Transcript for
The Australian Child Maltreatment Study: What do the findings tell us?

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (00:00): 

We need to be teaching children to behave in ways that are consensual and respectful of each other, but also to promote appropriate help seeking so that children know that they shouldn’t feel embarrassed to talk about when something might’ve happened online or something might’ve happened in the playground. And so we want to have that focus both on prevention and also early detection and responses. 

Narrator (00:28): 

Welcome to the Emerging Minds Podcast. This podcast is recorded on the unceded lands of the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains. We pay our respects to the traditional custodians and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, their ancestors and elders past, present, and emerging from the different First Nations across Australia. 

Dan Moss (Host) (00:54): 

Hi, my name’s Dan Moss and welcome to this Emerging Minds Podcast. Many of you who work with children or young people will have been unsurprised by the recent Australian Child Maltreatment Study, which described the experience of at least one form of maltreatment for over half of Australia’s children before the age of 18. Today we’ll hear from one of the principal researchers of the Australian Child Maltreatment Study, Professor Daryl Higgins. 

(01:21): 

Professor Higgins’ research has focused for over 30 years on public health approaches to the protection of Australian children and child safe organisation strategies. As the Director of Australian Catholic University’s Institute of Child Protection Studies and the former Deputy Director of Research at the Australian Institute of Family Studies, Professor Daryl Higgins has extensive research experience in the areas of child safe organisations, child abuse and neglect, child protection, out-of-home care, family law, and allegations of child abuse, disability and family care, welfare reform, and many other topics. So welcome, Daryl. Thank you for joining us. 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (02:04): 

Thanks, Dan. Lovely to be with you. 

Dan Moss (Host) (02:06): 

Daryl, as I’ve described there much of your research over the last 30 years is focused on the prevention of child abuse and maltreatment. Where many practitioners and people from organisations joining us today, what can they do to contribute to prevention and early identification strategies in their work? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (02:26): 

Yeah. Well, interestingly, I think it actually starts with knowing how big the problem is. And our key headline statistic is 62% of Australians have experienced one or more forms of child abuse or neglect. So I think as practitioners, firstly, understanding the scale of the problem is really important. But the second one, which I think is even more of a challenge, is actually believing that prevention is possible. And often when I talk to people, I actually get the sense that people are so shocked by the problem of child abuse and neglect, including child sexual abuse, whether it be in organisations or in homes, in the community that we talk about it as though it is a shocking problem, but we don’t talk about it as a preventable problem. That’s not the language that we use. 

(03:18): 

I think the first step in being part of a kind of prevention agenda is to actually frame it as something that can be stopped. Of course, we know that prevention has different scales. We know that providing healing responses, treating the mental health impacts and the trauma for those who’ve already experienced it is part of prevention, preventing the ongoing impacts and also preventing intergenerational cycles of violence and abuse. But I’m really most passionate about what we would call primary prevention, stopping abuse before it even occurs. And that’s of course really, really complex and not as easy as many other types of prevention. We’ve all been exposed to what prevention means for COVID. Over the last five years, we’ve learned about what are the risk factors being in close association with somebody having hands that are unwashed, being unvaccinated. So prevention is about all of those other things. 

(04:20): 

And I think we’ve got to fix up our language and our thinking as a multi-sector response to the problem of child abuse and neglect by understanding it as preventable, and having kind of in our mind’s eye a range of different things that we can all contribute to, to stop these forms of harm from occurring in the first place. 

Dan Moss (Host) (04:43): 

Thanks, Daryl. And so one of your intentions I suppose, in being involved in the Australian Child Maltreatment Study was really kind of describing the extent of the problem like how many Australian children are experiencing abuse. Can you describe your process throughout that study? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (05:05): 

Yeah. Sure, Dan. So it was nationally representative study and it was done via a random digit-dial. So the people who participated had an equal chance with any other Australian of getting a phone call from our team at the Social Research Centre who we contracted to conduct the computer assisted telephone interviews. So we then did, as part of the checks and balances of our study, we actually compared the sample that we achieved the 8,500 Australians who answered that phone call and completed the survey. And they matched pretty closely to the most recent census prior to our data collection. And we conducted then what we call population level weighting. So where we were slightly under, for example, on lower SES, people born outside of Australia, those kind of things. We just ratchet up the value, if you like, of the response from those groups that were underrepresented so that our population estimates actually do represent the Australian population at large. 

Dan Moss (Host) (06:14): 

Okay, thank you. So can you tell us a little bit about the main findings. And did these findings surprise you or did they really reaffirm what you already had long suspected? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (06:26): 

Yeah. So the key findings, yes, we found that overall we had very high rates of child abuse and neglect. It didn’t surprise us in the sense that all of us involved have been researching in child maltreatment, child adversity, and its consequences in terms of mental health and health risk behaviours. But the full extent of it, I think did come as a little bit of a shock that it was not just getting near as bad as we thought it might be, but it was probably even worse than we thought. So to find that 32% of the population have experienced physical abuse, 28.5% have experienced sexual abuse. They’re really high statistics, 30.9% have experienced emotional abuse. More than 39% have experienced exposure to domestic violence. And that’s something that I think we hear a lot about the impacts on women. We’re only just now hearing the conversation kind of turn to understanding the impacts on children and to see children as victims in their own right. And for us to have documented that two in five Australians have experienced exposure to domestic violence in childhood and just under 10% have experienced neglect. 

(07:47): 

So those are shocking statistics. I think the one that’s most shocking for me, and I should have been prepared for it, but I wasn’t, was the extent of what we call multi-type maltreatment. So I’ve been focusing on this area for all of my career. I began my PhD research looking at this topic of the likelihood that someone won’t just experience one type of abuse or neglect, but will have experienced multiple types. And so we’re pretty confident that our study is one of the first, certainly in Australia that documents all five types of abuse and neglect. And what we found was that yes, overall any type of abuse or neglect was experienced by 62%, so that’s getting up to almost two thirds of the population have experienced one or more different kinds. But of that group, two thirds have experienced two or more types. 

(08:43): 

So it’s actually the most common experience is not to have experienced one type, but in fact to have experienced two or more types. It’s more common than to experience one, and it’s more common than to have completely missed out on any maltreatment exposure during childhood. That that’s the biggest group in the population I think is really shocking. And certainly the extent of it did come as a surprise to me. 

Dan Moss (Host) (09:14): 

And so when we’re thinking about children that have more than one experience of maltreatment in their childhood experiences, what are some of the effects that we’re starting to see concerning mental health? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (09:29): 

Yeah. So that was, again, one of the unique things about our study was not only was it one of the first, well the first in Australia to assess all five types of child maltreatment, we also had a rigorous assessment of four different mental health conditions and a range of different health risk behaviours. And what we found was consistently across those different mental health and health risk behaviours. What we saw was not only that child maltreatment overall increased the likelihood of those different conditions, usually between doubling the risks sometimes more. But when we understood the fact that many people have experienced multiple types, that was usually the most consistently high odds ratio. We call it, yeah, the likelihood that you will have had a mental health condition or a health risk behaviour across life was the highest if in fact you’d experienced multiple forms. Which then led us to doing some further statistical analysis to account for the fact that people are experiencing multiple types to understand which particular exposures are the most harmful. And the results of that analysis suggest that it’s both sexual abuse and emotional abuse that stand out. 

(10:44): 

Once you account for the fact that people who experience those types of maltreatment are often experiencing other types as well. Taking that into account, it really is sexual abuse and emotional abuse that’s contributing to approximately double the likelihood of mental health outcomes like anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and harmful behaviours like suicide attempts, suicidal ideation, even in young people like we found multi-type maltreatment really being associated with significantly higher rates of self-harm and suicidal behaviour. Even in youth sample we had, which was the 16 to 24 year olds. 

(11:26): 

And I should have said too, we oversampled the young people because we wanted to really have a very thorough understanding of the most current generation. So young people whose childhoods were not that long ago talking about their childhood experiences. And what we found was the rates of child maltreatment, particularly exposure to multi-type maltreatment was still really high in this group and a very strong association with these mental health and health risk behaviours even in those early years of adulthood. 

Dan Moss (Host) (11:59): 

So given the results of this data and the particular mental health effects on children who have experienced emotional abuse or child sexual abuse. What do you think, what might this mean for practise imperatives or organisational imperatives in mental health services going forward? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (12:17): 

Yeah. Well, there’s so many different aspects to that, Dan. So firstly, the message that I always give to professionals who are not in the child protection sector, who are not psychologists or social workers, but maybe mental health professionals, maybe drug and alcohol workers, they may be working in homelessness services, a whole range of services. My challenge to them is to say, “How can you see yourself as part of the prevention workforce for supporting parents with evidence-based strategies for raising their kids that will avoid violence and coercion?” Because we have to not just say, “Don’t use strategies that are violent,” because sometimes parents then substitute strategies that are emotionally abusive and coercive. And that’s just as harmful as our results from the ACMS have shown. But as well as supporting parents, we also have to understand that children are at risk of child sexual abuse, and that can happen in the home, but it can also happen online and it can happen in organisations. And so we kind of have to match our investment in evidence-based parenting supports to equip right across the population parents with those skills and strategies they need. 

(13:41): 

We also need to build the capacity of parents and carers to be able to build the knowledge and skills of children and young people about consent and respect because we know that child sexual abuse is not just at the hands of adults, it’s also at the hands of other children and young people. So we need to be teaching children to behave in ways that are consensual and respectful of each other, but also to promote appropriate help seeking so that children know that they shouldn’t feel embarrassed to talk about when something might’ve happened online or something might’ve happened in the playground or something might’ve happened at a friend’s party. And so we want to have that focus both on prevention and also early detection and responses. 

Dan Moss (Host) (14:28): 

Yeah. And looking at the trends in child sexual abuse in particular. Have they changed over time in terms of children’s experiences of abuse? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (14:40): 

Yeah, absolutely Dan. And some in pleasing ways and some in disturbing ways. What we’ve actually seen is a reduction of prevalence of child sexual abuse at the hands of family members. That’s really good news. It’s approximately halved from a few generations ago. So our older participants had rates of approximately 8% have experienced sexual abuse within a familial setting or a familial context. And in our youth sample that was down to around about 4%. So approximately halving, that’s great news, and we should be very proud of our efforts as a community to try and drive down those rates of familial child sexual abuse. 

(15:26): 

Unfortunately, where we’ve kind of missed the ball is that what has happened is that that’s been offset by a rise in harm from sexual abuse by other children and young people, particularly those who are in a romantic relationship with the other person. So we know that that’s usually girls that are at risk of that abuse from a male romantic partner during childhood and adolescence. So work that we have to do as a society to have our eyes firmly fixed on that as a source of harm to children and adolescents and to really ramp up our efforts to kind of turbocharge, if you like, sexuality education so that people understand their right to body safety, that everybody has a right to that. And so in their interactions with others that they need to be respectful, they need to be consensual, they need to be safe. 

(16:25): 

And those are, while it’s easy to say, they’re much more difficult to [inaudible 00:16:31]. And I think one of the biggest obstacles that we have is that as a society, we don’t like to talk about sex despite the fact of course we have easy access to pornography, we have sex depicted on screens. It’s still not something that is often comfortably talked about by parents and carers, by teachers, by those in youth serving organisations. And yet it’s the lived reality for many children and young people that they are sexual beings, but more importantly that they’re often being exposed to sexual harm in ways that we as a society could be preventing them from being. 

Dan Moss (Host) (17:09): 

Yeah. And there’s been lots of work hasn’t there to overcome this kind of the power of this secrecy and the effects that that has on children both in a prevention lens, but also once children have experienced child sexual abuse and their ability to disclose. Can you talk a little bit about the work that’s happened within institutions to try to overcome this secrecy and have children being more protected within those places? Is your data showing positive results in terms of children’s experiences in institutions? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (17:44): 

Yes and no. What we found was that overall the proportion of adults, so remembering that our survey is retrospective, it’s asking about childhood. We collected the data in 2021, and our youngest participants were aged 16 and 17, right up to our oldest cohort was 65 plus. So we had a thousand in that older cohort. So it’s talking about childhoods that were earlier this century and childhoods that were well, well, well into last century. 

(18:14): 

So over that time we did see, as I said, some small reductions in child maltreatment in familial settings. But overall in terms of institutional context, it was relatively low. So 2% of the population have experienced child sexual abuse within an institutional context. Where we’ve seen particular reductions is in child sexual abuse within a faith-based context. So I had a former PhD student, Gabrielle Hunt, who analysed our ACMS data looking at sexual abuse conducted by clergy or adults within faith-based organisations, and she found almost eight or 10 fold reduction over time in that particular form of that type of perpetrator. 

(19:07): 

So we do have some positive signs, but our study as it is, doesn’t really tell us about very current organisations and that’s why it’s pleasing that government has committed to funding a future ACMS style study that looks at another generation of young people in the future so that their experiences of a more recent period of childhood would be able to compare to our study, which as I said was collected in 2021. 

(19:39): 

I should say too that it is pleasing that firstly the recommendations of the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse, that we have national principles for child safe organisations has been agreed to not only by all ministers, but in fact legislated across the country in different jurisdictions with child safe standards. So youth serving organisations, whether they’re sports clubs, churches, schools, early childhood settings, music, arts, recreation, anything that is working with children has to comply with these standards. 

(20:17): 

And of course, they include things like not just the capability of adults to be able to report concerns, but to do things like talking to children and young people around their perceptions. Do I think that we’ve implemented that fully yet? And are organisations really on board and knowing what they need to do? No, I think that’s the next step, is that we actually need to build that culture of having children’s voices at the centre, having lived experience to draw on, to understand where are the risks, how do we need to be redesigning our service offerings, our ways of operating. And I think different organisations are at different stages along that journey of delivering on the promise of the Royal Commission to really revolutionise in some ways youth serving organisations so that safety is at the centre. And certainly we’re seeing that in Australia at the moment, at the end of June, we’re hearing about early childhood settings and the importance of prioritising safety in those settings. So it’s an ongoing piece of work that we can’t afford to take our eyes off the ball. 

Dan Moss (Host) (21:33): 

So that takes us to about halfway through our fascinating conversation with Professor Daryl Higgins. So far, Daryl has provided us with a confronting statistic that 62% of Australia’s children experience at least one form of child abuse or neglect. He also described how the study found it was actually more common for a child to experience two or more forms of abuse than it was for them to experience none. Daryl talked about the imperative to build the knowledge and skills of professionals, parents, and children as part of a comprehensive child abuse prevention strategy across Australia. Daryl described the need for education for all children, young people, and adolescents around their rights to body safety and respectful relationships. 

In the next part of our conversation, I asked Daryl about some of the practises and policies that are needed to support children and young people to disclose their experiences of abuse and neglect. Daryl describes the need for trauma-informed models of care and services that recognise the extent to which trauma affects the majority of children and young people in our services. I hope you enjoy this next part of our conversation. 

(22:54): 

So thinking about this journey for the majority of Australian children who have experienced at least one form of maltreatment, is progress being made in terms of providing avenues for those children to tell someone about what’s happening for them? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (23:11): 

To talk to somebody? 

Dan Moss (Host) (23:12): 

Yes. 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (23:12): 

Yeah. Look, I think that that’s, again, part of the child safe organisation that are being legislated across the states and territories is it is an obligation for organisations to have clear policies and practises and processes for hearing about concerns. Unfortunately, though, I think the missing piece of action is that we don’t always frame that in a prevention oriented way. The language is still often talking about reporting raising, which may be a little bit too late, particularly if harm has already occurred and we’re only talking about reporting when someone has breached a code of conduct, or even worse have actually engaged in abuse. 

(24:01): 

So I think the space that is opening up right now is to try and really build that kind of prevention agenda, and that means changing the culture of organisations where building knowledge and skills of children and young people to have confidence in their right to body safety and body integrity, that they have comfort in the language that’s used around their body. That when you’re talking about correct anatomical parts for your body, that there isn’t giggles and smirks from the children and young people, let alone from the adults that are needing to engage in those conversations. 

(24:38): 

When we have sex education constricted to health and human development subject as opposed to being everybody’s job to talk about it. The maths teachers in high school comfortable to talk about interpersonal relationships and do the examples of fractions talking about what fraction of the population have experienced violence. If they were using those maths examples, not just about going to the shops and buying oranges versus apples and a quarter of this, plus a half of that, if they’re actually using real life examples that matter to children and young people about what’s the statistical odds of having an adult groom you on an online platform. 

(25:22): 

It’s those kinds of skills that we actually need to be building and building it in, in every subject in school. We need to be equipping parents to be having these conversations because it can’t just be up to schools to be building this knowledge in children and young people, we actually have to build it in parents. And so it kind of comes back to where I began this conversation of parenting skills is essential for prevention of all forms of child abuse and neglect. And even though additional prevention strategies are needed for child sexual abuse, particularly within organisations, at the heart of it is still good parenting skills that we actually need parents feeling comfortable and confident to have those conversations about sex and sexuality around relationships and around consent. 

(26:11): 

And I think if you did a quick poll of parents of, “What topics are you comfortable talking to your children about and which are the ones that make you feel nervous?” I think we all know which are the ones that are going to make them feel nervous. 

Dan Moss (Host) (26:22): 

Yeah, absolutely. Are you seeing changes in the way parents parent or the conversations or the preventative conversations parents have with their children compared to past eras? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (26:35): 

Well, I mean that’s not the focus of the Australian Child Maltreatment Study, but from other projects I’m involved in and conversations that I have with people and organisations that I’m part of, such as the Parenting and Family Research Alliance, which is a group of parenting researchers who come together to support each other and learn and collaborate, we are seeing signs of change. And it’s great that there’s actually going to be a brand new parenting survey that’s going live led by the Parenting Research Centre to actually understand and take kind of a national temperature, if you like, of parenting capability. But I think that there are some very specific skills that are needed to apply what governments have recognised and called, for example, in the National Strategy for Preventing Child Sexual Abuse, the strategy coordinated by the National Office of Child Safety. We have to be working with parents directly, and we also have to be working with those in the community who are coming in contact with parents and can be the conduit, if you like, for that knowledge. And that starts in early childhood. 

(27:45): 

I often have conversations with people in the early childhood sector is we need to be talking about consent at this age. So rather than just change a nappy, begin with the conversation of letting the child know it’s now time to have your nappy changed. “Would it be okay if I changed your nappy or would you rather Dan did it? Would you like me to change your nappy now? Or do you want to finish doing your colouring in or have your bottle or something and then we’ll change your nappy?” It doesn’t have to be about, “No, I don’t, I refuse to have my nappy changed.” There are health and safety concerns there too. But it’s starting on in an age appropriate way, that idea that, Dan, you are in control of your body and people shouldn’t be touching you and doing things to you without having a conversation. 

(28:32): 

And so in very gentle and respectful ways, if this begins early in life, in early childhood settings, those educators who are trained and well equipped to be able to start that when they do a handover at the end of the day, and Dan, you say, “How did my little Johnny go in childcare today?” Your educator will be able to say these kinds of things about how they have modelled those behaviours and modelled respect and consent. And dealt with a little incident that might’ve happened in the playground where somebody pushed somebody and didn’t take their turn or didn’t respect somebody else’s body space. 

(29:13): 

So these things start small and start early, and we have to build that groundswell of support. So by the time we get to teenagers engaging online and entering into romantic relationships and working out who’s going with who or whatever the language is that young people use nowadays, I don’t pretend to be on top of the lingo. We need to be able to have confidence and that this isn’t the first time that these kind of concepts are introduced and embedded in our everyday interactions and conversations with the children and young people in our lives. 

Dan Moss (Host) (29:50): 

Did the study or other research that you’re involved in, is that providing you with any clues regarding the kinds of professional support that could help children’s mental health after experiences of one or multiple maltreatments? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (30:08): 

Yeah. Well, I suppose our study is not a study of interventions, and that’s a limitation that we actually have recommended to government that any future work of this nature, we need to be able to build in the kind of protective factors, but also those kind of response factors. So what can mitigate the harms that we are seeing? So instead of having maltreatment associated with double, triple of a mental health condition emerging, what is associated with lowering that risk to mitigate those effects? But broadly, not just our research, but other research have made the claims that what’s needed is a trauma-informed workforce. 

(30:51): 

So a workforce that understands the high prevalence of child maltreatment, the likely co-occurrence of different types, and can build that into their kind of treatment models and modalities. That if we as practitioners are not able to ask straightforward questions around people’s experiences and acknowledge that and build that into our kind of service offering, then we’re going to be missing out on a really big and important part of young people’s, well adults right across life, their experiences of mental ill health. So we absolutely need to have those kind of trauma-informed models of service that recognise the very high prevalence of child maltreatment, and the even higher likelihood that when we are dealing with an outcome like a mental health condition, that we are dealing with a survivor of child abuse or neglect. 

(31:50): 

But again, another of my PhD students who just submitted her thesis is under examination at the moment, Lottie Harris focused on the subgroup of the Australian Child Maltreatment Study that had an out-of-home care experience. We call them a care experience sub sample, 395 of our 8,500 participants. And what she was able to do was understand the particular abuse and neglect experiences of that group. And unsurprisingly, they had much higher rates of child abuse and neglect, over 90% of them had experienced it, which is a key definition of the reason why you were removed from the care of parents and placed into out-of-home care. 

(32:35): 

So that wasn’t surprising. But what we then did with her work she focused on understanding the different dimensions of those maltreatment experiences and are they different, and in fact documented really convincingly that they have a higher level of intensity of maltreatment compared to those who don’t have a care experience. And when matched on the level of severity or intensity of maltreatment that in fact that there was no difference in the mental health and health risk behaviour outcomes across life when we compared those who’d experienced abuse at a similar level of intensity but didn’t have a care experience, which I think is really interesting and different from the usual narrative that we have about out-of-home care, population being significantly at greater risk. I think we now have to turn that around and talk about people with severe experiences of maltreatment, many of whom will be in the out-of-home care system and many of them will not be. 

Dan Moss (Host) (33:35): 

And that really kind of affects the way that we incorporate trauma-informed practises in non-specialist services, doesn’t it? In terms of the skill and confidence that is needed in both talking about prevention, but also responding to children that we believe might have experienced child sexual abuse or other forms of maltreatment. 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (33:57): 

Well, and if 62% of the population have experienced one or more forms of child abuse and neglect, who doesn’t need a trauma-informed response? So I think we actually have to be flipping it around and saying, “This should be treatment as usual. This should be standard practise because there’s a six out of 10 chance that the client I’m working with now has had one or more experiences of abuse and neglect.” 

Dan Moss (Host) (34:23): 

So what does that have any implications for the way that we support and develop practitioners or any practitioners really who are working directly with children and young people? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (34:33): 

Absolutely. It means that we need to go right back to the beginning and think about pre-service training. We need to be challenging universities to be building in knowledge about the prevalence of child abuse and neglect. It’s strong association with mental health and health risk behaviours across life. And also equipping them with knowledge and skills in being a prevention advocate. So understanding about what are evidence-based parenting supports, how do you implement them in different practise settings? What’s the role of different practitioners? If I’m a guidance officer in a school setting, what’s my role compared to if I’m a private practise psychologist dealing with the worried well who might be coming to me and have private health insurance to cover versus those who might be in a higher risk setting like a drug and alcohol treatment facility et cetera. 

Dan Moss (Host) (35:37): 

Yeah. Thanks, Daryl. More recently, you’ve researched the connection between child maltreatment and later involvement in the criminal justice system. Can you describe some of the important practise and systems findings from that research? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (35:51): 

Yeah, so that was led by Ben Matthews, who was the Lead Chief Investigator on the ACMS in collaboration with the Australian Institute of Criminology, who provided some additional funding to the ACMS team to look at these exposures. And what we found was across the board that child maltreatment was associated with higher levels of criminal justice involvement in adulthood, including contact with, as well as convictions. And so it was a complex piece of work. You can read the details of it on the acms.au website. All of the journal articles that we’ve produced. And there’s dozens of them, are all freely available. They’re not behind a university library subscription paywall. But there’s also lots of infographics and short summaries too that are really, really helpful. But I think the key message coming out of that research is, again, when we’re thinking about a population similar to when we are talking about a population of people with health risk behaviours like drug and alcohol misuse or mental health issues, that we are much more likely when we’re dealing with a criminal justice involved population that we are dealing with the victims of child abuse and neglect. 

(37:13): 

And interestingly, coming back to the topic of out-of-home care as well, there’s been lots of research for my entire career, the past 30 years, we consistently see reports showing that there are what we call crossover kids. So children who are involved in both the child protection and the out-of-home care system. Unfortunately, what we don’t say is it’s a child abuse and neglect crossover system that in fact, the juvenile justice and in fact I would say the adult justice system is a child abuse and neglect consequence system. And to recognise the higher probability that that system is dealing with people who have childhood experiences of abuse and neglect. And so justice, I would say with the mental health and the drug and alcohol sectors, we need to be saying, how are you a trauma-informed system to the justice system? How are you a healing and recovery system given the high rates of abuse and neglect that we are seeing within your catchment, your cohort? 

Dan Moss (Host) (38:23): 

What difference might that make? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (38:24): 

It might make some really big differences. So for start, it’s often a very different part of government that’s dealing with it. So what is the knowledge and capability of the minister of that justice department who maybe comes from a legal background and the head of the department, they’re not necessarily going to come with that knowledge of child welfare, child development of trauma and its impact. So where’s the interdepartmental collaboration to actually see this as a part of the child protection system? Part of the response to this well-demonstrated relationship between the high prevalence of child abuse and neglect and these kind of negative outcomes across life. 

Dan Moss (Host) (39:12): 

And in fact, some of your advocacy, hasn’t it, Daryl has been on the importance of centering or focusing on children’s safety in policy initiatives? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (39:22): 

Absolutely. And I can’t think of a single industry or policy where it couldn’t potentially be relevant. Even things like public transport, health, housing, any area that you can think of, yes, there’s lots of standard things that we just want government to be able to deliver, but we also want them to be able to deliver it in ways that are child-friendly and increase safety as opposed to increasing risk for children. And access to public transport is just one of those examples. 

Dan Moss (Host) (39:54): 

So we’ve talked a little bit about this, but I’m wondering if you’d like just to comment on some of the recommendations that you have not just from the latest study, but from your 30 years experience in providing earlier support for children after maltreatment to increase the chances that the effects on their mental health that the study has shown can be minimised or that recovery can begin. 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (40:18): 

I think that there’s a number of things that we can do, prioritising those who have had child maltreatment experiences is important, but of course it’s very hard because that doesn’t just mean those in the child protection system. As I said before, they certainly have high levels of intense maltreatment that need responding to, and many are calling now for a kind of gold card type response just as we have with veterans, that we want children in the out-of-home care system to have a gold card to be able to have priority access to mental health support. 

(40:53): 

And currently there are very few, and in fact, I’m part of the Children in Care Collective, and we’ve been documenting not just the difficulties with getting mental health support for children in the out-of-home care system, but in particular the obstacles to those other sectors like the mental health sector, understanding what are the needs of this particular group and not dismissing behaviours as somehow just simply a disruptive behaviour as opposed to a sign of trauma and a response to child abuse and neglect and seeing it as a mental health symptom in and of itself. So we do need to have these kind of holistic cross-departmental whole of government type responses if in fact we’re going to prioritise the mental health needs and healing across the community. 

Dan Moss (Host) (41:45): 

Daryl, lastly, it seems that many of us are hearing now people citing the Maltreatment Study, and I’m sure you are hearing this a lot wherever you go. Does this give you a sense of confidence that this might contribute to a mobilising of many of the prevention strategies that you’ve described today? 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (42:10): 

Yes and no. I am always gratified when I hear people citing the ACMS statistics back. If I go to conferences and presentations and I hear feedback from people about how important it is to their work. I’ve heard childhood and family welfare organisations saying We’ve made it the centrepiece of our strategic plan over the next five years. I hear people from schools in early childhood saying the importance of this work for redesigning their models of operating their core business. But I also hear that there are many people who’ve never heard of our results and who still are not recognising the enormity of the problem. So as much as it is gratifying to see uptake of the data, I think there’s still a long way to go. We haven’t made this part of the conversation, so we need to have a national strategy that’s focused on prevention of child abuse and neglect. 

(43:08): 

That means a national strategy around focusing on the capability building of parents. And it also means investment in trauma-informed service responses right across different departments and getting over some of those kind of problems that we perennially have in Australia of siloing of responses, not only within different departments within one level of government, but across government with some things being funded by Commonwealth Government, some things being funded by State, other things being run at the local government level. We actually need to have a national summit that’s focused on child maltreatment prevention that can really give us national uplift on this space. Otherwise we’re going to deliver another generation of Australian children and young people who have been exposed to unacceptable level of harm and whose well-being across life is subsequently compromised because of our failure to implement prevention strategies meaningfully. 

Dan Moss (Host) (44:07): 

Professor Daryl Higgins, thank you so much for joining us today. That’s been so insightful and so great to listen to. Thank you for your time. 

Professor Daryl Higgins (Guest) (44:17): 

Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure. 

Dan Moss (Host) (44:19): 

And thank you everyone for joining us today. We look forward to joining you next fortnight for another Emerging Minds Podcast. I’m Dan Moss, and goodbye for now. 

Narrator (44:31): 

Visit our website today at emergingminds.com.au to access a range of resources to assist your practise. Brought to you by the National Workforce Centre for Child Mental Health, led by Emerging Minds. The Centre is funded by the Australian Government Department of Health, Disability and Ageing under the National Support for Child and Youth Mental Health Program.