Why don’t we prioritise legal help for women and children interacting with the child care and protection system?
Our founding CEO Dr Tessa Boyd-Caine reflects on the structural inequalities women continue to face when it comes to legal assistance and child removal.
It’s a continuing frustration of mine when we mark dates like International Women’s Day but fail to recognise the structural underpinnings of the inequity we are marking. Whether through sexism and misogyny, racism, ableism, homophobia or in other ways, our lived experience is shaped and even determined by structural power.
What role do systems play in gendering our experiences?
One of the starkest examples of gendered assumptions I see in my work is how we resource access to legal help, and for whom.
In Australia, we deem the risk of going to prison – the deprivation of liberty by the State – as one of the most serious outcomes of interaction with the criminal justice system. In recognition of that severity, we provide publicly funded legal assistance to anyone facing charges for which there is a risk of imprisonment. As we should!
But what about people interacting with the child protection system, for whom one of the most serious outcomes is removal of a child from their family? Where is the priority on legal help for the families caught up in this system?
I can’t help but read this distinction through a gendered lens.
The impacts of the system
Both systems have to balance the rights of individuals with the State’s responsibility to protect people from harm by others. Both systems interact – some might say intentionally – with people who are themselves living with complex, intersecting health, legal and social needs. But risk of incarceration is faced more often by men than women, although there are many women in our prisons; while the risk of having a child removed is faced more often by women than by men.
I’m a criminologist by training. I care deeply about the impact of imprisonment and the over-incarceration of people, many of whom are criminalised because of their life circumstances. Many prisoners should not be locked up at all, including many women. The ongoing social and economic cost and harm caused by incarceration far outweigh the benefits.
But I also care deeply about the long-term impacts of removing children from their families. For these children, the impacts include a higher risk of interaction with the juvenile and criminal justice systems and of being caught up in the child protection system with their own children. The social and economic costs of removing children from their families are a false economy when we don’t do enough to support the health and wellbeing factors that underpin those child protection concerns.
A question of priorities
Why don’t we prioritise legal help for women and children interacting with the child care and protection system? What difference could it make if we did, especially as part of holistic responses to the underlying health, legal and social issues that prompt child protection concerns?
I am proud to be part of an organisation that cares about these questions. Over the coming months Health Justice Australia will be investigating what level of legal help is available for people interacting with the child care and protection system and whether service collaboration such as health justice partnership can point the way to a more equitable system for the women and children who are caught up in Australia’s child protection systems.
Imagine the opportunity that would be enabled if we didn’t just identify and remove children from risk of harm, but worked collaboratively to improve the health and wellbeing of these children of their families!
