Advocacy as a Human Rights Enabler for Parents in the Child Protection System

ABSTRACT

Parents and guardians in child protection systems are in unequal power relationships with child protection practitioners. This relationship is experienced as exclusionary or even oppressive by many parents and guardians. For families and communities in the child protection system who experience intersectional discrimination and disadvantage, such as people with intellectual disabilities and First Nations people, this unequal relationship and subsequent potential exclusion and oppression can be even more profound. A growing body of literature indicates that advocacy can assist in addressing unequal relationships in other contexts, such as involuntary mental health. This paper explores the role of representational advocacy in supporting parents in child protection settings through a case study of an advocacy service in Victoria, Australia. Using a human rights framework to guide the analysis, the paper highlights how advocacy can help support rights, but that broader structural change will be required to consistently uphold the rights of parents.

KEYWORDS:

• Advocacy
• child protection
• IFAS
• human rights
• social work

Disclosure statement

Robyn Buchanan is Senior Advocate at Independent Family Advocacy and Support, Victoria Legal Aid.

Notes

1 We use the term ‘parent’ in this paper, to include non-biological ‘parent-like’ relationships or grandparents or other family members who are ‘parent-like’ primary caregivers.

2 Other documents, such as Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) are also relevant, but for clarity and conciseness are not considered in this paper.

3 As a Declaration, rather than a Convention, UNDRIP is not technically legally binding in the way the CRC or CRPD are intended to be. For this analysis, which focuses on advocacy rather than legal doctrine, we do not make a distinction between the different hierarchy of international human rights legal frameworks.

4 Four countries with overrepresentation of First Nations children in child protection systems; Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States; voted against UNDRIP when it was adopted in 2007, although have since expressed varying levels of support for the document.

5 Culturally and linguistically diverse families are priority groups were added as a priority group in 2020, and were not a priority group during the evaluation data collection phase and so have not been included in the analysis for this paper.

6 Child protection practitioners were interviewed for the evaluation, however, due to the restrictive nature of the research agreements required to conduct these interviews, their data is not used in this paper.

7 Our evaluation was not able to determine at what rate First Nations family and families with intellectual disabilities specifically were diverted from the child protection system by IFAS, and this should be an area for further research. See Appendix 1 in (Maylea et al. 2021) for detailed calculations underpinning this figure.

8 The evaluation examined the potential that IFAS was leading to children staying in circumstances that were unsafe for them to do so and found no evidence of this occurring (Maylea et al. 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Victoria Legal Aid.

Notes on contributors

Chris Maylea

Dr Chris Maylea is a social worker, lawyer, and Associate Professor of law at La Trobe University.

Lucy Bashfield

Lucy Bashfield is a research assistant at RMIT University.

Sherie Thomas

Sherie Thomas is an Anglicare Victoria Intensive Family Services Practitioner.

Bawa Kuyini

Bawa Kuyini is Associate Professor of Social Work at RMIT University.

Kathleen Fitt

Dr Kathleen Fitt is a lecturer in social work at RMIT University.

Robyn Buchanan

Robyn Buchanan is Senior Advocate at Independent Family Advocacy and Support, Victoria Legal Aid.