There is an increasing demand for extended family members to care for children due to DFV, in both formal & statutory arrangements.
This presentation will focus on the intersection between supporting kinship carers who are faced with family violence as the reason for child removal and the requirement to support children’s ongoing connection with family safely. The interactive workshop will provide the opportunity to explore the challenges faced by carers when violence is prevalent in parents’ relationships and introduce emerging practice approaches to address this within a whole of family approach.
This is emerging work for IFYS who have identified significant gaps in both research and practice when looking to the intersections between mental health, trauma, domestic and family violence and the impacts for kinship carers stepping in to care for their own children’s children when they have been removed. 80% of kinship carers are grandmothers who in one study have reported some form of abuse including 51% physical, 82% psychological, verbal, emotional and 68% report that children were present.
Research is demonstrating that placement with extended family for children is achieving better outcomes in children’s stability, reduced behavioural issues and that sibling groups are more likely to remain together. Emerging research suggests longer term outcomes for health and wellbeing are greatly improved for children. The over-representation of First Nation children in out of home care makes placement for children within cultural and kin connections critical to achieving positive outcomes for wellbeing, a sense of identity and cultural connections.
Given these positive attributes of placement with kinship carers for children, urgent attention is required to greatly enhance the support mechanisms, including improved access to counselling, respite care, legal aid, and support from statutory agencies with a specific focus on having an identified people working with the person using violence (PUV).