Abuse

The Australian Institute of Health & Welfare has released its 150 page Child Protection Australia 2010-11 report [PDF], indicating that the number of notifications of child abuse or neglect to state/territory child welfare departments continued to fall in 2010–11, although the number and rate of children in substantiated cases remained stable.

There was a 13% fall in the number of children subject to notifications of possible child abuse or neglect compared with the previous year. During the same period, the number of children in substantiated cases (ie where a govt agency "concluded that the child has been, is being, or is likely to be abused, neglected, or otherwise harmed") was stable - rising by less than 1%.

In 2010–11, there were 237,273 notifications of potential child abuse or neglect involving 163,767 children. Of these notifications, over half were investigated and just over a third were substantiated.

There were 31,527 children involved in substantiated cases during 2010–11, ie 6.1 for every 1,000 Australian children aged 0–17. The report notes that -

Children aged under 12 months were most likely to be the subject of a substantiation of child abuse or neglect. However, over the past five years we have seen a large fall in reported rates of abuse and neglect for those under 12 months of age, from 17 to 12 per 1,000 children

The number of children on care and protection orders at 30 June 2011 rose by 4% from the previous year. The number of children in out-of-home care at 30 June 2011 rose by 5%. Although the total number of children on care and protection orders and in out-of-home care has increased, the number of new admissions into out-of-home care per year has fallen, suggesting that children on existing orders may be staying longer in out-of-home care.

As in previous years, the vast majority of children in out-of-home care lived in home-based care, primarily in foster care (45%) or with relative/kinship carers (46%).

The report states that -

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children continue to be over-represented within the child protection system. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were 7.6 times as likely as non-Indigenous children to be the subject of a child protection substantiation, and 10 times as likely to be in out-of-home care.

The most common type of substantiated abuse for Indigenous children was neglect, which made up 38% of all substantiated cases, compared with 23% for non-Indigenous children.