Will mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse improve or harm child protection?

As the 6th National Child Protection and Welfare Conference gets underway in UCC, social workers are asking if mandatory reporting of suspected child abuse will improve or harm their ability to protect children, writes Health Correspondent Catherine Shanahan.

Middle-class kids bush-drinking on a Saturday night, children wearing summer clothes in winter months — not the kind of issues you’d expect to be referred to child protection services, but it happens.

The examples are cited at a roundtable discussion with a group of social workers concerned that the existing child welfare and protection system is in no way ready for the imminent introduction of mandatory reporting.

The motivation behind the introduction of mandatory reporting is sound: It requires all organisations and individuals dealing with children to report suspected child abuse. As a spokesperson for Children’s Minister Katherine Zappone points out, it’s been “debated for 20 years by five governments” and although delivery will be challenging, the minister is firmly of the view, that “it is time to act”.

Mandatory reporting comes into force on December 11 and those partaking in this discussion — on an anonymous basis — say not enough groundwork has been done to allow the existing system support it. For instance, they are not convinced that a 90-minute e-learning module designed to teach professionals how to recognise the signs of child abuse and how to make a report to Tusla, the child and family agency, is, in itself, an adequate tool for child protection training.

They also believe the current system contains “too much dross” and needs to be cleaned up in advance of any change. And they believe systems in the community such as Tusla’s Prevention, Partnership and Family Support Programme (PPFS), designed to identify and address risks early and stop them escalating and detracting resources from existing services, are not yet embedded enough to really make an impact on current referral rates.

The social workers are also concerned at the level of awareness among the general population in relation to the introduction of mandatory reporting and the level of training extended to “mandated persons” — those designated by an organisation to report child protection concerns that cross a defined threshold to Tusla.

“I suppose one of the big issues is that with just over six weeks to go — to what extent is the population at large and the mandated persons, to what extent are they aware of it?” said one social worker. “And have they [mandated persons] been trained in relation to it? And from what we can gather, there’s little or nothing been done. There has been no formal training process.”

The Department of Children and Youth Affairs describes Tusla’s e-learning Children First training module as “comprehensive basic training on recognising and reporting child abuse”. The social workers say it is a good module, but that it should be used in conjunction with group sessions, where those availing of the online training would also have the chance to sit down and tease out what it means and reach a consensual understanding of what qualifies as a child protection concern.

“Because e-learning is rolled out on an individual basis, you could sit at a computer, or I could sit at a computer, and we might come out with slightly different understandings of a situation,” a social worker said. “But if you had a group of people in a room and you questioned and quizzed it and teased it out, so that we had a consensual understanding, it would be better than each of us walking away with an individual interpretation.”

The lack of training among foster parents, who, under the Children First 2015 legislation, are also “mandated persons” — is another difficulty.

“The biggest problem we have right now is around foster carers becoming mandated persons — and of trying to train large numbers. There isn’t a national training package. There’s the e-learning module [universally available online according to the department] that some of our carers wouldn’t know how to access. Some of them are not able to read and write. Or they may not be computer literate.

“We will be on the back foot again in relation to those carers, and they are the persons mandated to report child project concerns to Tusla.”

In relation to the increase in referrals social workers are predicting from December 11, one says the experience in other jurisdictions has been a 300-400% increase. Frank Browne, chair of the board of the Irish Association of Social Workers says they have consistently warned that mandatory reporting will “clog up the system”.

“The experience in Australia was that it completely overwhelmed the child protection system. People were reporting everything,” he said.

“Mandatory reporting might tick all the boxes, but it will mean having to respond to very superficial concerns,” said Mr Browne.

“Most parents about whom concerns are raised are struggling with things like addiction. Only a small portion do very nasty things. But if you clog up the system, social workers won’t be able to see the wood for the trees.”

Swamping the system at a time when more than 800 children are considered “high priority” welfare and protection cases, but have not been allocated a social worker because of staffing shortages and saturated workloads, is hardly ideal.

“Even if you take the increase in referrals to be a minimum of 40% or 30%, all of those will have to be processed irrespective of what happens after that, and as yet, we have no extra staff,” said a social worker.

Tusla is in the throes of a three-year development plan and has been actively recruiting but social workers say boots, in their area, have yet to hit the ground. They say new recruits will barely be in their posts when the new legislative requirements kick in.

Mr Browne says more experienced social workers are deserting child protection in droves because of the pressure they are under, “people who could handle five or six referrals very quickly, while a new, inexperienced social worker would struggle”.

“You have to be sure before implementing a new system that it can deliver and there is no evidence that Tusla is ready,” he said.

The social workers say “clearing out the dross” in the existing system would help. While the statistics nationally show that c58% of overall referrals don’t go beyond initial assessment and are closed off, c90% of referrals that come in from An Garda Síochána “have to be processed”. Sometimes these referrals may be no more serious than gardaí coming across “children drinking in the bush”.

“They could be middle-class children having a Saturday night out,” said a social worker. “But because the gardaí came across them, they make a referral into us. Now that’s not child protection — most of the country would be on our books if that was the case.

“But we still have to process that because it comes in under a formal garda form. So you could say that if we could sort out some of those problems, if the gardaí were told ‘you don’t have to do that’; if we had a different system — that would take away an awful lot of the volume that has to be processed to no real end other than to be closed off.”

Social workers also believe people will “refer things in out of fear that aren’t really child protection concerns”.

For example, at the moment, out of, say, 100 referrals in a given week, just six might go on to be worked, and 94 are closed off after the initial assessment. Still, the 94 generate paperwork and families are quizzed by social workers and maybe it was something as simple as “a kid out wearing summer clothes” at the wrong time of year. And later, when some of those parents look for a character reference for a job or a passport, the paperwork is there and “it could potentially go against them”.

“It’s ridiculous and the system is driving it,” said a social worker. “And that’s why we need proper preparation before launching mandatory reporting to the wider community.

“There’s a lot of clearing up work that could be done to clear all this dross out of the way. But if you introduce mandatory reporting on top of that, you are going to compound it, so we will never get to clear the decks and streamline or hone the system to be what it should be.

“So it means you increase the paperwork for social workers rather than more work with families and that’s an extreme waste of very expensive and valuable resources.”

Add to the mix the foot-dragging around the rollout of the National Child Care Information System, which will eventually, according to Ms Zappone, “form the backbone of our national child protection system” but which is currently confined to a limited number of areas, and social workers say you have the ingredients for “the perfect storm”.

“We have a new practice model, we don’t have our integrated IT system in place yet, we have multiple demands, multiple changes happening, and right in the midst of that you introduce something that floods the system, potentially, with a lot of extra demands,” said a social worker.

“I think the key question is ‘will mandatory reporting, if introduced now to the current system, enable children to be better protected, or will it impede our ability to protect children?’ And the question underpinning that is: ‘Is our preparedness for such a potentially massive change in policy sufficient to withstand and process that change?’ ”