For culture's sake, keep abused kids in towns
18.12.2007
worker disciplined over her handling of the multiple rape of a 10-year-old girl in the Cape York community of Aurukun has argued that abused children should remain in the township for the sake of their ``cultural, emotional and spiritual identity''.
Child safety manager Stephanie Fielder told investigators she and co-worker Marie Fletcher believed it was preferable that abused children who had been sent away from Aurukun were returned to their community. Ms Fletcher agreed that she had said ``the office was no longer working on separating children from the community -- we were working on reunification and returning children to the community''.
The case made world headlines last week when The Australian revealed that six teenagers and three adults who pleaded guilty to gang-raping the 10-year-old girl in May last year were given non-custodial sentences, with the juveniles not even having a conviction recorded. The girl was raped after she was returned to Aurukun from a non-Aboriginal foster placement in Cairns.
The Australian has learned that Ms Fletcher and Ms Fielder denied police requests to return the girl to Cairns for her own safety in the days leading up to the attack. A Child Safety Department review committee produced a 596-page report on the incident, which resulted in the sacking of one employee for his handling of the case, and the suspension on full pay of Ms Fielding and Ms Fletcher. Ms Fletcher was the officer at Aurukun who first received notification in May last year, before the rape, that the 10-year-old girl had tested positive to gonorrhoea. She did not pass the information on to police.
The report's findings are scathing -- including claims Ms Fielding may have a ``lack of understanding about abuse and statutory rape'' -- but both women are back at work with the department in Cairns, making decisions about the placement of at-risk children.
They were criticised in the report for their ``ethos'' of ensuring that children placed outside the community with foster parents were returned, and that none was sent away.
Investigators also revealed that Ms Fletcher had taken no action when the child victim told her she was going to ``hang myself''. It is mandatory departmental practice when
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such threats are made to immediately activate a suicide risk alert, but the threat by the child was ignored.
Her senior colleague, Ms Fielding, told the review team it was preferable to take children from outside carers and return them to the community because that was the way to provide the child's ``cultural, emotional and spiritual identity''.
The 10-year-old was meant to be returned to her non-Aboriginal foster parents in Cairns after attending a family funeral in Aurukun but was placed with non-approved carers in the community. The report reveals that this house was home to a teenage boy who was among a group of boys who had raped the girl when she was six. That same teenager, now aged 15, was one of the six juveniles who pleaded guilty on October 24 to raping her when she was forced to live in the house in May last year.
A senior health worker in Aurukun, who was not named, told the review team that several years ago the raped child had been examined by a psychologist who thought her erratic behaviour was because she had ``seen something really traumatic when she was younger''.
``One comment that struck me is that these communities are like war zones but you don't see guns,'' she said. ``Children aged between two and four years were present when their mother or sister or aunt were repeatedly stabbed, sometimes to death, over the years.''
