Welcome to the first issue of Children Australia for 2017. This year we hope to continue to bring you a range of content to do with children and young people's health, care and wellbeing. This issue covers a variety of topics, and the next will be a themed issue based on presentations given at the 2016 Australian Childhood Foundation conference on trauma. As always, we welcome and encourage submissions from both new and seasoned researchers, as well as those of you working in the field who may like to share your thoughts and innovations in a practice commentary. While on the topic of working in the field, I thought I would take a moment to consider the ways that space or the built environment can impact upon children when engaging with services.

Among the plethora of minor parties fielding candidates in Australia's 2016 federal election was a relative newcomer called Sustainable Australia. Formed in 2010 and campaigning with the slogan ‘Better, not bigger’, the party's policy centrepiece calls for Australia to slow its population growth through a combination of lower immigration, changes to family payments, and the withdrawal of government agencies from proactive population growth strategies (Sustainable Australia, n.d.). At a global level, the party also calls for Australia to increase foreign aid with a focus on supporting women's health, reproductive rights and education. Like most minor parties, its candidates polled poorly, attracting too few votes to secure seats in the Senate. But in the ensuing months, the South Australian branch of The Greens broke from the national party platform by proposing the aim of stabilising South Australia's population within a generation (The Greens SA, 2017). Just this August, Australian business entrepreneur Dick Smith launched a ‘Fair Go’ manifesto, similarly calling for reductions in Australia's population growth to address rising economic inequality and a “decline in living standards” (Dick Smith Fair Go Group, 2017).

I was recently challenged by a colleague to think about the sticky question of what social work, as a discipline, has achieved over the last 40–50 years. Being challenged about the efficacy of social work and the discipline's capacity for lasting impacts is hardly a new experience. Many social workers will have confronted the opinions of clients, managers, family members and the public about the contributions or otherwise that they perceive social workers to offer. I have had these experiences too, but there are particular times when such comments remain in one's memories. After the elapse of many years I do not claim to have total accuracy of recall, but perhaps the first time I was shaken by a challenge to my noble presumptions was when Dr John Paterson, Secretary of the Department of Health and Community Services, Victoria, spoke at a meeting of child protection workers around 1989–90. He declared that he thought a mature accountant could do as well in the role. As others have recalled, Dr Paterson ‘did not blush to ignore traditional codes on the role of public servants in the policy process and overtly sought to participate in normative statements about policy’ (Barraclough & Smith, 1994, p. 16). He was known for making offensive remarks. He described disability advocacy bodies as ‘piss and wind’ groups, denigrating them as people more interested in talk than getting their hands dirty delivering services (Milburn, 1993, p. 1). He precipitated great angst amongst public servants.

Last year, the Australian Childhood Foundation celebrated an important milestone. We turned thirty years old. For more than half of this period, we have sought to translate the richness of ideas that the field of neuroscience has offered to those of us taking care of children, young people and adults who have suffered trauma resulting from violation.

This Opinion Piece traces the rise of statutory kinship care in Australia from the progressive reduction of residential care and the struggle to recruit sufficient foster carers to meet demand for protective care. It outlines identified benefits of kinship care for children and flags concern about the early stage of development of kinship care policy, programs and data systems. It is argued that there are significant risks for children's safety and well-being in failing to assess carers thoroughly and to provide equitable case management and support (both financial and non-financial) to children in kinship care as in foster care.

It is not uncommon to hear foster carers and child protection case workers comment about a child's behaviour both before and after parental contact. Frequently these comments are negative, the view being expressed that contact should be reduced because the children get upset at seeing their parents for a limited time, and then at having to separate from them. The child's resultant distress seems too difficult to manage for foster carers. Some foster parents even go so far as to suggest that parental contact should completely cease. This article sets out the rationale for parent–child contact after a Children's Court has ruled that there is “no realistic possibility of restoration” of a child to parental care. In doing so, the article revisits many of the old arguments put forward for reducing parent contact. However, alternative ways of approaching children's difficult behaviours both pre- and post-contact are also proposed to suggest different ways of managing these behaviours. The legislation and child protection practice in New South Wales provides the frame of reference for this article.

This program development report describes the birth of ‘Wondering From the Womb’, a self-determined antenatal yarning resource created through a culturally respectful action research project undertaken in rural Victoria with Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members and professionals. The qualitative reviews completed within Community involved 40 participants who shared their wisdom and experiences regarding antenatal health, parenting and child-rearing practise and connection to Country. The resulting yarning resource, written from the perspective of a baby in the womb, has encouraged curiosity and wonder about what antenates can teach adults and community members regarding their life, learning and healing. Future uses for such a resource are identified with an aim to continue self-determined, culturally respectful service delivery for Indigenous babies, children and families across the Loddon Mallee region.

Family violence (also referred to as Domestic Violence and Intimate Partner Violence) describes violence that occurs within an intimate relationship, whether a current or former partner. Children can experience a range of abuses (emotional, physical, sexual and neglect) within the context of family violence, and harm is cumulative and may present as complex trauma. This paper is based on a practice presentation delivered at the International Childhood Trauma Conference in Melbourne (Australia) in June 2016. The purpose of this paper is to increase awareness of the impacts for children who have experienced family violence, to enhance understanding of the mechanisms that contribute to their trauma presentation, and to highlight the specific practice issues and considerations in providing therapeutic support to this client population, with the ultimate aim of improving diagnostic and treatment outcomes for children impacted by family violence. Sufficient safety and stability are required for children to experience therapeutic change, and if family violence is current, the initial response needs to be protective. Identification of family violence should prompt practitioners to use trauma-informed assessment and trauma-focused evidence-based treatments within a family therapy and systems framework. Family violence is complex and there are many barriers to treatment and practice considerations. Expansion of practitioner knowledge and skills in family violence trauma will enhance outcomes for children who have experienced family violence.

For children and young people who offend, contact with the justice system can lead to life-long offending, with evidence showing that the younger a child enters the justice system the more likely he/she is to have sustained contact and go on to reoffend (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), 2017). Local and international youth justice approaches that aim to rehabilitate or resocialise the child or young person often have more success in preventing reoffending (Elwick, Davis, Crehan, & Clay, 2013). So, what is it that makes an effective youth justice system, and how can we ensure that children and young people are diverted from the criminal justice system effectively and that those who offend do not continue into a life of crime?

The paper reflects on developments in leaving care policy and practice in Western Australia (WA) and nationally from the mid-1990s. The review of national and some international literature suggests that current Australian policy and practice shows a ‘systems stuckness’ that requires a more potent form of annual auditing and reporting of jurisdictional leaving care outcomes. The review of mostly Australian publications focusing on leaving care and the risk of homelessness includes reflections on recent developments in leaving care services in England, which recognise and restore relationship-based services for care leavers. Finally, the history, vision and initial impact of the Living Independently for the First Time (LIFT) Project, a case study of learning by doing, is outlined. The authors and their colleagues from the Department for Child Protection and Family Support (Midland District), Swan Emergency Accommodation (now known as Indigo Junction) and the Housing Authority of WA have collaborated to design and develop the LIFT Project. This initially unfunded action-research strategy involves inter-agency policy and practice designed to prevent homelessness of vulnerable care leavers.

Service utilisation by refugee families may be affected by the mismatch between Western individualistic service delivery approaches and the target communities’ more collectivist cultural patterns and practices. In addition to access barriers, utilisation of early childhood services by refugees can also be impacted upon by distrust of services, health and settlement issues, stigma, unfamiliarity with early childhood programmes, and fear of child protection and other legal systems. This low service utilisation sits in conflict with the need for early interventions for very young children, who are in the peak period of brain development. This article explores the implementation of a model to address these issues in early childhood work with refugee families and communities, with the intent to increase service uptake. Some strategies to address potential barriers will be described in the context of a community engagement model that includes consultation, relationship building, collaborative flexible service design and delivery, partnerships in community capacity building and cross-referral. Flexible, culturally appropriate interventions can enhance strengths based, non-pathologising and development-focused approach. A community engagement approach will, nevertheless, present challenges for service providers who must be willing to adapt their practices. Services and funding bodies need to recognise that this process is lengthy and resource intensive, but will ultimately lead to better service delivery and uptake, potentially leading to improvements in health, development and relational outcomes, for children and families from refugee backgrounds.

Drawing on a wide body of theory, including work on trauma and art therapy, this paper calls for art therapy to be considered a seminal player in the healing of childhood trauma across a range of service providers. The paper reflects on a therapeutic relationship between a recently graduated art therapist and a 7-year-old Aboriginal primary school boy living in rural Australia. Written from the therapist's point of view, this paper considers the responses of both the client and the therapist, and the transformative nature of this particular therapeutic relationship. The paper focuses on ‘Jannali’ (pseudonym) who was referred to the art therapy programme in the school, as he was distracted, difficult and disruptive in class. Struggling with his identity, his place in the community, his family and his skin, the relationship between the art therapist and Jannali developed through art and play. Reconciliation, not in terms of black and white, but in terms of relationship was a main theme: therapist and client moved from a state of ‘you and me’ to one of ‘us and we’. The paper shows how, through art making and play in a specific therapeutic context, cross-cultural relationships were forged, opening up liminal spaces in which the client's presenting issues and difficulties were both explored and supported and he was able to begin his journey as a learner where previously he was not. These changes also indicate that breaking the transmission of transgenerational trauma and its effects may be possible through art therapy.

Relational, body-oriented and brain-based approaches to recovery and change are increasingly popular modalities for working with traumatised children and adults. However, although these approaches encourage the awareness, and the harnessing of workers’ visceral experiences, there is little in the literature to describe how practitioners navigate their own somatic maps. In a research project undertaken from 2008–16, I invited nine human service workers to tell and explore stories about their own experiences of the body that emerged during, and/or in relation to, their own professional practice. A narrative methodology was used to help facilitate a depth of understanding of how the participants used their own bodies as a source of knowledge and/or as an intervention strategy with those with whom they worked. In this paper, I explore one of many stories told by Coral in which she describes the processes she uses to navigate her own somatic map as she interacts with clients and workers in a domestic violence service. I conclude that creating spaces for workers to explore embodied experience in the professional conversation is important, but is difficult without an acceptable discourse or narrative template. Nonetheless, given the opportunity, including the ‘body as subject’ encourages better outcomes for clients and provides richer accounts of human service workers’ professional experience.

Therapeutic residential care is currently seen as an answer to managing the increasing disruption experienced by many young people in care. Yet the history of residential care in Australia is problematic and the international evidence for the efficacy of therapeutic approaches is very poor. The author's own agency's experience of providing residential care also indicates that caution is needed before increasing the numbers of residential ‘beds’. Problems include young people's dislike of residential options and the stressfulness of an environment that involves shift workers and multiple transient relationships. Further, residential care can be a financial drain on child welfare budgets (being tendered to non-government agencies at over seven times the cost of community care), and has the potential danger – when beds are empty – of being used for young people who do not need this level of care. Residential care may appear to be the only option for a handful of adolescents no longer suited to foster care; but before developing therapeutic residential care further, government must be able to guarantee, at a minimum: a safe environment, a nurturing and healing environment, continuity of care, and the capacity to meet young people's developmental and permanency needs. These standards must be met, not just now, but over the long term.

The issue of what is ‘effective’ in therapeutic interventions with children and young people who have experienced maltreatment has attracted increasing professional interest since the 1980s. Currently, these interventions are subject to evaluative processes that privilege data collected from the adult experts, who design and deliver them. Measurements of effectiveness are predominantly based on a positivist paradigm, as indicated by the number of studies that use standardised measures to capture therapeutic success. An important concern is the neglect of children and young people's voices in the discussion of therapeutic efficacy.

This article presents the findings of a review of the literature, which revealed the continued privileging of adult ‘expert’ voices and the under-representation of the contributions from children and young people. However, when children and young people were engaged as active participants in evaluation processes, they were shown to demonstrate a depth of insight, which requires a reappraisal of adults as the only source of expertise in the effectiveness debate. The view that children and young people can be knowledge generators as well as active agents in their own healing is reflected by this article's proposals for future research partnerships with children and young people and changes to practice and policy development.

This paper describes a critical interpretive synthesis (critical review of the literature) exploring the ways children are described and represented in the homelessness and family violence literature regarding programmes. Authors' descriptions of children and their perceived needs are considered from individual, interpersonal and systemic positions, with an inherent focus on the influence of academic language and power in representing children. The articles reviewed here contained an abundance of negative descriptions of children's poor health, educational and developmental outcomes, but very little acknowledgement of children's personal resources and capacities in times of adversity. The programme goals and strengths-based therapeutic intentions described by the authors of these articles were not always congruent with the ways children were being represented in the early stages of the articles. We argue for a better balance in representing children's strengths alongside their challenges when describing their presentation and participation in programmes and research.

Across the developed world, efforts are being made to identify and develop effective interventions that will reduce the prevalence and severity of mental health problems among children and young people in out-of-home care. Foster and kinship carers have been identified as critically important in this process. In order to develop an understanding of what interventions and/or supports assist carers in responding effectively to the mental health needs of the children and young people in their care, a scoping review was undertaken. Using the scoping study method, 1064 publications were identified, and 82 publications were selected for further analysis. The review shows that promising interventions that aim to improve the mental health of children and young people living in out-of-home care have been developed and trialled both in Australia and internationally. However, the review also highlights the lack of research specifically focused on the role of the carer.

This research explored the experiences of care leavers, who lived in institutions (such as Children's Homes and orphanages) or other forms of out-of-home care between 1930 and 1989. Participants included representatives of three sub-cohorts: Forgotten Australians, members of the Stolen Generations and Child Migrants. Employing mixed methods, this research used three forms of data collection: surveys (n = 669), interviews (n = 92) and focus groups (n = 77). This research concentrated on participants’ experiences in care, leaving care, life outcomes after care (education, employment, health, wellbeing and relationships), coping strategies and resilience, current service needs and usage and participation in organisations as well as the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Most participants experienced extreme neglect and abuse while in care. Leaving care, often after years of institutionalisation, was generally a frightening and demoralising process. Despite these challenges, a number of participants demonstrated remarkable resilience. For many, however, these experiences had negative consequences in adulthood including serious physical and mental health problems. This often made adult learning, paid employment and positive relationships virtually impossible. Most survivors carry high levels of trauma and complex unmet needs. Implications for policy, practice and services are drawn from key findings.

Many traumatised children in Australia do not receive the type of trauma-focused treatment endorsed by international guidelines and, as such, they suffer from the consequences of intergenerational trauma. Even when trauma-focused treatment is available, there is a group of children who are difficult to engage in treatment and do not want to talk about their traumatic memories. Clinicians are often reluctant to address the trauma, for fear of ‘waking up sleeping dogs’. All children deserve a chance to heal from trauma and I believe we, as a society, have a responsibility to provide children with appropriate services and treatment methods to help them achieve this. This article describes the Sleeping Dogs method, a three-phased trauma-focused treatment method, based on a collaborative use of interventions by therapists, child-protection workers, residential staff, school and the child's network. A Six Test Form is used to analyse the possible reasons why the child is unable to talk about his or her traumatic memories, for which interventions are planned. Case examples with children who can be difficult to engage in trauma-focused treatment are used to illustrate interventions. Clinical experiences show the Sleeping Dogs method has been successfully used internationally, as well as remote communities in Australia.

There is sparse research on playgroups for fathers, therefore, the benefits of such programmes are difficult to discern. However, there is much research on the positive developmental outcomes children experience with involved fathers (Appl, Brown, & Stone, 2008; Evans, Harrison, Rempel, & Slater, 2006; Green, 2003; Rosenberg & Wilcox, 2006). This research focused on a Dad's playgroup run as part of the Communities for Children Logan Project in south-east Queensland, Australia. The research found that the fathers gained positive results as being a part of the playgroup, including improved family functioning, a feeling of belonging to a community in which advice was freely available, improved relationships with their child/children and feelings that this programme met the unique needs of fathers when others in the community have not. These needs were met through the play environment, scheduling, staffing and support networks.