From Words to Action

Joint Standing Committee on the Commissioner for Children and Young People From Words To Action Fulfilling the obligation to be child safe Report No. 5 August 2020 Parliament of Western Australia Committee Members Chair Hon Dr S.E. Talbot, MLC Member for South West Region Deputy Chair Mr K.M. O'Donnell, MLA Member for Kalgoorlie Members Hon D.E.M. Faragher, MLC Member for East Metropolitan Region Mrs J.M.C. Stojkovski, MLA Member for Kingsley Committee Staff Principal Research Officer Ms Renee Gould Research Officer Ms Michele Chiasson Legislative Assembly Tel: (08) 9222 7494 Parliament House Fax: (08) 9222 7804 Harvest Terrace Email: [email protected] PERTH WA 6000 Website: www.parliament.wa.gov.au Published by the Parliament of Western Australia, Perth. August 2020. ISBN: 978-1-925724-61-5 (Series: Western Australia. Parliament. Legislative Assembly. Committees. Joint Standing Committee on the Commissioner for Children and Young People. Report 5) 328.365 Joint Standing Committee on the Commissioner for Children and Young People From Words To Action Fulfilling the obligation to be child safe Report No. 5 Presented by Hon Dr S.E. Talbot, MLC & Mr K.M. O'Donnell, MLA Laid on the Table of the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council on 13 August 2020 Inquiry Terms of Reference The Joint Standing Committee on the Commissioner for Children and Young People will examine the scope and direction of the work currently being undertaken by government agencies, regulatory bodies and non-government organisations to improve the monitoring of child safe standards and the role of the Commissioner for Children and Young People in ensuring Western Australia’s independent oversight mechanisms operate in a way that makes the interests of children and young people the paramount consideration. In particular, the Committee will consider the following: • The recommendations made by the Commissioner for Children and Young People in the report Oversight of services for children and young people in Western Australia; • The recommendations from the Royal Commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse relating to an independent oversight body responsible for monitoring and enforcing child safe standards; and • The response from the State Government of Western Australia to the above recommendations. Chair’s Foreword What if we changed the way we think about child sexual abuse, from inevitable to preventable? … We need to recognise that, like every form of violence, child sexual abuse is an avoidable tragedy.1 t is clear that both historically and in modern times, the causes of the abuse and harm to which children and young people are exposed in institutional settings are myriad. There is now a considerable amount of evidence, some of it relating specifically to Western IAustralia, illustrating the diversity of people who sexually abuse children and the uniqueness of every survivor’s experience of child sexual abuse.2 While the responsibility for child sexual abuse lies first and foremost with adult perpetrators and institutions which have failed to care for a child, there is now widespread acceptance of the idea that, as a community, we are all responsible for preventing abuse from occurring and for responding quickly and effectively when it does. This is a responsibility which is taken very seriously by members of the Joint Standing Committee on the Commissioner for Children and Young People. With the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse delivering its final report in December 2017, the challenge faced by the State Government during the last three years has been to begin to implement the 310 Royal Commission recommendations which were directly applicable to the Western Australia Government, a process which is expected to take between five and 10 years. As would be expected, as well and contributing to the work of the Royal Commission, the Commissioner for Children and Young People has undertaken a great deal of work in relation to the Royal Commission recommendations, especially in the areas of child safe organisations, children and young people with harmful sexual behaviours, child friendly complaints systems and oversight of services for children and young people. The Committee has monitored, reviewed and reported on this work on a regular basis and has consulted regularly with the Commissioner during the course of the 40th Parliament. Faced with the enormous amount of evidence and the wide range of areas of action covered by the 310 recommendations being considered by the State Government, the Committee spent some time carefully considering the focus of the work which would lead to the publication of this report. After several hearings following up the Children’s Commissioner’s Oversight of services for children and young people in Western Australia report, which was conducted in response to a recommendation by a former iteration of this Committee in the 1 As quoted in Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Final Report Volume 6 – Making institutions child safe, Commonwealth of Australia, 2017, p. 42. 2 This observation about diversity and uniqueness is made in the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse Final Report, Final Report Volume 2 – Nature and cause, Commonwealth of Australia, 2017, p. 20. For evidence relating specifically to Western Australia, see: Hon Peter Blaxell, St Andrew’s Hostel Katanning: How the system and society failed our children, Government of Western Australia; Joint Standing Committee on the Commissioner for Children and Young People (39th Parliament), Report No.7, Everybody’s Business. An examination into how the Commissioner for Children and Young People can enhance WA’s response to child abuse, June 2016. iii 39th Parliament, we began to form the view that there were two common factors leading to the creation of an unsafe environment for children and young people. The first was a failure by institutions to put the interests of children above all other considerations. The second was a failure by governing bodies to assess and monitor the capacity of institutions to give primacy to the interests of children. To test this proposition, we embarked on a series of hearings both in Western Australia and in interstate and overseas jurisdictions to see how governments and organisations have responded to the growing demand for these failures to be rectified. On reaching London in October 2019, the Committee met with Sarah Blakemore, Chief Executive of Keeping Children Safe, an independent not-for-profit working to ensure that all organisations working directly for and with children have comprehensive safeguarding measures in place. I know I speak for all of my fellow Committee members as well as our advisors when I say that Ms Blakemore’s evidence provided us not only with confirmation that our inquiry was on the right track, but also with the focus and the energy needed to complete this report. In comments that go right to the heart of the critical issues facing Western Australia, Ms Blakemore observed that while we all know what bad looks like, we are less clear about what good looks like and how we might make real and lasting improvements to our system. It is worth quoting Ms Blakemore at length: The more transparent we can be the more we can learn from our mistakes. We all know stories of people who turned away when they shouldn’t. There are stories of people who have actively covered abuse up, but there are millions of stories of people who have not looked too hard. If we are not clear about what is expected of us as individuals, and we do not support that process in a transparent way, we will continue to have child abuse because the perpetrators look just like the other people who are not trying to stop the situation. If we can be really clear and empower people and make them not be frightened, then they will do the right thing. Otherwise…many people will think – “I’ll just stay in my lane.” If we understand the National Child Safe Principles, reproduced on page 11 of this report, to establish exactly the statement of clear expectation referred to by Ms Blakemore, several imperatives become apparent. We must foster a commitment to cultural change and reform amongst government and non-government agencies delivering services to children and young people. We must support organisations as they learn to hear the voices of children and put their interests first. We must enable organisations and the individuals who work in them to see the practical effects of becoming child safe. We must provide active encouragement to engage in good faith information sharing, both to prevent child sexual abuse and to respond quickly to incidents and risks. We must put the lived experience of children and young people at the centre of independent oversight to make sure systems are transparent and that people are empowered to make change. It is discussion of the National Child Safe Principles and these associated imperatives which form the basis of the chapters in this report. The report’s basic premises are straightforward: that the institutional failure to put the interests of children first will be rectified once organisations embed the National Child Safe Principles into the heart of their iv operations; and that the failure to effectively assess and monitor the capacity of institutions to put the interests of children first will be addressed when independent oversight renders systems transparent. While the State Government has accepted every relevant recommendation of the Royal Commission, implementation of the National Child Safe Principles and oversight provisions is still in the planning stage. Everyone working towards implementation acknowledges the complexity of the task, and this is certainly borne out by the evidence which informs this report. Each chapter, in my view, might itself have been expanded into the subject of an entire inquiry, such is the importance of each issue.

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