Persistent neglect is thought to be just as harmful to a child as abuse. However, neglect is often difficult to assess for two reasons: firstly it often resembles poverty; and secondly, neglecting families tend to have disorganised patterns of accessing health care and social support. This article looks at the importance of joint health and welfare input in interventions with families at risk of neglecting their children. The Strengthening Families Program at Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital provides a model for interdisciplinary and intersectoral (welfare and health) collaboration, which offers care management to individual families and is working towards systemic changes in the hospital's response to these families.

This paper considers how what has been learned about hoarding difficulties in adults can be applied to working with children and adolescents and how our knowledge of child development can improve how we help the younger person with this problem. In particular, attachment relationships to objects and organisational difficulties will be focused upon. The importance of earlier interventions, earlier in life, to prevent problems in the future is stressed. Future directions including a research agenda are put forward.

A study which reported information obtained from male child molesters and from the male victims of child abuse has recently been completed. When the results of this study were released, they attracted considerable media attention. Unfortunately the media reports were often inaccurate. The page 1 headline on the South Australian edition of the Australian (Powell, 6/1/95), for example said ‘One in two molesters cites abuse by Catholics’. This is incorrect. Furthermore, the media reports tended to unduly focus on issues to do with abuse by religious authorities and they failed to provide detail about other aspects of the study. In order to correct misinformation spread by the media, we present a short description of the study.

Child welfare policy making is a highly contested area in public policy. Child abuse scandals prompt critical appraisals of parents, professionals and the child protection system creating a tipping point for reform. One hundred and six transcripts of debates in the West Australian Parliament from August until December 2006 relating to child welfare and child deaths were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The analysis found that statistics about child deaths were conflated with other levels of childhood vulnerability promoting blame, fear, risk and an individual responsibility theme. The key rhetorical strategy was the use of numbers to generate emotion, credibility and authority to frame child maltreatment narrowly as a moral crime. Rhetoric and emotions is about telling causal stories and will remain ubiquitous in social policy making. So, in order to guide policy debate and creation, ground their claims and manage ambiguity and uncertainty, policy makers, researchers and practitioners working with complex social issues will do well to step into this public and political discourse and be strategic in shaping more nuanced alternative frames.

Early studies concerned with permanency planning identified that many children remained in care for prolonged periods of time, in the absence of clearly defined plans for their long-term future. The studies also highlighted concern that multiple placements have a deleterious impact on children. As a consequence, permanency planning frameworks were developed to address the problems of welfare drift, the essence of permanency planning being timely decision-making and concurrent planning. However, there appear to be some systemic issues impacting on the application of the permanency planning framework. There also remains a policy preference for family preservation, which adversely affects permanency planning. The need is to conceptualise permanency planning as existing along a continuum of planning options for children, co-existing with family preservation models.

Peter Dale is the principal author of Dangerous Families, which was first published in 1986. In it, he described an assessment and therapeutic approach to working with child abuse developed by the Rochdale Special Unit of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in Britain. In 1986, Peter became the Manager of the NSPCC Child Protection Team in East Sussex. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow in Social Policy and Social Work at Sussex University. He is currently completing a PhD study at the University of Brighton entitled: Clients' and therapists' perceptions of the psychotherapeutic process: A study of adults abused as children.

This interview was conducted whilst I worked as part of the East Sussex NSPCC Team for three months in 1993. This experience was made possible with the support of a Creswick Foundation Fellowship in Family Relations and Child Development and the Department of Social Work, Monash University.

In the interview, Peter discusses the changes in his thinking and practice since the publication of Dangerous Families.

In order for family day caregivers to increase the status of their profession, they require knowledge of early childhood and confidence in themselves in the work they do. The Certificate in Childcare (Homebased) was developed to be relevant to childcare in the home rather than centre based child care, to be offered in flexible mode with flexible entry and exit points.

It is proposed that a professional attitude influences the level of skill of caregivers. The study aimed to monitor whether the course can impact on caregivers' skills, and on how they view their profession. The study was based on an assessment of the child care skills of 58 caregivers which is part of the course requirements. Students were supervised and rated on their performance using the Harms and Clifford Rating Scale for Family Day Care. 70% of students were considered to have demonstrated the required level of competence.

Caregivers were also interviewed regarding their attitudes towards the course. Caregivers felt that the course gave them more status and most had plans for further study. Such positive changes can only benefit children and families using Family Day Care

This paper investigates the demands on social work resources in the north east region of the Department For Family and Community Services in South Australia, and examines the attitudes of workers to the question of access. Twenty three social workers, working predominantly in Child and Family Teams, were interviewed. A two part questionnaire was devised. The initial data covered information relating to the frequency, duration and supervision of access visits. The second part of the questionnaire used a semi-structured, open-ended format in order to explore social workers' knowledge and values in respect to access. The results of these interviews are presented and the implications for policy and practice in relation to statutory social work are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the impact of a dog safety program on the protective behaviour knowledge of children in the first year of school. This mixed methods study utilised pre- and post-testing (N = 121), observation of six sessions and individual interviews with a sub-group of children (N = 49). These interviews utilised a co-constructed narrative strategy where children were invited to assist an imaginary alien to safely navigate hypothetical safety scenarios. All schools improved their knowledge of safe dog interactions, with an overall increase in knowledge of 18%. Most children were able to apply abstract knowledge to hypothetical scenarios involving accompanied and unaccompanied dogs. Of concern, 24% of children still believed that dogs liked being patted on their heads and 16% of children had not overcome their intuitive reaction to run from a threatening dog. Whilst the program has made significant improvements to children's knowledge of safe dog-interactions, more gains can be made. We identify important opportunities for improving dog safety programs in general. We comment on the need to consider the impact of different models of child–dog relations in terms of either similitude or difference.

The Hague Convention of 25 October 1980 on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction is a multilateral treaty that seeks to protect children from the harmful effects of abduction and retention across international boundaries by providing a procedure to bring about their prompt return. The ‘Child Abduction Section’ provides information about the operation of the Convention and the work of the Hague Conference in monitoring its implementation and promoting international co-operation in the area of child abduction. There are currently 58 member countries and 22 non-member countries. Australia signed the Convention five years after its introduction. The Family Law (Child Abduction) Regulations 1986 enshrined in Australian law the principles espoused in the Convention which came into force in 1987. The Regulations are to:

1. (a) secure the prompt return of children wrongfully removed to or retained in any contracting state, and

2. (b) ensure that rights of custody and access under the law of one contracting state are effectively respected in the other contracting states.

“Now I can actually play soccer with the young people without fearing that my colleagues think I am escaping the paper work.”

These were the words from a participant in a social pedagogy training course in England a few years ago. This understanding emerged through in-depth discussions and activities around key social pedagogical concepts, such as the ‘common third’, the ‘3Ps’, the ‘zone of proximal development’ and the ‘learning zone model’. In this article we will explore how a joint activity, for example, playing soccer, can be seen as a pedagogical activity and with what intentions it is undertaken to make it pedagogically purposeful.

There are well-recognised and articulated difficulties in the provision of health services to communities in rural and remote areas. These difficulties encompass practicalities and geography, economics and politics, as well as the personal and professional. This article describes a multi-level model developed by a group of regional services to address the mental health and well-being needs of infants and small children of rural and remote families, utilising existing resources creatively and collaboratively. The model draws on understandings from attachment theory about the nature and needs of humans as relational beings.