Emerging priorities in my role as National Children’s Commissioner
Children's Rights
Megan Mitchell
National Children’s Commissioner
Australian Human Rights Commission
Grand Rounds at the Royal Children’s Hospital
Ella Latham Theatre
Royal Children’s Hospital
50 Flemington Road
Parkville, Victoria
19 March 2014
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1. Acknowledgments
Thank you for your kind introduction, and to the Royal Children’s Hospital for inviting me to speak today.
I too would like to show my respect by acknowledging the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land on which this meeting takes place, the Wurunjeri People of the Kulin Nation.
2. Introduction
I am honoured to be invited to participate in the Grand Rounds at the Royal Children’s Hospital. What a Grand title indeed, and it makes me feel a little as though I should be appropriately attired in a white coat with stethoscope.
The Grand Round of my own that I have conducted in my role as National Children’s Commissioner so far has been The Big Banter, my listening tour with children and young people and children’s advocates.
Armed only with my ears – and perhaps my ipad – I spent several months last year taking the pulse of children’s wellbeing and rights across Australia. While it may not have been ‘grand’ in style and means, the words of children and adults themselves have often been noble and touching. And the children’s rights which we aim to protect and uphold are rightly grand, in the best sense of the word. We should always be aiming high with respect to children.
Today I would like to speak to you in more detail about the Big Banter, and about what it told me about the need for child rights protection in this country, including some emerging priorities for action.
In particular, I will focus on one of the key guiding principles in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and a theme emerging out of my consultations last year – the right of every child to survive and develop.
But first, a little about my job and the meaning of children’s rights.
3. National Children’s Commissioner role
I began in my role as National Children’s Commissioner almost exactly a year ago.
Although there had been Children’s Commissioners and Guardians in the states and territories for a few years, my appointment was the first National Children’s Commissioner in Australia. This was a long awaited recognition that children need a strong advocate at the national level to ensure their interests, rights and wellbeing.
A key part of my role as National Children’s Commissioner is to promote respect for the human rights of children in Australia and to work in their best interests.
The legislation that governs my position – the Australian Human Rights Commission Act - gives me some tools to perform this role. They are
- promoting discussion and awareness of matters relating to the human rights of children in Australia
- undertaking research, or educational or other programs, to promote respect for, and the enjoyment of human rights by children
- examining and reporting on existing and proposed Commonwealth laws on whether they recognise and protect the human rights of children
- and finally, submitting a report to the Attorney-General after 30 June in each year about children’s rights.
In December last year I launched the first of these Children’s Rights Reports.
In my report, I devote a whole chapter to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This is because the Convention – which I will call the CRC – underpins all of my work and is a key tool for monitoring and ensuring respect for the rights of children in Australia.
What is the CRC?
The CRC is the most comprehensive human rights treaty for children, covering a wide spectrum of economic, social, civil and political rights to be enjoyed by children (defined as those under the age of 18). It includes everything from the right to healthcare and a standard of living, through to the right to be cared for, to play and to go to school.
It recognises that children have human rights, as do adults, but that they require special protection due to their vulnerabilities. Australia ratified the CRC in 1990, which means it has agreed to uphold the rights of all children in Australia.
The CRC has four Guiding Principles:
- Non-discrimination (article 2)
- Best interests of the child (article 3)
- Right to life, survival and development (article 6)
- Respect for the views of the child (article 12).
These principles should apply to all the other rights in the CRC.
Of these Guiding Principles, I am especially motivated by article 12, often called right to participate or the right to be heard.
Article 12 gives to every child the right to have a say, the right to have their views taken into account, and the right for those views to be treated seriously.
When the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a progress report on Australia’s implementation of children’s rights in 2012, called Concluding Observations, it observed that Australia has some good measures to promote children’s views. However, it also said we can do much better at respecting children’s views, for example for children under 15 years.
4. The Big Banter
Given the importance of article 12, it makes sense that one of the first things I have done as National Children’s Commissioner was to hear from children and young people themselves and conduct a national listening tour, which I called the Big Banter.
During the Big Banter, I met face-to-face with more than 1000 children, and heard from almost 1400 more children online and through the post. I also heard from hundreds of children’s advocates.
As you can see, children and their advocates have raised many different issues throughout the Big Banter, and some issues were raised many times.
But what I’ve learned is this: children want to be with their family and with their friends, and they want to be safe.
Children enjoy their freedoms and they enjoy being able to play, be active and have fun, but they also appreciate fair boundaries and rules.
They are particularly concerned about the level of violence and bullying in the community, and they would like to live in an environment that is free from drugs, alcohol and smoking.
Children worry that some families can’t afford to do or have the things they would like. They want more things to be available for free and services for children to be easier to access.
They want people to show more respect for one another, and they want to be respected and listened to.
And children definitely want to have a say and to have their voice heard.
5. Emerging themes from the Big Banter
These children’s priorities are reflected in the five key themes in my Children’s Rights Report. These key themes are central to ensuring the maximum protection of the human rights and fundamental freedoms of our children.
- A right to be heard
- Freedom from violence, abuse and neglect
- The opportunity to thrive
- Engaged citizenship
- Action and accountability
6. Opportunity to thrive
While all these themes are important pieces of the puzzle of protecting children’s rights in Australia, perhaps the most challenging is ensuring the opportunity to thrive for all children.
Every child deserves an equal chance to make their own way in the world and to aspire to be what they want to be.
This is not occurring for all children in Australia at the present time.
Many children who are at risk find themselves streamed into costly tertiary systems like juvenile justice and out-of-home care, invariably putting them on a path to replicate patterns of social exclusion and disenfranchisement through the generations.
This is borne out in the growing numbers of children in out-of-home care as a result of abuse and neglect.
As many of you will be aware, across Australia during 2011-2012 there were 37,781 children aged 0 to 17 who were the subject of one or more substantiations of abuse or neglect, an 18% increase from 2007-2008.[1]
And 39,621 children were living in out-of-home care in Australia in June 2012, an increase of 27% since 2008.[2] Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are nearly ten times as likely to be in out-of-home care than non-Indigenous children.[3]
Another example shows that, despite an injection of funding to prevent homelessness, we still have children and families facing homelessness.
In 2011-2012, around 107,200 people aged 0 to 24 were assisted by specialist homelessness agencies. Of these, around 19% were under the age of 12, and around 13% were aged 12 to 18.[4]
In my report I identify two ways that we should be working to address the risks facing these children.
First, there is a clear case for Australia to review its investment in and coordination of early action, intervention and prevention services across the nation.
In particular, building and supporting safe and resilient families where children can thrive and grow, is critical to giving children the opportunities they deserve. This is a view strongly echoed throughout the Big Banter.
Research commissioned by the Benevolent Society in 2013 showed that most Australians believe that it is important to do more to tackle issues for children early on, before they become difficult to fix and expensive for the community. Evaluations of some early intervention programs in the US found that children who were at risk of poor outcomes, who participated in early intervention, and whose parents received extra support with parenting, were more likely to finish school and find higher paying jobs, and were less likely to be involved in crime, compared with those children who did not receive extra support.
Despite this knowledge, current investment in early intervention, prevention and family support across the nation is patchy at best.
Having said this, there are some promising individual models based around local empowerment and community engagement on which we can start to build a more strategic long-term national approach.
For example, in my report I mention the Fitzroy Valley Futures Early Childhood Development Sub-Committee in WA that works collaboratively across disciplines to support local families and children in the home and in community settings with literacy, numeracy, parenting, and access to health and other essential services.
Justice reinvestment, which seeks to divert resources from correctional systems into programs that put children on pro-social pathways, represents another example of preventative action.
The Clean Slate Without Prejudice program at National Centre of Indigenous Excellence in 2009 in Redfern involves young people at risk of offending, many of them indigenous - undertaking boxercise with their mentors, friends and police. The mentors then go on to ensure that the young people go to school or jobs after their workouts.[5] It has been credited with an 80 per cent drop in juvenile robberies in its first year.
The second strategy goes to identifying and focusing on the most marginalised and vulnerable children
As we know, there are distinct categories of children who do not have the same opportunity to thrive as all other children in Australia. Whether it is the experience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children being more susceptible to illness and death in early childhood, the vulnerabilities of children in the child protection system, the challenges in providing quality education and healthcare to children living in small regional and rural centres, or the particular vulnerabilities experienced by newly arrived migrant communities, we need to ensure that these children are not denied the opportunity to thrive.
I hope to use my report to federal Parliament to highlight the particular vulnerabilities experienced by certain groups of children, and to outline action that should be taken to assure them of their rights. A big focus for my role in this area, along with partners and colleagues, is to act as a strong advocate for a comprehensive approach to early intervention, including through the vehicle of the National Framework for Protecting Australia’s Children.
I also work collaboratively with my colleagues at the Australian Human Rights Commission to focus on groups of children in need of special protection, and who are being denied the opportunity to thrive. In February 2014, the Australian Human Rights Commission announced an Inquiry into children in immigration detention in Australia. This will investigate the ways in which immigration detention affects the health, well-being and development of children, and assess whether laws, policies and practices are meeting Australia’s international human rights obligations. We are calling for submissions to this Inquiry on our website. The President of the Commission, Gillian Triggs, and myself, will also be visiting detention facilities to examine the conditions and speak to children, families and staff during the coming months.
It is clear that we need a strong commitment and sustained investment in early intervention, prevention and family support in Australia. We cannot, as a nation, afford to continue to grow out of home care, juvenile justice, homelessness services and other tertiary systems in ways that accept that we have basically failed our most vulnerable children and their families.
- The words of children in need of protection
I would like to return to where we started – with the words of children themselves.
In the Big Banter I was blown away by the ability of some children and young people to articulate their needs and the needs of their friends, in particular those who face the most adversity, as these following examples show:
I have Asperger’s Syndrome. Life in primary school was very difficult. Life would be better if people that were different, disabilities, races, religions and any other differences, all accepted each other. If there was no bullying. If schools were supportive of kids with disabilities, especially invisible disabilities like Asperger’s Syndrome.
14 year old child from VictoriaI’m a young Indigenous person. I’m locked up in a Youth Detention Centre. I want more staff to prevent fights between other inmates. I also want more help on the outside instead of being locked up straight away.
Child from VictoriaI know quite a few friends who suffer from mental illness and sometimes they feel like no adult really understands how to deal with it. It’s bad enough to be feeling such overwhelming self-loathing, sadness and hopelessness, but to feel like no one cares, that you are all alone, only makes it worse.
15 year old child from NSW
It is incumbent on us to listen to them, and, as importantly, to act on their concerns. So that all children – no matter what their circumstances – are given the best opportunity not just to survive but to thrive.
Thank you
[1]Australian Institute of Family Studies, ‘Child abuse and neglect statistics’, last updated May 2013.
[2] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Child protection Australia 2011-12, Child Welfare Series No 55, Cat No CWS 43 (2013),Table A21, p 78. At http://www.aihw.gov.au/publication- detail/?id=60129542755 (viewed 22 October 2013).
[3] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Child protection Australia 2011-12, Child Welfare Series No 55, Cat No AUS 174 (2013), p 41
[4] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Australia’s welfare 2013, Australia’s Welfare Series No 11, Cat No AUS 174, p 178.
[5] Rick Feneley ‘Swing and a miss: funding gaps hit scheme slashing crime rates’ The Sydney Morning Herald, 14 March 2013, <http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/swing-and-a-miss-funding-gaps-hit-scheme-slashing-crime-rates-20130313-2g0l8.html>