The ‘new’ American solution for abused and neglected children — Intensive Family Preservation Programs — are being heavily marketed to Australians. Victoria and New South Wales have enthusiastically embraced the idea with pilot programs based on American statistics proving its value in maintaining children with their families and improving their safety. No matter that the Americans themselves warned that evaluations showed that out of home placements rate was no higher for families that did not receive the program and that the programs came from a country whose own Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect described the child protection system as a ‘national emergency’.

This article is about program evaluation for child and family services. It sets out to offer some basic frameworks for thinking about program evaluation and about the issue of program effectiveness. A rationale for the emphasis on effectiveness is identified and then linked to three areas of possible measurement. These areas, changes in user/client condition, quality of services provided and user/client satisfaction, are then considered in more detail. Finally, it is argued that service users/clients will gain from program evaluation exercises. The evaluation of services contributes potentially to an improvement in the effectiveness of child and family services so service users/clients obtain benefit from such evaluations.

Administrative data on foster carers in New South Wales (NSW) are sadly lacking. Based on research commissioned by the NSW Department of Community Services, this paper uses the Australian Bureau of Statistics Census of Population and Housing and other data to provide up-to-date information on the characteristics of foster carers and the demographic trends that are influencing their numbers. Census data indicate that foster carer families are most likely to contain women aged 35–54 years, not in the labour force. Couples account for two-thirds of all foster carers, with the majority of those couples also caring for birth children. While single parents account for less than one-fifth of all foster carers, they are more likely to foster than couples, either with or without birth children. Higher rates of fostering were found in relatively disadvantaged areas. Projected increases in female labour force participation are expected to contribute to a decline (or to slower growth) in the number of foster carers over the next decade. However, projected increases in sole parent families and couples without children are expected to have the opposite effect. The relative magnitude of these effects was not ascertained.

While family care has many positive attributes, total care by mothers may not always be the optimal care arrangement from the point of view of the children or their mothers. Here we examine the way deinstitutionalisation policies for children with developmental disabilities has swung away from often inadequately funded institutions, substituting ‘community care’. ‘Community care’ is largely tending work carried out by mothers. The public sector again is under funded and provides almost no tending for these children. We examine the way the rhetoric of community care has hidden the labour of tending work carried out by mothers, and examine the discourses used to justify moving this labour from the public to the private sphere.

The Lighthouse Foundation provides long-term accommodation to young people aged 15–25 at risk of homelessness, through a therapeutic model of care. This paper will explore its application to young people with histories in the out-of-home care system and those who are leaving care, by focusing on a four-stage process of recovery and the unique experiences it raises for this population based on their history. Drawing on themes identified through our practice with vulnerable young people, it is proposed that key elements of the programme and process hold particular relevance to the long-term recovery of this population, including the provision of stable and consistent therapeutic residential workers, an integrated care team, and the capacity to work with the young person beyond his or her eighteenth birthday. (Please note, no specific examples of young people are provided, rather the article will present observed themes at the various stages of the Therapeutic Family Model of Care.)

The first section of the paper makes some observations about young people, crime and the police, and the particular vulnerability of Aboriginal youth coming to the attention of the police. Two issues, the maintenance of public order and juvenile offending, provide the framework for the discussion here. The second section looks at the nexus between the pre-trial conference - a recent innovation in the Children's Court in Perth - police prosecutors, and Aboriginal youth.

This article reports on the development of the Facial Emotion Recognition and Empathy Test (FERET) as a reliable and valid tool for assessing facial emotion recognition and empathy skills in primary school-aged children. Pictures of human faces developed by the researcher were used as response options for the children. The range of response options and their associated scores were constructed based on the Two Factorial Consensual Mood Structure, which indicates dimensions of emotions. Four hundred and twenty-two primary school children participated in the research. The children were asked to recognise emotions and display the appropriate empathetic response. Data were analysed through item analysis, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and Item Response Theory (IRT). As a result of item analysis, FERET has been designed to include 6 items related to facial expressions of key emotions and has been found to have an internal consistency coefficient of .82 and be unidimensional. Results from the IRT indicated that all the items in FERET discriminate better responders from poor responders. It was concluded that FERET can produce reliable and valid results in measuring facial emotion recognition and empathy skills among primary school children.

This article presents the work of the Child Sexual Abuse Treatment Program and Adolescent Sex Offender Treatment Program, auspiced by the Children's Protection Society. The focus is upon their experiences in working with families in which sibling incest has occurred. It outlines the philosophy, principles and model of the program, gives an overview of the demographic data and client profiles, and finally reflects on practice observations relating to issues which have emerged in their work.

The paper deals mainly with work undertaken at Travancore Child and Family Centre and discusses the connection between attachment disorder and Undersocialized Conduct Disorder. Clinical examples illustrate the difficulties such children present to the caregivers and workers in the systems around the child. As these children generally fail to respond readily to therapies based on the child’s ability to form trusting relationships, management and treatment strategies which rely on careful assessment of the child’s attachment behaviour are described.

In child protection, ‘status indicators’ typically describe the status of children in care in regard to reason for coming into care, length of time in care, racial or ethnic identity and whether specific bureaucratic milestones have been reached. With Indigenous children, status indicators are broadened to encompass explicit requirements arising from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Placement Principle. Our contention is that this approach serves administrative decision-making and not the needs of Indigenous children.

We propose a different process for evaluating the effectiveness of foster care for Indigenous children that considers their well-being rather than their status as cases. This paper examines ‘well-being indicators’ for Indigenous children in care that emphasise foster family capacity to fulfil basic developmental, health, educational, social, cultural, spiritual, housing (Fisher, Pecora, Fluke, Hardin & Field, 1999) and economic needs. The paper concludes with recommendations for practice research on well-being indicators in Indigenous families.

The Ermington Family Learning Centre provides educational opportunities for both children with learning difficulties from low income families, and their parents. The Centre specifically targets disadvantaged children and encourages the involvement of families, most of whom are vulnerable and isolated from traditional services. Because the focus is on children, many parents who would not normally use welfare agencies or seek professional support have accepted help from the Centre. The integrated but indirect approach has ensured not only sustained educational gains and improved self esteem in the children, but improvements in family functioning and the self esteem of parents.

This article gives a brief overview of the Spiral to Recovery practice framework as it is being used at Catalyst child and family services in far north Queensland. The Spiral is an evidence informed framework for therapeutic residential care (TRC), designed for children and young people with complex and extreme emotional and behavioural difficulties who reside in out-of-home care (OOHC) placements. The Spiral is a stage-based framework where the initial aim is to establish actual and felt safety before young people meet the challenges of healing and growth. The framework rests on a theoretical base of trauma, attachment and socialisation theories. The article also describes how the Spiral framework has been implemented at Catalyst, demonstrating the need for congruence between organisational and practice frameworks.

In recent years there has been considerable analysis of how the media create images of crime. The relationship between child abuse and the media has also been subject to greater scrutiny. This article examines the role of one newspaper in a child protection case. The part played by the newspaper in the court case led to an examination of the language used by the media in their representations of children. The researchers found that a child may be objectified in language even when the child’s gender is previously identified. The ‘gender slippage’ may in extreme cases lead to the ‘textual abuse’ of children, where child abuse is rewritten to lessen the impact on the reader. The authors conclude that the actions of journalists and the language they use require more critical analysis.

This paper addresses a number of issues relating to welfare planning for children with serious disorders of attachment, including problems in relation to natural families, implications for caregivers of behavioural aspects of attachment disorders, and difficulties in implementing ‘permanency planning’ principles. Historical trends and cycles in policy formulation are referred to, and some suggestions are made with regard to directions for treatment and future planning of services.

Suzanne Jenkins has had over fourteen years experience in the field of child abuse and perpetrator work. She was employed as Senior Therapist at the Gracewell Clinic in Birmingham, England. The Gracewell Clinic had a world-wide reputation for its successful and innovative approach to working with paedophiles and other perpetrators of sexual violence. Since the clinic's closure in late 1993, Suzanne has developed her own therapeutic and training model for working with sexual abuse based on an integrated approach.

The interview was conducted whilst I was on a study tour of Britain supported by a Creswick Foundation Fellowship in Family Relations and Child Development and the Department of Social Work, Monash University.

The interview took place during Suzanne's time with the Gracewell Clinic. In the interview, Suzanne discusses ideas that she has found useful in her experience of working with perpetrators of sexual abuse.

This paper addresses the issue of cooperation and the building of effective partnerships within the network of agencies that aim to strengthen and support families. It argues that an important step in building such partnerships is an awareness of what each agency does. This paper therefore sets out the context in which family support services are currently operating in NSW, the particular strengths of family support services and the contribution of such services to families and to planners. Constraints on family support services are also explored, particularly those that relate to the lack of recognition of the role of family support services and lack of resources available in NSW. There is an analysis of options regarding changes to work practices by family support services to deal with the lack of resources.

While participation of parents in case planning in child protection is widely accepted as desirable, in practice both workers and parents are often left frustrated by the outcomes of child protection meetings. Two models of managing the decision making process are reviewed, Looking After Children (LAC) and Family Decision Making (FDM). Approaches to preparation, planning and management of conflict are highlighted. Strategies for facilitating parental participation are identified and can be applied more broadly to child protection meetings, to encourage more effective outcomes.

Burnside is an agency of the Uniting Church and has a role to facilitate the development of children and families most in need through quality services, research and advocacy. This article describes a home visiting model which was developed and approved for implementation as a three year pilot by Burnside on the Central Coast in NSW, beginning in 1997. The model is described and presented as a format that may be useful to stimulate similar program proposals elsewhere. The model uses paid professionals within the context of a ‘Family Centre’ with a volunteer network to offer ongoing home visiting support to first-time parents facing social and geographical isolation and who have few supports and resources to meet their needs. Importantly, the model relies on close collaboration with Child Health services and a partnership with other community agencies and the local community itself. The model accommodates current debate about the need to break cycles of abuse through positive preventative family support to strengthen families and communities.

Alfred Adler (1954) referred to the sibling rivalry between the first and secondborn when he said,

The striving for power in the case of a secondborn child also has its especial nuance. Secondborn children are constantly under steam, striving for superiority under pressure: the race-course attitude which determines their activity in life is very evident in their actions. The fact that there is someone ahead of him who has already gained power is a strong stimulus for the secondborn. If he is enabled to develop his powers and takes up the battle with the firstborn he will usually move forward with a great deal of elan, then while the first born, possessing power, feels himself relatively secure until the second threatens to surpass him (p. 126).