Responding to child deaths: the work of Australia's Victorian Child Death Review Committee

Abstract

The Victorian Child Death Review Committee (VCDRC) in Australia is a multidisciplinary Ministerial Advisory Committee established to review the deaths of children either currently child protection clients or known to the statutory child protection system. The Committee provides advice about each child death as well as insights into what are the surrounding patterns and issues. Key to this role is examining the contribution of the service sectors to the protection of children and the routine practices that are in place to respond to children and vulnerability. This paper provides a snapshot of the cases referred to the VCDRC and the key messages for practice drawn from them. What emerges is that often the threshold for when statutory child protection services must be involved in child and family matters can be ambiguous and that agreement about intervention, the level and nature of need or risk, and when cumulative harm and neglect require statutory responses are not always shared between agencies. It is clear that the lack of common frameworks about what constitutes child protection intervention challenges services. It is recommended that there be and used agreed definitions and frameworks to ensure shared understandings and collaborative responses across the service and legal systems.

Keywords:

• risk
• practice/theory/methods
• law
• child welfare
• care management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Rosemary Sheehan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work, Monash University, Australia. She has 17 years’ experience as a Dispute Resolution Convenor in the Children's Court of Victoria and has until recently been a Member of the VCDRC (2010–2013). She provided academic consultancy for the Victorian Government's review of child protection legislation (2002–2003). She teaches mental health in Monash University undergraduate and postgraduate social work programmes and coordinates the Higher Degrees by Research and Master of Social Work (Forensic Studies) programmes. Her published research covers a range of areas: child welfare and the law, family violence, mental health, judicial and corrections responses to offenders, with particular reference to women offenders. Her current research projects include: Management of sexual abuse cases in the Family Division of the Children's Court Victoria, a specialist list project implemented in 2013 which she has evaluated, and a study of cumulative harm to children and its lack of fit with how legal responses understand child maltreatment.