reclaimyourchildren
The Watch Committee on the Department for Child Protection WA is newly formed and is the result of an increasing knowledge of removal of children from the love of their families by an apparently over-aggressive and bullish Department.


For all the Good that they may do there is much Wrong that is done - children are being unnecessarily removed, families are being destroyed, people driven to suicide, the trauma is immense, and the ignorance that underwrites DCP is horrific.






Photo taken by Gerry Georgatos, 2008, Tent Embassy, Old Parliament House, Canberra


OUR AIMS INCLUDE:

* To advocate on behalf of families who cannot afford extensive representation and who feel overwhelmed by the Department for Child Protection WA, and who may have reason not to trust the internal complaints processes of the Department.

* To advocate for the amendment of the State Act (2004) which presumably guides the Department for Child Protection and its caseworkers and team practice leaders. We believe that the Act is misguided, far too broad and loose and prone to allowing extreme and unwarranted actions from under qualified and extended caseworkers and team practice leaders.

* The first and ongoing pathway for the Department for Child Protection is for children and their parents to remain together however we have discovered this is not the case.

* The Department for Child Protection should focus on child sexual health abuse, evidenced real physical harm and in assuring the access to good health and education for children.

* The Department for Child Protection to be held criminally accountable for unwarranted removal of children from the love of their families.

* The Department for Child Protection to return children, it has abducted, to their families.


We are further advocating debate in the following:

* To ensure comprehensive professional development of all DCP workers and which will include dispute resolution, conciliation, interpersonal skills.

* To ensure substantive equality training is undertaken by all DCP workers, and anti-racism courses.

* To ensure ongoing professional development of all DCP workers in Aboriginal and Migrant cultural studies.

* To encourage DCP and the Tertiary Sector to develop specific graduate courses that can be undertaken upon completion of an undergraduate degree in social work or other relevant study upon their employment with DCP.

* The Complaints Management Tribunal shall be independently sponsored and shall include the EOC, human rights specialists, lawyers, and specialist grievance handlers and conflict resolutionists.

* That parents are availed to their case files at all times and no information can be withheld by DCP.

* A separate agency, not funded by DCP, shall be set up to monitor DCP, and review all cases.

* Where DCP has wrongly removed or damaged families that they shall immediately compensate these families/persons.



Even if we have to rally day in and day out on the steps of the Department for Child Protection, Royal Street, East Perth, and on the steps of State Parliament, West Perth, and picket the branches of DCP, whether they be Armadale, Gosnells, Cannington, Fremantle, regional and so forth, we shall do this - we will not be deterred - we shall bring an uncompromising overdue awareness to the Western Australian community of all this horrific ill and virulent cruelty as plagued by unchecked Agency, and we will do so in the quest to better them, to improve them, for the sake our children, our families, our society. Many children and families need saving from the ignorance and abuses from the overwhelming and uneducated Department for Child Protection WA. The problems with this Agency and its counterparts are notoriously endemic.

A Watch Committee has been formed and we shall ensure the requisite expedient engagement with the Minister for Child Protection and with the Director-General - however we shall not disengage from rallies, protests, dissemination and so forth while undertake the moral obligation to remedy their many unwarranted interventions and abductions and the utter harassment many caseworkers wrought on others.

PRIMUM NON NOCERE - FIRST DO NO HARM