Saving the Children

YET ANOTHER BATCH of deaths of children in the care of obviously dysfunctional families and of the various state departments entrusted with the safeguarding of such children once again makes clear that we have a serious social problem affecting the youngest and most vulnerable members of the community. And so far no government seems to have the faintest idea what to do about it. Worse, the officials charged with dealing with the problem are underfunded, over-bureaucratised, and in the grip of the remnants of the ideologies of the 1960s, obsessed with a few slogans and determined to resist any change in thinking. So children continue to die under appalling circumstances, often beaten or starved to death by parents who seem beyond the reach of any ordinary understanding of civilised behaviour.

Drugs and alcohol are a large part of the problem. So is the feckless begetting of children by men who, cuckoo-like, lay their eggs in the nest of the welfare system and move on, leaving the mothers wholly dependent on the state for support either by preference of by lack of opportunity to work. The mothers, equally feckless, often enough have no notion of contraception or perhaps no interest in it, and it is not infrequent to find a series of children by the same mother but by different fathers no longer on the scene. Not surprisingly, successive partners of these women feel they have little or no responsibility (and, all too often, no affection or even sense of duty towards the children by earlier partners—and not too much even for those they themselves father). They again move on, repeating the cuckoo pattern. Such a situation is surely a sign of serious breakdown of social conventions and the family, and hence of society as a whole.

But it is always unwise to forget that such signs of social breakdown have been observable in earlier times. There has always been a miserable underclass in various guises, in which poverty, waste and irresponsibility are endemic; nor is there anything new about the abuse of children. In earlier eras these phenomena were generally ignored (they were certainly not the stuff of daily media reports) except by a few observers, social commentators, or religious reformers. In England, one such observer was William Hogarth, whose drawings of the effects of cheap and generally available gin seem still applicable to some of the families described in modern accounts—while the men are off drinking and wasting their substance on gambling, the women seek solace in cheap wine or, worse, in hard drugs. The children, as in the famous Hogarth etching, fall neglected from the breast to the pavement. Charles Dickens was an unsatisfactory, because excessively sentimental, chronicler of such matters; in particular the inevitable sexual abuse of the children in crowded, desperate households could not be admitted in Victorian times. A much harsher account of reality than Dickens’ was that of Arthur Morrison in his classic East End novel, A Child of the Jago. Emil Zola came closer to the reality of underclass sexual habits in Germinal.

Karl Marx probably had a fair idea of what actually went on, which is why he distinguished so clearly between what he contemptuously called the lumpenproletariat and the respectable proletariat, the working class. In modern Western societies like Australia the working class in the traditional sense has almost completely withered away, being now closer to what used to be called the middle class; but we are left with an underclass which is clearly not withering away. Indeed, if the huge number of cases of child abuse and neglect reported to the authorities are any indication it is a growing and intractable category.

While drug and alcohol abuse are obviously a large element in the overall syndrome of underclass behaviour it is far too simple to argue that if we could get them under control everything would be fine. For this abuse is as much a product of the wider problem as a cause of it. The reality is that we do not know why some people will use drugs to excess and cling to them with determination at very great cost to anything else. Mental illness, more or less severe, is clearly a contributory element in all of this. Sometimes there is talk of an “addictive personality”, but little is known of this phenomenon. It does however seem to be the case that predilection for drugs varies considerably within the population. But then, one can speak of a wider phenomenon, the “dependent personality”. Dependency is on such a scale these days that no welfare system is likely to be able to handle it without disastrous consequences. Noel Pearson has pointed to the extent of dependency in the Aboriginal population and its attendant evils—but it is clear that the Aboriginal dependency issues, though often more severe, are just a subset of a wider social problem which exists regardless of ethnic background.

If there are underlying personality characteristics which incline some people to dependency, substance abuse and irresponsible family behaviour then little is known about them—they do not seem to have been the subject of much serious study. And of course it has for the last thirty years been unfashionable to talk about possible causes. Until recently it seemed enough for all the social workers and sociologists to mouth empty slogans about capitalism, exploitation, inequity, race, gender, class and oppression. Indeed the faculties teaching would-be social and community workers are still peddling them, thus producing the class of bureaucrats who are thrown into the front line of the problem without having the slightest idea of what to do about actual problems of the underclass.

THE BIGGEST PROBLEM of the underclass, of course, for those in it, is how to escape it—though many are so corrupted that they conceive this only as envy of wealthier members of the community, often expressed through theft and vandalism—and above all how to rescue children in particular, as well as adults, from it and how to prevent people from falling into it. There are no easy solutions to this, but slogans are of no help. Children are the biggest problem of all, both because they are the most vulnerable and because they can be saved from what might become lifetime dependency and proneness to drug abuse, as well as to the repetition of the patterns of child abuse which threaten them. Adults already accustomed to the pattern of dependency are more difficult to deal with. They have grown up for the most part either with dysfunctional families (whether as a result of poverty or other problems) and as a result of the workings of the welfare system have been effectively conditioned against serious effort to move out of the underclass and into the workforce. The structure of the welfare system, especially with the heavy effective marginal tax rates involved in moving out of welfare and into the workforce, have a lot to do with this. (The classic case is that of benefits, such as health and other concessions, which cut out totally at some arbitrary earnings figure.)

As a result of the various dogmas of the social work profession it has become virtually impossible to rescue children, especially those suffering abuse, from the fallout of their parents’ dependency. The invention of the fiction of the “Stolen Generation” of Aborigines has done enormous harm in this respect. It has made it politically incorrect to rescue endangered children from their families. It is perfectly true that rough and ready social workers of earlier times did do great harm by insensitively removing children under threat of abuse, in the authoritarian fashion of their time. The conditions in which the children thus removed were sent to live were often damaging, though usually establishments taking such children were intended to be run in the interests of the children and were operated by religious people who professed, and sometimes actually pursued, the best of intentions. Much misery was visited on the children when such establishments were badly run, or abuse took place within them (including, of course, sexual abuse both by adults of children and of younger children by older children). But it is not true that all of the establishments to which children removed from their dysfunctional families (whether Aboriginal or not) were hotbeds of abuse—some were well run and beneficial for the children.

The fact that not a single case of supposed “theft” of a child by Commonwealth authorities has held up in the courts counterbalances the sentimental fantasies of the Bringing Them Home report. In one recent case, in Adelaide, a substantial award was made by a court for wrongful detention of a child. This was not on the grounds of policy towards Aborigines. The whole fiction of the “stolen children” has been generalised into a kind of prohibition of all attempts to take children from families in which they have suffered serious abuse, or in which there are serious alcohol and drug problems, into care; and combined with this has been the strange prejudice against adoption. Adoption of children unable to be cared for properly by their own families into families which offer them better chances, instead of being encouraged is made almost impossible. Again, there is a whole confused ideological background to this.

There are cases in which the problems of dysfunctional families are exacerbated by children having special problems. It is extremely tough for a functioning family in which everything else is reasonably good to deal with such children—and as a result of the strange epidemic of autism it seems to be a rapidly growing problem. The causes of autism are still quite unclear. Severely autistic children impose a huge burden on their families, and little real help is being offered by the welfare system to such children. Their care and treatment are expensive and there clearly is not enough funding devoted to them—though the potential bill is very high. A severely autistic child is desperately difficult to deal with (and unrewarding for carers, since they are emotionally cold, unlike for example Down Syndrome children), but the response of welfare departments is to push as much of the burden onto parents as they can, amongst a forest of bureaucracy (interminable meetings attended by numerous people who should be working) and duck-shoving between departments as a result of their own budgetary constraints. For an ordinary family this is appallingly difficult; for a dysfunctional, drug and alcohol-using family it is a virtual death sentence for the child. These children should be removed whenever a family consents, and sometimes even failing consent.

WHICH BRINGS US to one of the central issues: consent. This is central to both the problems of poverty and of child abuse. To an educated outsider it often appears that much poverty is wilful, in that no serious effort is made by its victims to improve their own lot. There is certainly amongst the habitually welfare-dependent a reluctance to move away from a system which at least delivers them a degree of security, even at a low level. Attempts at making welfare assistance, both in cash and in kind, conditional are often opposed by the professional welfare industry, with a lot of talk about human dignity. These are usually the same people who would have a nanny-state impose all kinds of controls on advertising, diet, alcohol and tobacco intake while at the same time insisting that virtually every “necessity” of life should be provided by the state as a public good.

Obviously there are objections to conditional welfare, just as there are problems with removing children at risk from their birth parents, but sometimes it can be the only possible solution for those who are so conditioned by dependency that they must in effect be taught to be less dependent. It is a matter of what is rated as more important. In the case of children who have actually suffered abuse in the context of a dysfunctional family their protection needs to be placed above the wishes of the family; while there is no doubt that some of these children are genuinely loved (although possessiveness can be the real motive) their welfare and survival need to be given greater weight than the child protection authorities these days often do.

It may be that the only solutions to the problems of the underclass and welfare dependency (often deeply ingrained over two or more generations) must involve a degree of tutelage. Although this seems instinctively objectionable, it may be the only workable approach. It may also be even more expensive than the current bumbling and wasteful policies. It is easy enough to denounce the half-educated social workers who maladminister social policy at the coalface, especially in the case of abused and endangered children, but this is little different from the retrospective criticisms handed out to their equivalent of yesteryear by today’s ideologues. In both cases clearly incompetent people are doing their best according to their lights; the mistakes being made are those of their era.

What is clear is that many children are, and have always been, born to people who really are unsuited to bring them up properly or even at all. Facing up to the fact that many people in our society are unfit to be parents is difficult in the extreme. And policies of coercing the subnormal or the inadequate, the addicted or the mentally ill, in the name of welfare can have horrendous consequences. Not just in Nazi Germany—in Sweden as late as the 1950s such policies were being implemented.

It is a horrendously difficult issue to deal with, and it is clear that we do not know how to deal with the problem of unfit parenthood. Nor do we know how to deal with the underclass as such, where child abuse is most common (not that it can ever be thought to be absent in other social strata). But certainly there seems a stronger case for being prepared to take children away from threatening environments and entrusting them to families better equipped to deal with them in a humane manner than for the current set of ill-considered prejudices on the part of those officially entrusted with the protection of children.