In a previous life, I was a child protection worker. I understand how hard it is because I’ve walked the journey.
You accept that hearing traumatic stories and seeing the horror of childhood trauma is a part of the job description. Our training teaches us there is a fine line between caring too much and burning out; caring too little and being ineffective and compassionless.
As an Aboriginal worker, this line is even more challenging when the experience of racism becomes your most valuable therapeutic tool as well as the one most likely to render you helpless.
Vicarious trauma occurs when hearing your clients’ traumatic stories, witnessing traumatic incidents, traumatise those who are there to help. It’s recognised and increasingly understood in supervision and workforce support but not nearly as much as it should be.
There is often the view that because you signed up for the job, you should expect what is coming and be able to cope. However, studies show up to 80 per cent of mental health professionals have their own experience of mental ill-health.
So what happens when those in the helping profession come with pre-existing trauma and are in systems in which not only is trauma the norm but also systemic racism? While there is considerable literature supporting racism as having a similar impact as trauma, systems fail to understand it or respond as part of standard supervision, support or evidence-based structural change.
In child protection, the struggles are more personal. Aboriginal people work in the same system that forcibly removed their families and then denied they did it for 207 years. Many also fulfil the dual function of client and worker – being foster carers themselves. Adding to the layers of trauma is that Aboriginal workers are also related to many of their clients.
So, how is it possible to represent that system to your Aboriginal clients as a place of support and healing, particularly when it remains monocultural in its program delivery, parenting ideology and staffing, and continues to remove Aboriginal children at a rate of 11 times that of non-Aboriginal children?
It’s a system designed to favour the privileged but delivers its services to the least privileged.
Your advocacy for change was dismissed because of the “cultural” label on your job title. Clients who look to you for help - do not know how little power you have.
So, what’s the answer for those vulnerable kids who have only you?
Their black caseworker who has walked their journey and understands their story?
What becomes of them in a system that fails to see who they are beyond another black kid destined for a cycle of intergenerational failure?
Who cares about them if you leave? Cop the racism or abandon a vulnerable child: that’s the impossible choice.
Dr Westerman wants to see the current child removal system fixed (STOCK IMAGE). Source: Mick Tsikas/AAP
What systemic racism looks like
Last month a cultural audit commissioned by the West Australian Department of Communities (formerly the Department of Child Protection and Family Support) by my company, Indigenous Psychological Services, that identified widespread, systemic racism was leaked to the media by an internal whistleblower after being buried for three years.
I had no role in leaking the report and no knowledge of who the whistleblower is; however, the fact a report commissioned by the department, about improving outcomes for Aboriginal families, had to be leaked has become the story.
Damningly, a follow-up report by PwC Indigenous last year said there were internal concerns the recommendations in the IPS report had not been acted on, and further echoed the levels of entrenched systemic racism. The optics could not be worse for a state that has 57 per cent of Aboriginal kids in out-of-home care. WA also leads the world in locking up Aboriginal children and in rates of child suicide in Indigenous communities.
Under media pressure, the department publicly released the report alongside a report defending its actions. The department then made front-page news when 11 WA Police raided the home of a staff member looking for evidence that they were the whistleblower.
The department’s actions tell an important story of the lengths it is prepared to go to not fix a toxic culture and how dangerous it is to reveal information within the public interest. It says that if you raise racism, we will not only deny and bury that narrative but your career will also be under threat.
I am horrified by this turn of events which sadly continues to confirm the veracity of my findings. Whistleblowers who leak information in the public interest – in this case to protect Aboriginal children - deserve protection.
Whistleblowers exist only in systems in crisis – and make no mistake, this is a system in crisis. The report provided a global first opportunity to measurably track scientifically determined child protection cultural competencies against reduction in Indigenous child removal rates. Such was my frustration that I offered my services at no cost.
The results were damning, with not one of the 295 staff-tested agreeing the organisation provided a culturally safe workplace and only three meeting the benchmark for cultural competence. This is a workforce crying out for support and not getting it.
For Aboriginal staff in the system, it’s worse.
Their qualifications are demeaned and questioned, their expertise bypassed. Aboriginal workers at the most senior levels are rare and none fulfils a decision-making role when it comes to child removal. Not one. Increasing the number of Aboriginal staff does not form part of the department’s key performance indicators.
Unsurprisingly, Aboriginal staffing has decreased from 9.6 per cent to 5.8 per cent since 2009. Importantly, as Aboriginal staff have decreased, Aboriginal children in out-of-home care have increased by 119 per cent.
A report by Dr Westerman's company identified widespread systemic racism within the WA Department of Communities. Source: Google Earth
Systemic versus individual racism
Systemic racism is different from individual racism. An example:
A psychologist uses a psychological test they know is culturally biased. They have no option as it’s the endorsed tool of choice. They try their best to adapt to cultural differences without guidance. These tools inflate child maltreatment risk with Aboriginal families based on cultural difference. It also means care plans do not incorporate Indigenous-specific factors as part of a standard intervention. It makes treatment impacts impossible to address and measure.
In systems 79 per cent of all substantiated abuse with Aboriginal kids is due to “neglect and emotional abuse”, which are arguably the most influenced by cultural biases. Substantiation is seven times higher and removal 11 times higher. This is systemic racism, not individual racism. What continues to be implemented are mainstream programs with no evidence of impact on Aboriginal clients.
There is significant research that demonstrates how ineffective mainstream approaches are in addressing Indigenous trauma, attachment and parenting needs. There is also the overwhelming economic and human cost of continuing with such approaches, with racism costing Australia an estimated $45bn a year.
This is systemic racism.
Ignore the evidence. Ignore the science because your comfort is in using mainstream approaches. The workforce, being 94 per cent non-Indigenous, uses it because they understand it. But most of the client base, at 57 per cent Indigenous, does not.
It also means intensive therapeutic services are skewed towards non-Indigenous families, with significant impacts. That being rates of non-Indigenous kids in care have declined from 56.8 per cent to 42.8 per cent since 2009.
How do we fix the ‘system’?
First, we must stop this narrative of child abuse being about race. It’s the definition of racism and unhelpful to prevention efforts. I cannot “treat” Aboriginality if that is supposed to be causative of abuse.
I can, however, therapeutically alter characteristics that predispose individuals to child abuse and violence. Race is not a violence or abuse risk characteristic. Abuse will prosper when it is made about race rather than behaviour.
For example, only 5 per cent of all substantiated child abuse cases come from the wealthiest cohorts. To suggest abuse doesn’t occur in wealthy, white homes defies logic but we continue to racially stereotype Aboriginality as a risk factor unabated.
When I was a child protection worker, I had only one notification of abuse involving a wealthy, non-Indigenous family in seven years. They attended with their lawyer. I was 22.
However, there is still this view that the statistics are free from privilege, systemic racism, confirmation bias and racial profiling.
Increased access to legal services for Aboriginal people leads to a marked decrease in rates of removal. Aboriginal people in the highest child removal cohorts have English as a second or third language. They do not understand their rights. It’s notable that rates of substantiated abuse are three times higher for kids from very remote Indigenous communities.
We are already removing poor black kids at a rate that’s crippling the system. It increases the likelihood of at-risk children outside of this defined cohort being missed over those who are being distractingly racially profiled.
So are we denying that abuse exists in Aboriginal communities? Absolutely not. It’s just impossible the system has it completely right when you see over-representation of a cultural group to this extent. Advocating to address removal does not mean advocating to leave children in abusive situations. It is possible to be about prevention and removal if you are child-focused. I have spoken of the damage of under-policing of Aboriginal victims many times and am disgusted and outraged by this.
However, we also know that a driver of over-representation is something we do not like to admit but that our research confirmed: the view Aboriginal people care less about our kids. We are less capable parents. We feel less pain when our children are removed. This is known as the racial empathy gap; it confirms this perceptual bias.
To address this, our second priority is to understand the relationship between child protection cultural competencies and outcomes for Aboriginal families. The tool used in the WA review provides this unique opportunity. It enables the tracking of measured, objective improvements in cultural competencies of staff and organisations against child removal rates.
Cultural competency is not cultural awareness. It’s a complex field that applies the neuroscience of racism to evoke measured behavioural change. If racism can be irrefutably, causally determined as a predictor of child removal it then becomes trackable and improvable via targeted skills-based training and system changes.
Currently, there are no culturally determined trauma, mental health or suicide prevention training provided to child protection staff to ensure they have the skills to provide support to at-risk families. When I was a child protection worker, I delivered intensive therapy to my clients. In seven years, while I inherited many wards of the state, I did not personally remove one child. I also did not leave a child in an abusive situation. Aboriginal families were flagged for intensive support, and as an Aboriginal psychologist I understood how to provide it. Consistent with this; we calculated whether the decline in Aboriginal staff numbers was statistically correlated with escalating child removal rates and found almost a perfect relationship between the two.
It’s rare that you find a parent who does not want to do better, to provide a better life for their child. The fact we are not providing these opportunities for black parents is something a culturally competent system would change.
Third, data is reported differently and inconsistently in each state, making it difficult to benchmark in a standardised way. For example, this month the WA department claimed Indigenous child removal rates had decreased for the first time since 1997. However, it used the number rather than the rate. The former showed a reduction of 26 Aboriginal kids removed and the latter showed a 1 per cent increase in the removal rate. However, this was in a Covid-affected year and communities were locked down from services. Consistent with this, there was a 17 per cent decrease in child abuse notifications last year.
While a Child Protection National Data Set began from 2012–13, this simply tracks child removal trends. It doesn’t provide causal explanations or explain ‘they why’ of the over-representation, nor does it track or gather evidence on therapeutic outcome. Descriptive statistics do not provide anything useful regarding the focus and measurability of prevention efforts.
It’s about difference
Attachment matters. Remove a child from a family, those families never recover; those children never recover.
We are continuing to build generations of trauma by shouting for more child removals. We have a significant body of research that shows removal from primary attachments is the pipeline to the justice system, is irrefutably linked to mental ill-health, suicides, trauma and educational failure.
Compromised attachment is then inherited into future generations and relationships. We are seeing this in practical action with the same families who generationally make up the bulk of child protection statistics. Why? Because trauma feeds trauma. Those who have trauma as children are more likely to have trauma as adults.
For example, if you’ve been exposed to violence as a kid, you can develop a tolerance for it; calm, on the other hand, may feel foreign to you. It is common that those with trauma will evoke crises in their environment as a method of exerting control simply because they expect it. We address this by increasing tolerance for calm through improving self-soothing strategies in individuals.
This is the hard therapeutic work of healing compromised attachment and is our best chance of halting intergenerational trauma. We have great outcomes with high-risk non-Aboriginal families with this but have yet to determine empirically an Indigenous-specific program.
This needs to be the highest national priority.
Clinical psychologist and Nyamal woman Dr Tracy Westerman was a child protection worker. Source: Aaron Fernandes/SBS News
Parenting differences, not deficits
The core of understanding cultural attachment lies in the primary differences in Aboriginal parenting.
Natural growth parenting means a greater focus on the concept of “It takes a whole community to raise a child”. It teaches interdependence and is often confused for attachment disorders from a mainstream, nuclear family model. Community and kin are equally responsive and responsible as biological parents to the emotional and attachment needs of kids.
Aboriginal kids are also taught to view the group as more important than the self from birth. This can look like maternal deprivation or a reactive attachment disorder when assessed from a mainstream perspective.
Kinship parenting is often viewed as emotional abuse and neglect (which continues to be the main reason for Aboriginal child removal in 79 per cent of cases); as chaotic parenting; as no one caring for a child or the child having no predictability.
But the core of chaos theory is that “chaos is not chaos if the ‘chaos’ is predictable”. Ask the child to map carers based on different emotional needs they provide and see that predictability.
Currently, child protection does not require staff to undertake a cultural kinship map. They use tools based on mainstream concepts of attachment and parenting instead.
These cultural differences render parenting programs mostly ineffective because they do not translate culturally. It also means core attachment to children cannot be addressed as a fundamental aspect of treating a parent’s own trauma or compromised attachment.
Finally, the cultural competence of non-Aboriginal foster carers is not assessed, or training provided according to the unique developmental needs of Indigenous kids. With 37 per cent of Aboriginal kids placed with white carers and strong cultural identity predicting better outcomes for removed kids, it’s critical this is included in standard support for Aboriginal kids in foster care.
All of the above was recommended in the IPS review with the tools to test and track it all against Indigenous child removal rates. None of it has been acted on. We will now lead all of this via my non-profit charity.
Bravery, to me, has always been the most important virtue because it enables all the others.
Changing systems requires bravery.
Choosing to generate race-based fear that has led to the escalating removal of Aboriginal children rather than preventing removal requires bravery.
I wish we had more leaders in this country who were brave.
Dr Tracy Westerman AM is an Indigenous psychologist, MD of Indigenous Psychological Services and founder of the charity the Westerman Jilya Institute for Indigenous Mental Health. She was Australian of the Year (WA) in 2018; Inducted into the Womens’ Hall of Fame (2018).
