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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-11-02 Daily Xml
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Children in Residential Care

Mr TEAGUE (Heysen) (14:39): My question is to the Minister for Child Protection. Is the minister meeting her duty to protect the children who are placed in state residential care facilities? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain.

Leave granted.

Mr TEAGUE: By her report, the Child and Young Person's Visitor Annual Report 2022-23, the Guardian for Children and Young People reports that over one in four young people were reported as missing in the three months before the commissioner's visit to the residential care facilities, with the youngest person reported missing under 12 years old.

The Hon. K.A. HILDYARD (Reynell—Minister for Child Protection, Minister for Women and the Prevention of Domestic and Family Violence, Minister for Recreation, Sport and Racing) (14:40): Thank you very much to the shadow minister for child protection. It is a question that has been traversed by successive ministers in relation to children in care, particularly in residential care, and the number of children who go missing from residential care.

First of all, just to clarify for the shadow minister, what I can say in relation to the number of children who go missing is that around 30 per cent of those missing person reports relate to a very small number of children. The reason they relate to that small number of children, and the reason children in residential care do from time to time leave their particular residential care placements, relates to a really difficult, complex range of issues that those children experience in their lives and that their families often experience.

Those children and young people are children and young people who, together with their families, have experienced a range of issues: poverty, intergenerational trauma, mental ill health, substance misuse, sometimes housing stress and a range of other really complex issues. This means that those children and young people are sadly experiencing a great deal of very difficult and complex trauma, which means that their behaviours can be also similarly complex, sometimes dysregulated, which means that sometimes they do seek out particular situations. They do leave residential care settings.

That, of course, is a problem, and it is a problem that we seek to deal with through a range of mechanisms. As I said, a lot of the time, they may leave residential care settings because of the experience that they may have encountered prior to going to care. What I can say first of all is that, unlike children and young people who do not live in residential care settings, each time a child or young person goes missing from their residential care home, there is contact in those circumstances. In particular circumstances, there is a report made to police, and rightly so.

Again, that is unlike what happens for other children and young people in our community, but it is a really important step to make sure that there is an interagency focus on the particular issues and the particular environments that those children and young people may be in. That is the first step, but there are a range of other measures as well as working across agencies and very closely with SAPOL in those circumstances.

There are a range of other measures and programs that are used in residential care to improve the experience of children and young people. I know I am running out of time, but I am certainly happy to meet with the member at some point and fill him in on the MyPlace program, on the Sanctuary model of care and on a range of other programs that we initiate. I did want to also speak about the—

The SPEAKER: Minister, your time—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! Your time has expired.

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