Can Australia ride the wave of healthier child protection? Day 1 of the ACCAN conference.

So is Australia ready for a radical change in child protection?
The searching question was asked twice in quick succession on the opening morning of the 11th Australasian Conference on Child Abuse and Neglect (ACCAN), first by Dartington UK's Michael Little, then by by Professor Dorothy Scott, director of the recently established Australian Centre for Child Protection.

Both keynote speakers struck out in the same direction, urging a departure from current over-zealous treatment approaches leading to ever increasing numbers of children in care, in favor of a public health-driven strategy focusing instead on all children.

Perhaps because I’m in Australia, a surfing analogy springs to mind: a potentially very exciting public health wave is cooking. Scott and Little's argument earned them appreciative nods, agreeable murmurs and numerous "two thumbs up" signs (a Queenslander’s way of communicating endorsement).

But will the wave bomb before Australia has the opportunity to surf it? Or will it gain momentum only to be dumped out, flattened by the deadening weight of state influence?

And what will happen if the wave is missed altogether? Dorothy Scott presented some stark trend data to show how children were entering care in unsustainable numbers. And she talked about the shame for all Australians of regarding the enormous disproportionality of indigenous and ethnic minorities caught up in the care system.

That much is inescapable: as we were traveling the Australian east coast, dropping in on various departments along the way, some of the statistics we were shown were staggering: not only are there much too many children in care, in the far north of Queensland over 60% of them are from indigenous communities (for Queensland as a whole it is around 25%).

Dorothy Scott had another metaphor to describe the prevailing state of affairs. The care system was like “the Titanic – heading towards the iceberg at an increasing rate of knots”.

So we know we need to do something; how do we do it?
This was the follow-up question put by New Zealand Commissioner for Children Dr Cindy Kiro. Researchers might be able to point to the moral and ethical arguments supporting a shift to public-health approaches, she said, but unfortunately they did not carry as much weight as delegates would like among policy makers.

Michael Little responded by saying that the economic benefits following such approaches were likely to be the most powerful levers in eliciting change. Dorothy Scott was not so sure.

Either way, before the economic (as well as moral and ethical) arguments can be made to policy-makers, high quality, rigorous evidence will be needed to sustain the case for change. And it needs to be home-grown.

I thought the argument for high-quality evidence was going to pressed home during a symposium on the first afternoon called ‘Bridging the research-practice divide’.

What it did do was to challenge the typical ‘three cultures’ model of research dissemination (which examines the different worlds that research, policy and practice each occupy). It made the case for a more ecological perspective, stressing the the importance of the social, political and economic contexts that influence research uptake.

Some innovative methods for getting research into the hands of practitioners were discussed, including an innovative newsletter called Horizon developed by Dr Stephen Lake from the Queensland Department of Child Safety. All approaches advocated an active model of dissemination.

However, there was no mention at all of ‘high quality’ evidence. And so far I've heard precious little reference to rigorous evaluation of approaches designed to improve the outcomes of Australia’s children. I know such evaluations are out there (Triple P; NEWPIN, Parenting Under Pressure) but so far they're off the ACCAN radar.

In the absence of high quality evidence, radical change will boil down to being a wild shot in the dark. It needs to be grown in the fertile soil of local, rigorous evaluation, ideally by experimental methods. I’ll let you know if I see any.