Rural “crises” have been a significant feature of our physical and social history since the early days of European settlement. Our landscape is both harsh and vulnerable, and the climate accentuates the vulnerability of that environment. In the beginning farmers imposed traditional English methods of agriculture on the land, including clearing and irrigating without any real understanding of the consequences these methods would bring to the landscape. Soil erosion and salinity are part of the heritage of those days which we will have to deal with for generations to come. Nevertheless, Australian farmers have developed techniques for farming this country that have been copied in other dry-land areas throughout the world.

The maintenance of the physical and emotional safety of children about to be returned to their families following serious abuse is a complex and significant problem. This paper describes a treatment offered to such families which makes use of a residential setting, and which involved intensive work over the period of a week. This approach was cost effective, allowed for greater creativity by child protection workers, and impacted significantly on the lives of the families. This paper offers a philosophical as well as practical framework for treating at risk families in which a child is about to be returned.

Caring is the central activity for many women who care for children with disabilities and other dependent relatives and it circumscribes virtually all of the other activities they carry out. This paper will compare the daily experiences of such women (who have been participants in the author’s recent research into home-based care) with what has been written in social work literature about women who ‘care’.

I wasn’t born a Commissioner for Equal Opportunity. I spent my formative years as a child, and my re-educative years as a lawyer, a teacher of law, and a law reformer.

As a child I swore that I would never be as insensitive to children’s needs and desires as adults were being to mine. As I became an adult I realised the seductive truth that it is much more reasonable, and pleasurable it was, to assert my assessment of children’s best interests over their own.

I asked the Farmer and his wife to tell me about the Rural Crisis. His wife gave me a long look, and said “We are the Rural Crisis!” This paper is dedicated to them.

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.

The 1990 National Evaluation Conference, a conference devoted to current developments in evaluation, left the authors with many concerns. This paper, after describing a few of the contributions which were of relevance to human services, explores some of the dilemmas. Is program evaluation a research activity or not? What are the implications of the commercialisation of the public sector? Is evaluation a tool to induce employee conformity? These questions are raised, and their implications for human services discussed.

Child welfare workers express criticism of the child-in-isolation model of child welfare practice. At the same time, however, they often persist with a “foster mother-in-isolation” model of fostering. The authors of this paper were conscious of an increasing interest in fostering by policy makers who however, often seemed to see little difference between the “staffing” implications of fostering and of family day care. This way of thinking about fostering is at odds with practitioner’s experience. A small scale empirical study was initiated which posed the question “Who are foster families”. The findings from this study make it clear that foster families have qualities and methods of functioning which become evident only when the foster family is understood as a whole and not merely as a foster mother who has connected to her various dependents beside the foster child. An appreciation that there are “foster families” and not just foster mothers actively engaged in the fostering process can make for more sensitive welfare policies and more appropriate service delivery models.

The economic effects of the current rural downturn are relatively easy to monitor. This paper looks at the social costs and the impact on farm families. It also discusses the discrimination against farm families within Australia’s welfare system.

A sample of 1,146 children ranging in age from 5-13 years was assessed for stressful life events across the lifespan. Children reported experiencing, on average, seven events during their lifetimes. Boys reported more such events than girls. The impact of multiple life events on children’s adjustment is discussed in the paper.

Most packaged parent education programmes available in Victoria teach some underlying principles about children’s behaviour and offer specific skills or strategies for managing children. Whilst parent education is seen as an important part of a treatment plan for parents who have abused or neglected their children, these parents are rarely at a stage where they can make use of the information or strategies taught in the packaged programmes. Acutely vulnerable parents, who themselves have been hurt as children, must first heal some of their past before being able to learn and use new approaches to parenting. This paper considers the characteristics of acutely vulnerable parents and proposes some approaches that can be employed to assist these parents reach a point where they can respond to parent education and develop new positive ways relating to their children.

On the 2nd of September this year, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the Assembly in November 1989, came into force under international law, 30 days after the lodgment of the 20th instrument of ratification (by which time 31 countries had deposited ratifications). Shortly prior to that date, on 22 August, after some public controversy about the matter, Australia had determined to sign the Convention. The Convention, which stemmed from the 1979 International Year of the Child, expanded and elaborated within an international treaty, rights first enunciated (in non-binding form) in the 1959 Declaration of the Rights of the Child. It applies to a person under the age of 18.

Over 5 years ago, the Report of the Child Welfare Practice and Legislation Review Committee was published. That report - Equity and Social Justice for children families and communities, took, as one of its foundation principles, the proposition that Victorian law and practice should reflect internationally accepted principles of human and civil rights of children.

Teresa Donaczy’s calm presence and quiet sense of humour cannot mask her pain. The memory of removal from her family at the age of five still haunts her. A re-union thirty-four years later, a happy marriage, nine children and thirteen grandchildren cannot erase the hurt.

Born Teresa Kirby on an Aboriginal reserve in the New South Wales town of Balranald in 1936, Teresa recalls how the Aboriginal people hid their children in the bushes to avoid them being taken by New South Wales Government authorities.

The following article by Professor Brian Wharf is based on programs operating in the USA. There are some signs of placement prevention programs being embraced by government bodies and non-government child welfare agencies in Australia and in Canada. His experience of developments in Australia, during a recent visit, prompted him to put forward this article for publication in Children Australia. There appears to be a remarkable similarity of interests between child welfare issues in Australia and Canada, particularly round the question of whether protection and prevention services should be integrated or provided by separate agencies or departments. Children Australia hopes this will be the first in a series of exchanges between Australia and Canada.