Allowing the Catholic Church to investigate itself was once described by an abuse victim as akin to 'putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank'.
The Church now largely accepts the value of outside scrutiny, and has even endorsed a national redress scheme that would subject it to independent examination of its complaint handling and treatment of victims.
But there is another institution — plagued by rampant child abuse in 2016 — where the vampires in charge are still trusted to mop up the haemorrhage.
Like the Catholic Church, state foster care providers often do a bad job monitoring themselves, and will only take child safety seriously if subject to external oversight. The federal government must urgently step in to support thousands of children who feel they have nowhere to turn when harmed in state care.
Children enter state care if removed from their birth parents due to abuse or neglect. They are either placed with foster carers or in an institution, with their placement managed by a state department or private agency.
Multiple scandals throughout 2016 suggest the word 'care' be deleted from the description 'state care'. Deaths of foster girls in Queensland and NSW were exposed shortly before an ABC Four Corners profile of foster group homes, which highlighted incidents of children assaulted in care, and lured for sex by predatory outside adults.
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse revealed that there were 2600 reports of sexual abuse in foster care — government and private — between 2012-13 and 2013-14 alone. State care now seems a bigger threat to child safety than paedophile priests.
While many carers and caseworkers do an incredible job with limited support, there are those who inflict further trauma on already traumatised kids. When they do, the children have no option but to report the abuse to the same organisation that employs the abuser.
"The federal government encroaches on many areas of state responsibility, but are curiously aloof on child protection, where decades of mismanagement have inflicted immense trauma on generations of children."
Victorian man Russell Mulry spent his childhood being shuffled between 87 foster homes across three states. In one placement, he was badly bashed by his carer's husband. When he told his agency, they moved him to a house just 750m away from his abuser. The agency allowed the carer and her husband to continue fostering kids, and failed to provide Russell with any counselling. 'I also wanted to complain about the emotional abuse of being moved so often,' says Russell, but his calls to various agencies always fell on deaf ears.
I have heard many similar stories from former wards of the state. Foster care agencies have little incentive to act against abusive carers — they lose funding when they lose carers, and it's very difficult to recruit replacements. And like most organisations, their first inclination when things go wrong is to protect themselves. When news broke on the death and alleged rape by group home staff of the foster child dubbed Girl X, the NSW government concealed her identity and denied media information about the case. This was supposedly done to protect her.
If only they had been so diligent about protecting her when she was still alive.
States may have oversight agencies — such as Ombudsman or Children's Guardians — but these are poorly-resourced bodies with limited powers; and they generally don't provide direct support for kids. Their websites advise people to report child abuse to the state agencies responsible for funding the carers, and thus compromised by a conflict of interest.
The federal government encroaches on many areas of state responsibility, like health and education. But they are curiously aloof on the biggest state disaster of them all: child protection, where decades of mismanagement have inflicted immense trauma on generations of our most vulnerable children. More than 40 inquiries since 1997 have resulted in little improvement.
The federal department of social services has both a presence in each state and child protection expertise, having developed national standards for out of home care. This department could fund teams who investigate reports of foster care abuse, and provide much needed direct support and advocacy for the children harmed. Given the multi-billion-dollar cost of child abuse to our economy, the short-term expense of such of an initiative would more than pay for itself over time; and save lives.
If the Catholic Church can accept the inherent conflict of interest in internal investigations, government can do the same. It's time for the federal government to show some leadership and help the thousands of kids who seem to lack someone who cares.
Oliver Jacques is a freelance writer. He previously worked as a policy adviser for government and non-government organisations in child protection, housing and welfare economics. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald, Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph.