NSW logged 112,000 children as at risk of serious harm last year. It has no idea what happened to 75% of them

It begins with a phone call. A 10-year-old boy rings, asking for help because his mum’s not coping, she’s been drinking and can’t look after him. A teacher calls, concerned about a student who keeps missing school. A neighbour rings because there’s often shouting next door and the parents of the kids who live there have started smoking ice again.

The New South Wales child protection helpline receives hundreds of thousands of calls a year, largely from teachers, doctors and police who suspect children are at risk of abuse and neglect. If a child is in danger it’s designed to be their gateway to help.

But at any given moment there can be 10,000 reports stuck in a backlog, according to one caseworker. When the calls to the centralised service are eventually triaged, “like in a hospital”, the reports are referred to Department of Communities and Justice offices.

Related: Children in danger as NSW child protection reaches crisis point, striking caseworkers say

It’s here that a brutal calculation takes place. There might be dozens of children in danger but often DCJ officers can choose only one call to respond to. Will it be the baby born to a single mother with addiction issues, or the teenager who is hurting themselves and running away? The child coming to school with bruises, or not at all?

The other reports are marked “closed due to competing priorities”. No one responds to them. As one caseworker says, “You would be horrified if you saw what was closed.”

Next, delays mean that even the most serious calls might not be followed up for weeks or months. In that time children may be hurt, experience severe neglect or witness violence that affects them for life.

These children are deemed to be at risk of significant harm and, in the 12 months to June 2023, there were more than 112,000 of them. Only a quarter received a home-based safety assessment.

The other 84,000 had their cases closed. The NSW auditor general has found that the DCJ did not follow up with any of these children and does not know what happened to them.

These are the children failed by a system workers say is in crisis due to underfunding, understaffing and the privatisation of out-of-home care. But even the children who are assessed are often failed, and
for the same reasons.

The effects can be devastating, caseworkers say, not only for individuals but for society.

‘I can’t actually look at myself in the mirror’

Michael Smart quit the department last year after the removal of a baby from a 19-year-old mother. It was a case that almost broke him. He saw how the system could punish those who had asked for help.

The teenager had asked a nurse to help her because she was afraid she wanted to shake her infant. Smart removed “many” children from their families in his more than 20-year career as a caseworker in the state’s northern rivers region but says this was the first time he thought a removal was “completely wrong”.

“This young woman, she had no partner,” he says. “She had no family support. She had given birth on her own. And then a few weeks later she tried to seek help. The assessment was that this young woman was capable of looking after this child but needed assistance.”

Related: ‘People think it’s all in the past’: push to reform system taking Aboriginal kids from families

But because she had no family to turn to – both her parents had “significant alcohol issues” – and because the department had no capacity to support her, her baby was taken. “That was the point when I realised that I couldn’t ever go back to the department,” Smart says. “It was the first time I’ve ever been involved in a removal that I felt, ‘I can’t actually look at myself in the mirror.’ It was about poverty.

“She’d identified that she was struggling, which is … a strength. She sought advice, she sought help – but she was penalised because she was 19 and she had no one to assist her. But the government weren’t going to help her either.”

The state’s child protection system is meant to keep families together as much as possible. It is meant to support those who are struggling, to remove children from danger and to care for them if they can’t go home. It is supposed to help make their homes safe, so that they may be reunited with their families. In the second half of 2023 78 babies were removed from their mothers within their first two weeks of life. That’s nearly three a week.

‘The public would be absolutely mortified’

The northern rivers region is best known for the tourist town of Byron Bay. Its hinterland is home to counterculture and cattle farms; the rolling hills are an almost shocking emerald green. Here the statistics for children in danger are among the worst in NSW: fewer than one in six calls about children at risk of significant harm are assessed.

It’s a story replicated across the country: overwhelming demand is met by a desperate shortage of resources. In 2022-23 about one in every 32 Australian children came into contact with child protection services, according to the federal Institute of Health and Welfare, and, as is the case for all child protection statistics, Indigenous children are disproportionately affected. In 2022 the Productivity Commission said response times had lagged to their slowest in more than a decade. In 2023 the federal government added social workers to its list of skills shortages, its record of occupations that employers are struggling to fill.

In the northern rivers there are DCJ offices in Tweed Heads, Ballina Lismore and Grafton. Staff, who spoke to Guardian Australia on the condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to talk to the media, say some offices are so short-staffed they can barely respond to any reports.

“If the public sat in on an allocation meeting and realised what we don’t allocate, they would be absolutely mortified,” one caseworker says. “They go through all the reports and they go, ‘OK, we’ve only got one worker who’s got capacity to go out and we’ve got 40 reports, so which one are we going out on?’

“It might be teenagers who are using drugs, leading to psychosis and impacting on their brain development. Domestic violence; you might have children witnessing parents choking, throwing stuff, punching mum in the head, holding the baby yelling and screaming, threatening with a weapon. Mum’s unable to protect their child because they are in survival mode. And, whatever mum does, the male can be coercive and controlling, monitoring where mum is, the routine with the kids, controlling every aspect of what she’s doing.”

The caseworker warns that the state is not only letting down its most vulnerable children but also the healthcare system, schools and police. The failure to intervene means children experiencing domestic violence may suffer psychological harm that “perpetuates that cycle of violence”.

‘Wanting to be with your mum’

Jason is a young Aboriginal man from Grafton who understands the cycle of violence. Guardian Australia has decided to give him a pseudonym to protect the privacy of the people in his story. He was removed from his family when he was three after police were called to an “intense episode” of domestic violence.

The 27-year-old now has two small children of his own. He admits to having been violent towards their mother on two occasions. He says it’s something he’s ashamed of. He’s sensitive, speaks openly and seems remorseful. But he says he can be quick to anger.

He and his siblings went to live with their grandmother but spent stints with foster carers when he says his behaviour became too much for her. They were sent to Port Macquarie, Sydney and towns outside Grafton. When he was a child, Jason says, he was “very violent” whenever he arrived at a carer’s house, breaking windows and destroying valuables so caseworkers would come back to pick him and his sister up.

Jason also spent time in residential care, living with other children who had been removed from their families. It felt like prison, he says.

“There’s nothing like wanting to be with your mum,” he says, “especially when you are so many kilometres away that you know for a fact that you can’t even speak, see or hug or touch.”

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Despite being a promising scooter rider who was sponsored by a local company, Jason says he was “fighting heaps” at school. He was impulsive and the way he acted was “pretty bad”. He spent three weeks in prison this year for breaching an apprehended domestic violence order that his mother had taken out against him after he broke one of her windows during an argument. On the later occasion, he says, he got drunk and shouted at her and threw “a couple of items” down the hall.

Jason says he still feels angry about what happened to him as a child but he had a “big wake-up call” after his daughter was born.

“Everyone in the world has a choice, or choices,” he says. “But being, as I said, impulsive, and I guess being in that framework … has affected me.

“There’s not really much programs or rehabilitation for the, I call it post-traumatic stress, from dealing with the feeling of constantly being alone, that you’re constantly being shipped around, and you just don’t feel welcome or comfortable in any sort of area that you are put in.”

The family violence cycle

For too long, Prof Susan Heward-Belle says, children have been viewed as “collateral damage” or “secondary victims” of domestic violence. “There hasn’t been enough acknowledgment that they have unique experiences of family violence that are their own,” she says.

Heward-Belle was a NSW child protection caseworker for many years before completing a PhD in domestic violence and teaching at the University of Sydney. She points to the Australian Child Maltreatment Study, the first to estimate the proportion of mental health conditions caused by childhood abuse and neglect.

The study found that between 21% and 41% of mental health conditions could be linked to childhood maltreatment, which Heward-Belle says can have “lifelong impacts” on the way people view themselves.

Like all the caseworkers the Guardian spoke to, Heward-Belle points to early intervention as vital for breaking this cycle, but says that until child protection services are adequately resourced, “nothing will change”.

One northern district casework manager says the department had begun cutting resources in 2022. The office lost about a third of its staff. Between January and May last year, the manager says, the office closed “250 to 300 reports” it would have responded to if it could.

“There was one in particular that sort of sticks in my mind,” the manager says. “A little girl who had been restored to her mother and then the shit hit the fan, the mum started using drugs again [and] associating with people that weren’t great for the little girl. And we were told we can’t allocate that. And so to my mind, why did we remove that child, work with mum to try and get things better, and put her back in a situation that was as bad as when she was removed? It was sickening.

“There was domestic violence, there was serious neglect and physical abuse, like, you name it, across the board, we were just closing them because we had no capacity.”

The manager says proper intervention is “intensive”. “If we can’t go into a family to work with them, to get some sort of change, these children grow up, and the only parenting role modelling they have is of their parents, and you continue a cycle.

“There were kids who [are] now adults who were known to us as children who were being reported as new parents.”

***

The cycle of violence is not guaranteed. It can be broken with adequate and timely support. Without it children who are exposed to domestic violence are more likely to have violent relationships as adults, whether they are the perpetrator or the victim. Sometimes they are both.

“There are cases where, you know, the mother is violent towards the father, as well as the father being violent towards mum,” the casework manager says. “So the kids see that and go, ‘Oh, that’s normal.’ It’s really important to respond to those families quickly. And we try to come to it from an angle of trying to get people to understand the cycle.”

The manager went on extended leave and pursued workers’ compensation: “I literally woke up one morning and couldn’t get out of bed. I just couldn’t do it.”

‘The worst of the worst’

Michael Smart says child protection workers are under extraordinary pressure and resourcing problems have reached crisis point. He is now an organiser at the Public Sector Association, the union that represents DCJ staff and other government workers.

Encouraged by the success the teachers’ and paramedics’ unions had in securing pay rises after the 2023 election of the Minns Labor government, the PSA called for caseworkers to have their wages regraded, which would mean a $10,000 raise for entry-level employees, who are paid $79,302 on average and are almost always required to have completed a four-year social work or psychology degree.

The government allocated $244m over the next year to move children out of emergency accommodation and to recruit more foster carers. But its budget didn’t include funding to meet the union’s demands of a pay rise and the hiring of 500 additional caseworkers. Negotiations continue.

The government has conceded that the low response rates to reports of children at risk of significant harm reflect staff shortages. There were 233 unfilled caseworker positions across the state in March. For months there were only two caseworkers in Ballina available to respond to new risk-of-harm reports and they even had to buy their own stationery, according to an employee, and Lismore is also understaffed.

The department maintains there has been no reduction in the number of funded caseworker roles across NSW and that, at the moment, there are no vacancies in Ballina. A spokesperson for DCJ said it reviewed every child’s ROSH report.

Dr Jess Griffiths is a former caseworker who, when she started in Ballina in May 2021, was one of 16. By early 2023 only four were left, she says. Her workload became “just unbearable”.

“The wheels had already fallen off,” Griffiths says. “[There] was just this constant kind of mental load that you carry, and all you’re trying to do is prioritise the worst of the worst.”

Griffiths says many “really concerning” reports had to be closed. By the time she left the department, she says Ballina was so short-staffed it was only responding to reports about babies. Reports about coercive control, a strong predictor of future violence, did not receive attention she says. “Children just not going home, or not going to school, or running away from home or homeless on the street would never be allocated,” she says.

Caseworkers ran evacuation centres during the extraordinary flooding that devastated the northern rivers in early 2022. More than two years later the Lismore office still hasn’t reopened.

A local caseworker says staff only have 10 hours out of the 140 hours they work each month to meet families in person. The rest of their time is taken up by record keeping and paperwork, so “we can’t go face-to-face because we’re sitting at a desk looking at a computer screen”.

The caseworker says reports which are “more difficult” to investigate, such as those relating to emotional and physical neglect, may be abandoned in favour of more immediately pressing reports about physical abuse and violence, even if DCJ has received dozens of calls about them.

Child protection workers can be called to homes where families are living in overwhelming squalor. “If you were to put the TV series Hoarders in the minds of people, this is the stuff we deal with,” the Lismore caseworker says. “You’re talking maggots in fridges. You’re talking flies.”

Some houses in subtropical Lismore are “absolutely full of black mould”. “There are people who are sick, they’re poor, and the department of housing [Homes NSW] doesn’t really give two shits about them,” the caseworker says. “I could take you to 25 houses that have a mould problem that’s been reported over and over and over again.” All of these houses have children living in them.

“I have to say that if anybody down the pub saw what we saw, they would be absolutely outraged, because our tolerance for risk is so high,” the caseworker says. “And it has to be, because if our tolerance for risk was any lower, we’d be bringing way more children into care.”

In June the state’s auditor general, Bola Oyetunji, handed down his review of child protection. The report was damning. It criticised the DCJ for not collecting appropriate data on what therapeutic services children needed and said that despite “numerous” previous reviews the department had not redirected its resources from a “crisis-driven” model to one of early intervention.

Oyetunji also determined that the department had “failed in its duty of care” because it did not monitor the wellbeing of children in out-of-home care, even though it is required by law to do so. Over the past five years there has been a decline in the number of children returning to their parents. There were 569 “restorations” in 2018 and 417 in 2023.

‘Pretty much broke my soul’

The case of two young Aboriginal girls and their three older brothers who were removed from their mother because she could no longer take care of them sticks with one caseworker. The woman, it was believed, had an undiagnosed brain injury from being kicked in the head and hit by a relative.

“That whole case pretty much broke my soul,” says Sam, a former Aboriginal child protection caseworker, who managed the family’s case for 18 months before she quit the department. “She was still a good mum and she loved her kids unconditionally but she just didn’t have that capacity to understand how to actually be a parent.”

The children were separated and their cases taken on by two agencies. The girls went to Ngunya Jarjum, an Aboriginal-run organisation based in Lismore. Sam says the sisters were placed with a carer. When she and another caseworker went to collect them, they “stank of urine” and their heads were visibly crawling with lice. Ngunya Jarjum told Guardian Australia it did not comment on specific child protection matters due to the legal requirement to protect children’s privacy.

The girls then went to another agency, Life without Barriers. They were placed with carers who weren’t Aboriginal.

Sam says she felt frustrated with what she saw: “There just wasn’t really any motivation to keep the family connection with the two younger girls and the three older brothers,” she says. “They lived probably a five- to 10-minute drive from each other. And they were really trying to whittle their family contact down to one hour a month.”

The children’s mother had to move home. While heavily pregnant, she spent 24 hours on a bus every month to get to and from the coast so she could attend mandatory court hearings relating to the removal of her children and, ideally, visit them. Sam says she tried to organise Life without Barriers and the carers to time the mother’s visits with seeing her girls, but she felt they weren’t accommodating.

The boys went to We Care NSW and were placed in an “alternative care arrangement” because no family could be found to take them in. They lived in a house under the supervision of shift workers arranged by We Care. We Care told Guardian Australia it did not manage children’s cases and this responsibility remained with the agency that referred children to them.

ACAs are a type of “high-cost emergency care arrangement” in which children are placed in hotels, motels, serviced apartments or rental accommodation. Most are run as a for-profit service by labour-hire firms. Information tabled in parliament in March revealed that the youngest child living in one of these arrangements was just two. As of 11 March the child had spent 173 nights in this sort of care.

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Last August there were 471 children in HCEAs in NSW, according to the auditor general, with 30% living in hotels, motels and serviced apartments. These arrangements cost an average of $829,000 a year for each child, but the government has said they can reach up to $2m. In his review the auditor general found that shift workers without child protection qualifications delivered most of the care in emergency placements. His report found DCJ “lacks the systems” and reporting processes to gauge the quality of this care.

Every caseworker Guardian Australia spoke to pointed to the privatisation of out-of-home care as a shift that changed everything for the worse. More than a decade ago the Coalition government relinquished most of the state’s responsibility for it, entrusting non-government organisations and private agencies with arranging foster care placements, residential homes and emergency care. These agencies are also meant to be responsible for ensuring that children are looked after.

There were 12,352 children and young people in statutory out-of-home care in NSW at the end of March; 46.1% of them were Indigenous. In June 2021 58 out of every 1,000 Indigenous children in Australia were in out-of-home care. The system has been criticised as repeating the tragedy of the stolen generations, the Indigenous children who over a period of at least 60 years were forcibly removed from their homes.

Some caseworkers argue that taking children into care can be unavoidable. But Sam says she worked with Aboriginal families who were treated with a stigma that she believes perpetuated the ongoing trauma of the stolen generations. “I don’t think there’s enough support available to those families that’s culturally appropriate,” she says.

The auditor general has said DCJ has failed to deliver Aboriginal strategies and reforms in the last five years and that it has not developed holistic family preservation models based on Aboriginal ways of healing.

Sam says she keeps coming back to the case of the family of five children. The girls sometimes went six weeks without seeing their brothers. She says she felt ongoing frustration, believing that Life without Barriers was reluctant to arrange makeup visits because of the cost.

Guardian Australia sent detailed questions to Life without Barriers about Sam’s concerns. A spokesperson for the organisation said it was not able to comment on specific cases due to privacy and confidentiality obligations.

“Aboriginal children have a right to grow in culture and with kin and for this reason, Life Without Barriers publicly committed to transition all Aboriginal children in our care to Aboriginal community-controlled organisations in NSW,” the spokesperson said.

In late 2022 the NSW government awarded Ngunya Jarjum a five-year contract worth more than $63m. Life without Barriers – a charity which operates across the state – was given a contract for the same period worth more than $705m. “It’s an enormous amount of money,” Sam says. “And this is the type of treatment that the families get.” All up the government spent $1.9bn on out-of-home care in 2022-23.

Workers say its outsourcing means children are often pulled out of one situation of neglect only to be dumped into another. The caseworkers say some agencies “cherrypick” cases – a baby or toddler will be easier to place in a foster home and cost less than an older child with a disability.

One caseworker recalls a child being managed by an agency who was about to be returned to a home where a “massive domestic violence incident” had occurred. “There were older siblings in the home and they were becoming violent,” the caseworker says. “And there’s no way the agency was doing home visits, or they would have seen the holes in the walls and that the house had been absolutely trashed.”

Another caseworker says: “You take [children] from the family because they’re at risk or they’re in danger or whatever. And then we put them in equally as dangerous situations and we leave them. I wonder long term what that cost is going to be. The litigation that the department is leaving themselves open to is enormous.”

In March the families minister, Kate Washington, disclosed to the NSW parliament that the government had started tracking some out-of-home-care NGOs because she was so concerned about the quality of the information they were providing to her office and to magistrates. DCJ caseworkers, who represent the minister in court matters relating to children who have been removed from their families, raise similar concerns.

Washington said nearly 100% of the information about the children in care that the department received was not accurate. Labor has blamed the Coalition for leaving it with a “broken” system. The opposition’s families spokesperson, Natasha Maclaren-Jones, says DCJ caseworker vacancies have increased under Labor. Across the state the government recorded a 7% vacancy rate in 2022. It was 10% at the end of March.

Washington hasn’t said whether she’ll give caseworkers a raise or hire more of them. She has ordered an “urgent” review of out-of-home care, due to report back by the end of the year, and promised reform. A “dedicated team” has been created to move children out of emergency care.

But, as one northern rivers caseworker says, it’s not as simple as “moving the kids” because there is such a massive shortage of foster carers. “There’s nowhere to put them,” the caseworker says. “That’s where we’re stuck. Organisations know that they’ve got the monopoly. That’s why they charge so much.”

‘Tears for all the children’

Before Betina Huber quit DCJ after 20 years in its Ballina office, she made a formal complaint. In an email, seen by the Guardian, the senior caseworker wrote that the job had become “intrinsically abusive” and unsafe.

“Caseworkers and managers are continuously exposed to children’s suffering due to the inadequate and dysfunctional [out-of-home-care] system which was put in place by the department,” Huber wrote in the 11 December 2023 email.

“The impact on children is devastating, unbearable to witness, causing us emotional and psychological harm, evidenced by the mass exodus of caseworkers, people going on sick leave like myself, and workers on [compensation] claims.”

Huber said she had “despaired” about failing children. “I am sad for letting my team down now,” she wrote. “This is what burn out feels to me: Grief at feeling defeated … Tears for all the children who crossed my path and wondering how they are now, and the parents, and the colleagues.”

She said outsourcing the minister’s responsibility to provide “safe and nurturing care for children in care” had “led to the endemic abuse of children”. She made 12 recommendations “as a matter of urgency”, including that DCJ employ professional care workers on salaries of $150,000 to look after children in emergency situations and keep them out of ACAs.

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Huber says she attended an internal meeting six weeks after she sent the email. “There were no outcomes, there were no minutes,” she tells the Guardian. “There was nothing. I then just felt like it was no point in staying there. Nothing was going to change.”

A spokesperson for DCJ said it was unable to comment on individual employment or child protection matters due to privacy obligations.

But the department concedes it needs to improve. The DCJ spokesperson said “we acknowledge there’s more work to be done to ensure all vulnerable children and families get the support they need”.

Huber says the government is “traumatising” and “abusing” children in emergency care. “Sometimes they move 500km away, at which point it’s very difficult to keep contact with their parents,” she says. “And this is for children as young as newborns.”

Children living “without love and care” often deteriorate within a couple of months, she says, because they don’t feel safe. “We’re spending so much money,” she says, “to actually harm children long term.”

And money is both the problem and the solution for a system that is supposed to be keeping families together wherever it can. Too much funding is going to private contracts, frontline workers say, and not nearly enough to them.

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Despite his experience of the child protection system, Jason dreams of working with young people who have been removed from their families. He says he always wanted to be a social worker but, because of his history, fears he “can’t ever be that person that I wanted to be”.

“I’ve always been thinking that, like, am I welcome? Am I good enough to be around certain people?” he says. “It always plays on your mind.

“I still wish I could be able to help,” he says, his voice breaking. “I get emotional about it because … I just know exactly how much it affects everybody.”

If he ends up being able to do the work that he wants, he will tell young people not to give up “no matter how empty you feel” or “how much you doubt yourself. You’ve got choices, and just choose wisely. It’s going to be a long journey, but you’ll see the other side of it all …

“At the end of the day … I would say, ‘I’m proud to be able to stand before you to actually have this conversation.’ So, yeah, that’s what I’d say.”

• Do you know more? Contact catie.mcleod@theguardian.com