The View from the Other Side: A Journalist's Perspective

✍ Scribed by Sally Loane

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 104 KB
• Volume: 6
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0952-9136
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0852(199703)6:1<55::aid-car296>3.0.co;2-#

✦ Synopsis

On 29th August 1995, The Sydney Morning Herald reported a chilling story on its front page under the headline `Our Child Abuse Shame'. At least 19 children had died of severe child abuse over the past two years. Those children were under the care and protection of the state's welfare system, the Department of Community Services.

In the weeks that followed, the story, as journalists say, `really kicked in'. Writer Adele Horin reported, day after day, the dreadful state of the welfare system, the secrecy of the investigations into the deaths of children from abuse, the gut-wrenching details of little lives lost, of a welfare department coming apart at the seams, fraught with industrial trouble and its morale at rock bottom.

Readers of the most in¯uential broadsheet in Australia's biggest city were assailed with the grim images of tiny children snued out by horrendous abuse from adults. One such story concerned an 18-month old little girl (whose family had already been reported to the department for alleged mistreatment of an elder sister) who was punished for dirtying her nappy by being plunged into a bath of scalding water by her mother's de facto, who was himself withdrawing from amphetamines. She died in agony some hours later.

A month after the ®rst story, the politicians could no longer withstand the pressure of what was clearly a major social crisis. The state premier, Mr Bob Carr, ordered an immediate overhaul of the way child deaths were investigated. A special team would advise on measures to provide on-the-spot advice for frontline welfare workers. This advisory panel was ®rst proposed to a previous government by a child abuse expert, Professor Kim Oates, in June 1994. Nothing was done.