THE Madonna House report is a further contribution in pointing the way toward reform of our child care system. Its release, in spite of the substantial segments culled for legal reasons, is to be welcomed.
We must trust that those in positions of responsibility who have had access to the full report, i.e., the relevant Ministers and their officials, will feel doubly obliged to implement the lessons to be learned from the omitted sections.
It is difficult to imagine a more vulnerable group in our society than children in care; vulnerable in terms of their age and by definition because they have experienced severe trauma in their lives.
The primary reasons for admission to care are parents' inability to cope, neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse. Nevertheless, the loss of one's family for whatever reason, and whether voluntarily or through a court decision, is a traumatic experience for any child.
But society, in providing for these children, is essentially saying that, in these instances, public care is a better option.
This places a major responsibility on the child care system to ensure that the experience of children in care justifies their removal from their families. Their welfare cannot be left to chance.
In fairness, it must be acknowledged that the bad publicity heaped on residential care of late does not tell the whole story. Certainly there has been a great deal of unacceptable practice in residential care over many years. But recent coverage tends to obscure the fact that the vast majority of residential child care staff are exceptionally caring, dedicated and professional and that there have been significant improvements in the system.
But there is still a long way to go.
Indeed the Madonna House report shows that only two out of 41 child care staff were professionally qualified and more than 50 per cent of staff had no qualification. One is assured that the situation in most other residential facilities is significantly better.
But the fact that this represented the level of trained staff in a centre which, as the report states, "became the principal emergency Residential Child Care facility in the Eastern Health Board region" must be a matter of grave concern.
This is not to be critical of individual members of staff, most of whom, presumably, carried out their duties responsibly in the interests of the children in their care. It does, however, raise serious questions about the child care system employed and the value it placed on the service offered and, by extension, on the children themselves.
In particular, it is difficult to imagine the damage done to a child who is abused within a system which purports to protect him/her from earlier abuse perpetrated within the family.
While reform of the residential child care system is essential and in some respects has already begun, its development must be integrated with necessary change in our provision for children in general.
In this respect the report's recommendations with regard to the articulation of a national child care policy statement, provision of comprehensive family support services, vetting of child care staff, mandatory reporting, the development of national standards and statement of children's rights, are particularly welcome.
Priorities for reform, specifically in relation to the residential child care system, must include measures to assure the quality of service provided and mechanisms to enable children (and others) to make complaints appropriately.
Within the context of a timeframe (e.g. five years) by which time all necessary reform will have taken place, the former should include a commitment to ensure that all residential child care staff would be trained to an appropriate professional standard.
There is also a need to strengthen the management of residential care; to provide increased supervision and support which recognises the burden of responsibility carried by individual members of staff; and to create a proper career structure to ensure, inter alia, the retention of professional staff within the system.
Some residential centres have taken their own initiatives to establish a complaints procedure for children in their care. This should be a requirement of all centres.
And it is important that residential services be accountable to an independent inspectorate which, would audit service quality and promote good practice in addition to inquiring into practice failures.
The Madonna House inquiry team was clearly convinced that the abuses it was investigating were neither isolated nor unique to this centre, but were symptomatic "of a dysfunctional social system". Compounded with the fact that "real barriers existed to children making contact outside of the centre when they wished to do so and rules governing access to telephones etc. were an actual and psychologically isolating factor", one has a sense of the powerlessness of the vulnerable when confronted with the power of this particular "system".
Yet we cannot be without hope.
The release of this albeit truncated report amounts to a further step towards identifying not only the problems in the system but how they can be overcome.
Even more importantly, it represents an imperative for real action to strengthen our capacity to respond to vulnerable children and their families.