As the sun sets on Brisbane's CBD, Mel and Marshall from the Brisbane Emergency Response Outreach Service (BEROS), set out on their night shift.
The duo will spend the next six hours driving around the city's streets looking for children sleeping rough — some as young as 11.
"What we look for is if they've got a short-term, long-term or interim child protection order," Mel said.
"If they do and they are linked to a child safety centre within our region and classify as self-placing, then we will be able to assist them."
Self-placing is the term the Queensland government use when a child under its care leaves a foster, kinship or residential care placement.
Others use the term homeless.
BEROS receive referrals from the department to ensure the safety of the children and maintain contact with them.
That's where Mel and Marshall come in.
"Generally, we try and scope certain areas to see if there's anyone that may look young, if they're not sleeping we approach them," Mel said.
"We try to build rapport with these young people as well, if they're not eligible for the service (BEROS) we would refer them to other services in the area."
But Marshall said finding those kids can be a challenge.
"It's really hard to see young people on the streets, they're not sleeping on benches or anything," he said.
"I would imagine some of them don't feel safe coming to where a lot of the adults are having meal support at the food vans."
Department closing placements, youth worker claims
Grace* grew up in the foster and residential care system and ended up on the streets at least six times during that period.
"The first time that I was homeless on a child safety order was just before I turned 12, and I would sleep at a bus stop," she said.
"I think the shortest was a few days and the longest was about two months."
These days, Grace is a youth worker who helps kids in the system.
She said some kids had their placements closed by the department or they left their allocated housing for safety reasons.
"A lot of the time they're made homeless because child safety won't find them a suitable placement and where they were was unsafe or it was closed, and they weren't actually allowed to return," she said.
"Often they were in a residential placement with other children and the other children there may have made them feel unsafe.
"A lot of times kids are moved very, very far from home ... they're very isolated and they don't care if they're homeless, they just want to be close to what they know."
Life under a bridge
Clay knows first hand what it's like to be made homeless while under the care of the department. He was 16 when his foster care placement broke down.
After six months staying with relatives and 36 rental applications, he had nowhere left to go.
He made a new home for himself and a group of teenagers, under a bridge.
"There was anywhere from six to eight of us at any given time," he said.
"The youngest was 14, I was the oldest at 17 … sometimes there was the occasional 13-year-old that popped up."
Clay managed to hold down a job for the 18 months he lived there.
The bridge ran over a body of water, providing somewhere to bathe and power points under the bridge gave the group access to power.
"So that gave us access to food, a spot to be able to cook and phone access which left us in contact with the rest of the people that we loved," Clay said.
"I was up at 4am to get ready, go to work, I'd work anywhere from 12- to 18- hour shifts depending on where we were working.
"I'd come home, jump in the ocean for a bath after work, go out and have dinner and go to bed."
A job also gave him the funds to help support the other kids he'd taken under his wing.
Why are placements closed?
Typically, children under a child protection order have experienced abuse or neglect.
Those experiences often lead to trauma-based behaviours, meaning children struggle to regulate their emotions and can become aggressive, violent and antisocial.
Grace said it's those behaviours that contribute to placement closures.
"A lot of the time unfortunately it's the children that have more of those trauma-based behaviours that we see, where a placement will break down or a carer will say they don't feel safe having the child in the home anymore, even if that child is 11 or 12," she said.
"Most of the time they're just left and their placement is closed immediately.
"I find the longer that they're homeless for, the less likely that child safety are to try and get them to return to a placement."
It's something Toni Sumner said she sees as the BEROS team leader.
"We do hear from young people that their placements have been closed against their wishes," she said.
"Typically that's when there are issues between co-tenants or with the workers, so the support workers … or if they're not able to support those young people through their trauma-informed behaviours."
Ms Sumner said BEROS saw more homeless children from residential care than foster or kinship care placements.
"If a young person is not fitting into that residential space there's nowhere else for them to go, so there often are periods where they have to be self-placing or homeless essentially," she said.
'That's our legal responsibility'
Director-General of the Department of Children, Youth Justice and Multicultural Affairs, Deidre Mulkerin acknowledged the importance of youth workers across the state.
"We have a responsibility to provide a placement for every child in our care," she said.
"It's absolutely not a funding issue, we are funded to provide placements and support for every young person that we are responsible for ... that's our legal responsibility."
Ms Mulkerin said sometimes the placements were not to the liking of the child or what they wanted wasn't available.
"So we will work with them [the children] about what is the best possible arrangement we can provide," she said.
"There's never a time when we would say, 'there is nothing so therefore you have to go'."
But Ms Mulkerin said placements might be closed if a child was not expected to return.
"If they look like they are not coming back, or if the next arrangement has worked out, then yes we will close off that placement," she said.
"It's not a 'you leave today, we close it tomorrow' — it will really be case by case."
How many kids are self-placing?
Ms Mulkerin said she could not provide a number for how many children were self-placing, because it would involve taking child safety officers off the front line.
"The only way I could [provide a number] is actually to ask my local colleagues to do their count locally and I made a decision that I actually want them to do the work, rather than stop and roll up the number," she said.
What the department could say, is as of June 30 last year there were 9,741 children in foster or kinship care, 1,582 children in residential care and 1,004 in other living arrangements.
Other living arrangements includes extended hospital stays, boarding school, moving interstate with family or carers, detention centres, self-placing and older young people living independently.
In that same period, there were 84 children in youth detention under the care of child safety and 25 children in watch houses, although it's not known how many of the 25 children in watch houses were in the care of the department.
The director-general agreed the number of children self-placing could be in the hundreds.
"In the context of 13,000 children on child protection orders in the state, 100,000 children known to us every year. So, it is a small number in the context of all of the children known to us," she said.
Where do self-placing children go?
Pam Barker and her team at the Brisbane Youth Service (BYS) are one of the first points of call for kids who find themselves on the street. They assist kids between the ages of 12 and 18 with crisis, housing and health support.
Currently they have nine children using their services who say they're self-placing or have lost their placement.
"Of the nine young people who are currently stating they're self-placing they're around the ages of 12, 13 and 14 years of age," Ms Barker said.
When a child shows up at BYS, the organisation must notify the department.
"We tell child protection we have their young people in our care and we push quite hard for child protection to respond," she said.
"If the young person is refusing to engage with the child protection system, and their case workers, we try our best to find solutions for them but often there isn't suitable housing."
Youth homeless shelters can't accept children under the age of 16 who are under protection orders with the department.
"We're not funded to provide accommodation to young people under the age of 16. And a lot of our models are not suitable," Ms Barker said.
Ms Barker said BYS often sees kids living in dangerous situations.
"We know through the statistics of couch surfing, things like sexual favours and other favours can be exchanged for a bed or a roof over their head," Ms Barker said.
"I think a lot of these young people are hanging out with people who are much older and then entering into relationships with much older people, which then puts another layer of risk of pregnancy as a young person."
These are the same situations youth workers like Grace said she finds kids in.
"There's no healthy relationships role modelled for them so they don't even know how to keep themselves safe," she said.
"Sometimes they don't even know that they're in an unsafe situation and they've been rejected so many times, and a lot of that is their placement closing, and there is nowhere else for them to go so they're kind of being pushed into these more unsafe situations that we're seeing."
Does the department try to get kids back into care?
The relationship between kids self-placing, or living rough, and child safety is often strained.
Services like BEROS play a crucial role in bridging that divide, according to Community Living Association coordinator Tania Lawrie.
"I think it's incredibly important," she said.
"Particularly for the young people who access BEROS because they find it so difficult to trust government agencies both child safety, housing, youth justice, so having an organisation that's separate is really important."
Children in care are allocated a child safety officer (CSO), but the industry has a high degree of turnover.
Ms Sumner from BEROS said that instability makes it difficult for children to maintain a relationship with the department.
"Often times young people don't know who their latest CSO is," she said.
"Or they've had three or four CSO's within a stretch of a couple of months and they start to just disengage from the system altogether because it just becomes overwhelming and confusing."
In some cases children who have lost or removed themselves from placements still receive youth work services during the day, from staff like Grace.
"Often we would try and feed them, I know that I've taken a few kids to laundromats to try and wash their clothes if they had any, a lot of the time they actually didn't have anything," she said.
"We're expected to take them to a library and they're expected to sit there for eight hours or take them to a park or walk around a shopping centre."
But it's where those children are left after a youth worker shift, that concerns Grace the most.
"Often the child is dropped off in a McDonalds car park or at a train station, sometimes the child is able to choose where they're dropped off but often it will be a well-lit public area that child safety have chosen and that will also be where the child is picked up from the next day if they've got youth work support again," she said.
"These kids have no phone, they've got no clothes and no money, and they're expected to be back in that McDonalds car park at 8am the next morning for their youth work shift."
The director-general said she wasn't aware of children being left at car parks or fast food outlets.
"It's not something that has ever been brought to my attention," she said.
Kids 'struggling to express themselves'
There's no doubt the work done by organisations like BEROS can be challenging.
In some cases, kids are exhibiting risky behaviours, alcohol and drug use are common.
Marshall said even in situations that were more precarious, it was important to remember why some kids behaved in certain ways.
"There's definitely times when we have to be a bit more cautious like lock the car and stay inside, but a lot of the time they have strong trauma backgrounds and they're just struggling to express themselves," he said.
"If we can just chat to them for a bit they're often pretty happy to go along with us and work something out together."
It's this approach, Grace said, that encourages children to engage with youth workers.
"There are some organisations that do outreach support where they'll walk the streets at night and they'll go to places like those bus stops and train stations where we know a lot of kids are, and the kids are very, very happy to engage with those youth workers," she said.
Grace believes child safety are too quick to deem children unsafe.
"We'll see child safety say that it is too dangerous to go out and talk to these kids, but we have all these other workers that are able to do it and come out fine."
Karyn Walsh runs Micah Projects, one of the organisations behind BEROS.
She said that while safety of workers was a concern, it was work that must be done.
"It's definitely tough," she said.
"But you've got to be committed to it and want to do it and believe that people need you to do it.
"Because if we don't do it, we're just neglecting the potential of so many people."
*Name changed to protect identity
