Commissioner for Children and Young People in Western Australia (Jacqueline McGowan-Jones) spent the initial few months of her appointment in the role on a ‘listening tour’ and will continue this endeavour. Valuing the voices of children has also been resonated through a Western Australia publication called What can adults learn from children?, which you can find at www.ccyp.wa.gov.au. I think this is the perfect way of thinking if we are going to get the underpinning right for a strong culture of child safety. Children must be, in every respect, included in the development and maintenance of our culture of child safety.

Nicole Talarico
Early childhood professional and child advocate

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Buy Nicole Talarico's book, Asserting a Culture of Child Safety here.