Every year, Australia's child safety departments remove thousands of children from their parents on the grounds they are not safe at home and need urgent protection.
In doing so, the government becomes their guardian, taking responsibility for their lives.
But the state can be an uncaring parent, in whose hands children can live with dozens of strangers a year, be raped by those sent to protect them, and stay "warehoused" in group homes that are seen as training grounds for prison.
As part of a major ABC investigation, more than 700 people from around the country have come forward with concerns about Australia's failing child protection system.
WARNING: This story contains details that may cause distress to some readers.
The abuse
By the time a child ends up in state care, they have likely already experienced some form of abuse.
Often for a prolonged period, because it can take years for departments to act.
Far from being safe, some of these children are then preyed upon by the very people the government has vetted to look after them.
Isabella Mills, former resident, Qld
"These men were supposed to be my fathers"
Isabella was about two years old when she was placed with foster carer Alfred Peter Carr and his wife.
She had always been intimidated by his temper, but as years passed something more sinister in Carr's nature had reared its head.
"Peter was really into child pornography, and he loved to use me as his main source," she said.
"That's just what I grew up thinking kids do.
"Him being my father at the time — because that's what he was to me at the time, he was dad — I just felt like I didn't have much choice but just listen and do as I was told and be quiet about it."
Carr would conceal the paedophilic acts from his wife. By the time Isabella was about eight, the abuse and secrecy had become too much and she self-harmed.
Soon after, the placement broke down and the department sent Isabella to live with another carer. But rather than save her from the abuse, it escalated.
The man would regularly rape Isabella — in the shower, at his gym.
He had told her to keep quiet, but Isabella said she alerted the department to other types of abuse in the home. Eventually, the investigation was abandoned, she said.
"They did nothing ... I have [self-harm] scars all over my body because nobody was paying attention," she said.
When she was in year 10 at school, she moved again — to a female carer's house. The woman was the first grown-up Isabella had ever trusted, and with her unwavering support, she went to the police.
Last year, Carr was given a three-year-and-six-month sentence for rape, indecent treatment of a child and possession of child exploitation material. He only served eight months of it, with the remainder suspended.
The other man's case is still before the court, so we cannot identify him.
The year Carr was convicted, Isabella turned 18 and the government ceased being her guardian.
She believes it is she who has been dealt a life sentence, suffering daily from post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression from the sexual abuse she endured under Queensland's Department of Children, Youth Justice and Multicultural Affairs.
Amie O'Brien, former resident, Qld
"It was her word against mine"
In the five years Amie was in government care, she moved 46 times, staying with foster carers and in residential care homes or — when all arrangements fell through — in a motel room with a departmental youth worker.
During one of these motel stays in the early 2000s, a government worker took 15-year-old Amie shopping in the Garden City Westfield, spending about $300 on her.
"She encouraged me to pick things out and try things on. I remember feeling anxious because I thought she was expecting me to buy these things," Amie recalled.
Back at the Sunnybank Star Motel in Brisbane's south, the youth worker insisted Amie again model the new clothes for her.
When Amie said she had a headache, the worker suggested a massage might help.
"I laid down on the bed and I just had my bra and undies on, and she was massaging between my legs and was touching my breasts," she said.
"I didn't do anything, I didn't say anything, I just laid there.
"I was sexually abused when I was younger by a neighbour, so I always had this fear of men, but I never thought I needed to be concerned about women."
In a redress application lodged last year, Amie wrote: "I remember that I self-harmed the following night because I was so conflicted and overwhelmed. I felt angry at the department that they would put me back in a situation where this could happen."
A woman, who at the time worked for Queensland's Children's Commissioner, told the ABC she remembered Amie telling her about the alleged abuse.
Amie said on the night she self-harmed she also confided in her case worker, who later informed Amie the alleged abuser had denied the incident, and the department said the worker "needed more training around boundaries".
Fifteen years since leaving state care, Amie is unable to move on.
"Last year, I spent six weeks in hospital after two suicide attempts," she said.
"I can go long periods of time in which I'm stable and I'm achieving my goals and stuff. And then, all of a sudden, the past really catches up to me."
The racism
Indigenous children are 10 times more likely to be removed from their families.
Departmental policy dictates that they are then placed with Indigenous carers to maintain contact with their culture, but that doesn't always happen.
Instead, Aboriginal children can languish in care hours from their land while some workers dismiss signs of sexual abuse in First Nations children as "cultural" behaviour.
Megan Beveridge, former residential care worker, SA
"They basically told me it was cultural what the girl explained, because they saw sex all the time"
Ms Beveridge quit her role with South Australia's Department for Child Protection six months ago.
During her tenure, she had worked in the state's residential care homes — group-home-like settings, where children end up as a last resort, after their foster or kinship placements lapse.
She recalls an incident a few years ago that involved three young Aboriginal siblings: a girl aged about six and her two brothers aged about eight and 12.
"The girl had sexualised behaviour. She would deliberately take her underwear off and would do it in front of her brothers," she said.
When Ms Beveridge reported it, she said a senior worker explained the disturbing act away as "cultural" behaviour.
"'That's what Aboriginals do, that's their culture'. That's what I was told," she said.
"I actually was dumbfounded. I could not speak. I couldn't believe I was hearing that.
"I said to him, 'I'm sorry, you cannot put that on a culture … it's certainly not Indigenous culture'.
"[Then], another worker, not me, actually witnessed the 12-year-old having sex with the sister. And suddenly it was a big hoo-ha.
"They removed him from the house and put him by himself and that was it. Nothing done for him, except we're moving him away to stop the problem."
James*, school principal, WA
"I remain deeply concerned about the way child sexual abuse is being handled"
Until recently, James ran a school in remote Western Australia. The majority of his students were Indigenous. We've withheld his name because he still works in the system.
Schools are often the safest environments for children to disclose abuse, away from the perpetrator.
"Children were telling us, believing that we would try to stop it," he said.
"We took those stories, and we wrote them into the mandatory reports."
James estimates staff at the school had made reports about two-thirds of the students. But his follow-up calls with the Department of Communities and police seemed to lead nowhere.
"I was sending those children back home, knowing full well that I'd done whatever I could do, but knowing full well that there was going to be further abuse in the home," he said.
James also remembers attending a conference in Western Australia, where a government-employed worker spoke about counselling two young children who were abused at home.
"[They] first of all tried to write off the sexual abuse as cultural, and secondly, the fix to it was the little girl was going to get an implant to stop her from getting pregnant," he said.
"That's the level that the system's broken at, where that's acceptable.
"I believe the only way to repair the system is to have a royal commission."
Deborah de Fina, lawyer, NSW
"It's not for the state to pick new parents for a child simply because they are poor, disadvantaged, might have a disability"
Ms de Fina has been practising law since 1995. She has led Legal Aid NSW child protection law division and worked for the royal commission into child sexual abuse.
When representing families fighting for their parental rights, she found it was the clients from diverse cultural backgrounds who were targeted for intervention.
"Sometimes, I think, the child protection workers — who were for the most part young white women — would want to pick a better family for the child, rather than accepting that perhaps the child's family of origin was the best that it could be," she said.
"If you're going to take the child away from their family because of issues with the family, then at the very least the state should be providing a better system for them, better care. I don't think that's always the case."
She said early intervention was a missed opportunity.
"A lot of the families that we were dealing with, if you gave them a lot of support, a lot of help, they could have taken care of their kids, but it was easier for the state to remove the child than to provide the resources necessary for that family," she said.
The malpractice
Workers who challenge how a child's case is handled can find themselves "performance managed" out of the departments.
The ABC heard from more than 200 current and former workers, many of whom say they are unable to keep children safe in departments where management is more concerned with cutting corners and manipulating statistics to manage public opinion than protecting children.
They want the system dismantled, starting at the top.
Beverley Bell, former case worker, Tas
"There's an awful lot of covering up"
Ms Bell, who left Tasmania's Department of Communities in 2018, described the culture in the office as "toxic", where staff displayed "an ongoing and chronic dislike" of Indigenous families — who were "treated and talked about as though they were less than human" — and where workers engaged in an "illegal" practice.
She said to save time, departmental workers often presented court with documents that had been copy-pasted from another child's file, bearing little, if any, relevance to the child in question.
"I've seen that happen that an affidavit was used from another child and just changed the birth date, and maybe the gender if that was needed, and changed very little of the facts," she said.
"It is illegal because the affidavit that the case worker is required to write to hand to the magistrate is something that he uses in his decision-making about a child's life.
"And if it's not original, and a case worker's original work, then it's not a correct document. It contains false information, misleading information. The magistrate doesn't know that."
She said the department workers also engaged in a practice known as "sleeping cases" — opening investigations so they'd disappear from the "unallocated" cases list, which is released to the public.
"[It's done] so it looks better when there's a parliamentary inquiry or something," she said.
"They're open but nobody is doing any work on them.
"Unless something really serious happened, a child death or something — and then there would be a big flurry of activity — I would say for years they just stayed open, but nothing was done."
Fred*, current case worker, Tas
"I've been around for over a decade and barely recognise the current process"
Fred still works for Tasmania's Department of Communities as a case worker, so we cannot reveal his identity.
Because of his seniority he's given more complex cases, but he barely has time to delve into the intricacies of them.
"You're rushing from case to case, rather than spending the time, building relationships, seeking solutions," he said.
In his time, he's seen the department deliver numerous reviews and reports into child safety — usually after public outrage.
"All [reviews] came out with all sorts of grand ideas and the government then go ahead and fund this, or partially fund this, and we all have to get retrained," he said.
"The department does things because this is a way of managing public opinion."
On the ground, he says, things rarely improve.
"They don't improve, they just change. It's like shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic," he said.
Cora Ingram, former minister's adviser, NSW
"We need a real clean-out, starting from the top"
Ms Ingram left the New South Wales Department of Communities in 2018, having worked as a case worker, manager and policy adviser to then Labor minister Reba Meagher.
She's still in contact with current workers, who call her for advice.
"I've decided to speak out because I'm concerned that things are getting worse," she said.
"It's not about the best interests of children anymore. It's all about being able to have an annual report that shows we've opened this many cases, we reacted to this many things. But it doesn't show outcomes.
"You can play with the system, so it looks like work is being done, when actually nothing's being done to protect children and help families."
She said there should be an external review into the department's practices.
"Matters go before the court with little understanding of the legislation and the opportunities that they've got to help families, rather than just remove children," she said.
"We hand over to NGOs [non-government organisations] with things that probably should be more fully addressed by the department itself. We've got the legislative responsibility to do that.
"Perhaps a royal commission would be the best answer … [but] it's got to have some teeth and it's got to have proper questions asked. It shouldn't be about the department being able to convene the show."
The outcomes
The outcomes for children who have spent their formative years in government care can be disastrous.
Workers say suicide attempts are not uncommon among young people in residential care.
And neither is ending up in the juvenile justice system and later, prison.
Bindi*, former resident, Vic
"Out of the 30 kids I grew up with, 25 are already deceased"
Bindi was about nine when she first entered the system. Like many former wards of the state, her own children, who identify as Aboriginal, have also been in care.
We're legally not allowed to reveal Bindi's real name because that would identify her children.
Now 30, Bindi says her life has been "absolutely destroyed" by the abuse she endured in care.
When she was about 10, she was sexually abused by one of her foster fathers. In a residential care home years later, she says a worker made her perform a sexual act in the shower.
"I tried to report it a number of times. I just got told I was delusional and stupid," she said.
Like many wards of the state, Bindi was in and out of juvenile detention.
And just four months after she turned 18 and Victoria's Department of Families, Fairness and Housing closed her case, she became homeless.
She says many of her peers from the residential care home are no longer here.
"Out of 30 kids I grew up with, 25 are already deceased. The rest of them are over in jail or on drugs," she said.
"Pretty poor statistics coming out of a department that's meant to protect children."
Glenn McFarlane, former case worker, WA
"They have terrible outcomes and then they go into the prison system"
Mr McFarlane has worked in juvenile justice and, until 2012, in child protection. Of the two institutions, he said juvenile justice had a more "therapeutic" approach.
Some of the families he worked with had been in state care for five generations.
"The department had been the parent for four generations prior, and often we would still pathologise the family and say that's the family issue. And I'm like, well, we've been the parent," he said.
"If we're taking fifth generations of children into care, it's intrinsically failed."
He believes Western Australia's Department of Communities contributes to the cycle of disadvantage.
"Mental health, offending stats, drug abuse — all of those issues are massively over-represented in kids who've been through the care system," he said.
"It should be dismantled and completely reconsidered from the ground up. Generations of children continue to be lost, stolen, broken."
Kayla*, current case worker, WA
"I see kids who've been placed in residential care, who are too young, they're too innocent, and they're being … corrupted"
Far from protecting children, Kayla says Western Australia's Department of Communities puts children in harm's way. She still works there, so we cannot reveal her identity.
Primary school-aged children, who should be nurtured by caring grown-ups, are dropped in group homes with much older children exhibiting at-risk behaviour.
"We have got rapists and kids who are breaking the law and smoking drugs — methamphetamine — they're lighting fires in the bush," she said.
She remembers leaving a child under the age of 10 in one of these homes.
"This sweet little person, just absolute sweetheart, I felt like I was just throwing them into the den of wolves and walking away," she said.
"The thing that upsets me the most is when they got to the [residential] group home, they got their pyjamas out and wanted to put a movie on and have a shower and get ready in front of the TV — like they would have at home with all their younger siblings. And to the other kids at the group home that's laughable, that's ridiculous."
The child was "constantly" beaten and bullied by the older children.
"Within six months, they were talking about wanting to kill themselves," she said.
She said the excuse that departments lacked time, money and staff was not good enough for the children who were driven to suicide in their care.
"Who's going to find those resources, who's going to find these workers? Let's have a look at that," she said.
The way forward
These were some of the more than 700 people intimately involved in the system, who contacted the ABC with concerns children are barely surviving, let alone thriving, under government care.
They say a national intervention — by way of a royal commission or an external review — is required to expose the level of ineptitude in the departments and recommend how each family can be given the support it needs to overcome challenges.
Lisa Wellington from Aboriginal women's health and welfare organisation Waminda said the child protection system had been failing Indigenous families since it had been set up.
"In order for change to happen, the department needs to engage with the Indigenous community and listen to the families and walk alongside them," she said.
"The government's done this in the first place, removed our children, they are responsible for making this happen."
Ian Gilfeather, who has trained child protection workers, said more funding would go a long way.
"The problems with the system are many — basically it's underfunded, it's under-resourced," Mr Gilfeather, who until 2020 was contracted by the NSW Department of Communities and Justice, said.
"A lot of those children who are reported, never get to see a case worker."
The ABC put the claims made in this story to the relevant state and territory departments. While they could not comment on individual cases, they insisted the safety of children was their top priority, and allegations of criminal nature were referred to the police.
"If an investigation is opened into the actions of a foster or kinship carer, we take immediate action to ensure the safety of any children in their care," a spokesperson for the Department of Children, Youth Justice and Multicultural Affairs in Queensland said.
"A range of safeguards are in place to ensure children in care are safe and thriving and that includes regular visits from child safety officers."
The department said recent reforms meant staff were working "more intensely than ever before" with families.
The departments maintained racism was not tolerated, with the Tasmanian Department of Communities adding that departmental workers received training to ensure they were "culturally competent", and South Australia's Department for Child Protection saying staff had a responsibility to call out racism.
The departments said significant steps had been taken to ensure Indigenous children were found culturally appropriate placements.
The Western Australian government last year passed the Children and Community Services Amendment Act, with amendments that support Aboriginal children's right to stay connected with their culture. The state last year reported a 0.8 per cent drop in Aboriginal children in care, and 2.8 per cent decrease overall for children in care.
Victoria's Department of Families, Fairness and Housing said it had the highest rate of Aboriginal children placed in kinship care nationally, and also the lowest rate of children in out-of-home care across the nation; while the NT's Families, Housing and Communities department said it had, for the first time in 40 years, recorded a "significant" reduction in the number of children in care, most of them Aboriginal.
The departments said they openly reported data about children in care. Tasmania's Department of Communities said court documents did relate to the specific children, but some information "may be replicated" if there was a sibling group with the same family background. It said workers continued to triage lower priority cases while supporting families. The NSW Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) said unallocated reports were triaged and "dealt with appropriately".
"DCJ has clear oversight and reporting measures to ensure work with families is purposeful and timely," a spokesperson said.
The departments said steps had been taken to better support children in residential care homes. South Australia's Department for Child Protection said only one in 10 children in care stayed in group homes. The Australian Capital Territory, South Australian and West Australian governments said they were relying on new therapeutic care models, with the WA government last year committing $39 million over the next four years for these homes. Last year, Victoria became the first jurisdiction to offer support to all young people leaving care, until they turn 21.
The governments also pointed to funding and staff boosts. As part of its Roadmap to Reform, the Victorian government over the last four years has allocated $2.8 billion to child protection services. The New South Wales government has committed $2.5 billion to support child welfare, and the Northern Territory government is partnering with the federal government to give $17 million to Aboriginal family support services.
The South Australian government will review child safety laws in October, and the Tasmanian government is preparing to introduce a new crime of "failing to protect a child or young person".
*Names have been changed.
Credits
- Reporting: Katri Uibu
- Videography: Che Chorley, John Gunn, Jon Sambell, Mark Leonardi, Owain Stia-James
- Graphic design: Paul Strk
- Digital production: Katri Uibu and Daniel Miller
- Digital editor: Daniel Miller
