THEY TOLD HER SHE SHOULD NEVER HAVE CHILDREN…! – Queensland teen blames Child Safety failures for her darkest years—and says she’s not the only one
A “rough” environment endured in “survival mode” is the reality of child protection, according to several young people raised by Child Safety Queensland.
They were removed from their families for their own safety but were left feeling angered that the alternative care seemed to offer only alternative trauma, before spitting them out on the other side.
They told 7NEWS.com.au they have been failed by Child Safety Queensland.
The Queensland Government is sitting with recommendations from an inquiry into the Child Safety system, which Attorney-General Deb Frecklington called “neglected” when the landmark report exposed failures in June.
But how that neglect manifests in the daily lives of vulnerable children creates trajectories too often misunderstood, one expert told 7NEWS.com.au.
Queensland mother-of-two Deanna Paylor, 21, told 7NEWS.com.au she entered child protection “from birth”.
By the age of five, she had been diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder — a rare stress-related condition caused by social neglect and maltreatment, which causes significant behavioural and emotional impacts including trust issues.
“I was always misbehaving or, you know, like lashing out because I never had that one stable home,” she said.
“I don’t even know how I did it. I just think I was living in survival mode. I was surviving off adrenaline.”
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Soon after turning 12, Paylor was placed in a residential care home where she said another resident several years her senior sexually assaulted her multiple times.
“I didn’t have a secure lock on my door,” Paylor said.
“That’s just how rough and raw a residential care home could be for a young female, which is disgusting … the system is broken, and as a result I struggle with lifelong complex PTSD and anxiety.
“I didn’t have one safe person or one safe place … I couldn’t even tell them I was getting raped.”
While her attachment condition, and the changes to appointed Child Safety officers (CSO), created barriers to help-seeking, the mother of a friend she met in Girl Guides helped her report the sexual abuse to police.
In a move known as “self-placing” — which is when a child in state care chooses to stay in a place of their own choosing while still in the child protection system — Paylor eventually moved in with that friend’s mother.
“I’ve now got two beautiful sons who call her Nanna,” Paylor said, noting that motherhood helped her to debunk engrained beliefs.
“They drilled it into my head that I wasn’t to have children because I would just continue the cycle.”
Paylor said she endured 45 different placements in Child Safety.
Another Child Safety resident, 15-year-old Emma Griffith* has been moved 10 times in the last year, and has described it as “the most unsettling thing”.
“It’s terrifying. I think about it every day and I’m scared that I could go outside and be told you have to pack your whole life and just move, and I don’t get a choice. If we don’t move, their option is to call the police.”
One time her placement closed unexpectedly during a shift at her part-time job, and she was left stranded with her boss before youth police came to collect her.
She asked her team leader for clarity during her most recent move: “I was telling her, ‘It would really benefit me to understand, so I can accept it.’ She literally said to me: ‘You don’t need to understand’.”
“They brush things off,” she said.
On Griffith’s long list of things brushed off is “an incident where one of my workers had been having really unusual conversations with me that were quite sexual and I was really uncomfortable”.
She said young teens in state care are usually no longer treated with the sensitivity of children, but they are without the ability or resources to become truly independent.
“We lose our childhood, and then they’re sitting there and they’re wondering why we’re acting like this and presenting these behaviors and these outbursts of anger. But we don’t have anything,” Griffith said.
‘Where’s mum? Is she coming to see me?’
A government audit found almost 800 children were self-placing across Queensland last year.
Jack Smith*, 16, is self-placing with the very family he was removed from last year.
His mother, Eleanor Wright* said despite the danger she supposedly posed to him, Child Safety has not conducted a single welfare check or meeting in the month that he has been back living with her.
Child Safety first contacted her last Christmas Eve — Smith had self-presented to a local hospital during an acute mental health episode.
Wright was given three options: Pick up her son immediately, relinquish her care of him, or risk losing all three of her children.
“I refused to pick (Smith) up until he’d been medically assessed under the advice of his psychologist … I said, it’s not safe for (Smith), my other children, or myself, to collect him until he’s been medically cleared,” Wright said.
Wright said a lack of acute mental health beds in the hospital had contributed to the dilemma, but that a Child Safety Officer (CSO) came to her house to assess her other two children.
Wright said she was “pressured into signing the 28 day agreement” for Smith, so he could access the mental health support he needed. She describes the reality of the next six months as “parental alienation”.
Back in the hospital, Smith said: “I was in a very vulnerable state, and I was asking, ‘Where’s Mum? Is she coming to see me?’ and (the CSO) said, ‘Do you want to hear the sugarcoated version or the un-sugarcoated version?’ — and I was like, ‘Give it to me raw’.”
He said the CSO told him: “Your mum doesn’t want you anymore.”
Later on, he said another CSO commented that: “Mum‘s a horrible mum … that I should never contact her again and just build a new life … I started to think differently of mum.”
Sleeping in tunnels and stealing dry clothes
Wright said she had worked hard to keep her son away from drugs, only to have him returned to her as an addict.
“I’ve worked his entire life to keep him out of the drug scene. When he started to have trouble in school, with drugs … we pulled him out and did homeschool to ensure he didn’t end up down that path,” Wright said.
Smith was introduced to a new combination of money, boredom and access while in Child Safety.
“I got really heavy into crime and really deep into drug addiction,” Smith told 7NEWS.com.au. “I made all the wrong friends … then they signed me up with Centrelink, so I was getting free money, doing nothing, sitting on my backside.”
Smith was moved into a Supported Independent Living home, where carers drop in rather than providing constant supervision — by the time he was relocated again, he had formed deep friendships and deeper drug addictions.
He was stopped at a petrol station on a road trip back to his former placement area for a medical appointment, when Smith said: “I got out of the car and ran … simply to get back on it.”
Four days later, Smith said: “I realised what I had done.”
He texted his CSO for a ride, but she did not immediately respond. The next day she replied “I have been instructed not to collect you until we find an approved placement.”
“These are the consequences of your own actions.”
‘The darkest time I’ve ever had in my life’
Smith was left homeless for 10 days, until he received a Centrelink payment that he used to get home. During that time, he had no money for food or accommodation, and no access to medications prescribed for his disabilities.
“I was sleeping under tunnel near a local shopping centre. It was raining the whole week heavy, and it was freezing cold,” he said.
“I would go up to BIG W and steal a jumper every single morning and steal a fresh pair of jocks and steal a fresh pair of socks.”
Wright’s newly acquired lawyer advised her that without permission from Child Safety, picking Smith up herself might jeopardise her chance of permanently getting him back.
“I would have been down there in a heartbeat to pick him up. I literally had to sit on my hands,” she said.
“(Child Safety) took him from me because I couldn’t provide safe care for him, yet their model of safe care is on the streets homeless?”
His mental health spiralled in state care, resulting in another stint in hospital for “deep psychosis” during what Smith called “the darkest time I’ve ever had in my life”.
The CSO did not stay with Smith at the hospital, and he was discharged by the hospital to his mother, who had been sitting by her son’s bedside.
“To have (Child Safety) take him from me, add to his trauma, turn him into a drug addict, and then hand him back to me to take him home around my other children and detox … they are exposing me and the children to more harm,” Wright said.
Recovering from damage done
Smith did not return to the same home he left on Christmas Eve.
Wright said she and her younger kids fled that home when Child Safety had contacted her ex-husband “to see if he had capacity to take (Smith)” — despite a no contact order for domestic violence-related mutual undertakings.
“I told (the CSO) that he’s a very dangerous man, and doesn’t know where we are … they disclosed our address to him,” Wright said.
It was the second time Wright had fled out of fear of her ex, having started a new life “with nothing” but the kids four years earlier.
Wright claims she was also plunged into financial hardship when Child Safety suddenly cut her disability carer allowance, and that her younger kids became “terrified that they were going to be taken away”.
Smith is now home, sober, employed, and attending weekly psychiatry appointments — but he and his family are still reeling and recovering from the last six months, and remain before the courts to sever their ties with Child Safety.
Child Safety responds to the claims
Jane Stevens*, who has been employed as a contract worker with Child Safety for 20 years, said: “The child protection system is always working in chaos.
“It’s always last minute. On a Friday afternoon you’ll get a call from Child Safety going, we’re removing these children now at, you know, 4.35pm, but we haven’t got anywhere for them to go yet.
“Yes, you have emergent situations … but you can’t tell me every removal is at the drop of a hat.
“The residential system is all about heads on beds.”
Australian Childhood Foundation CEO Janise Mitchell told 7NEWS.com.au that placement breakdowns “are the enemy” of healing.
“We have to ensure we meet a child or young person’s fundamental right and need to be safe, that the system offers greater safety than the family from which they have been removed, that it is able to understand and meet their needs for relationship stability, through which the healing of their trauma can begin,” she said.
The Department of Child Safety was contacted with an opportunity to comment on all the comments made within this article, but “The Child Protection Act 1999 prevents us from commenting on individual cases,” a spokesperson said.
“We take allegations of abuse very seriously and when concerns of a criminal nature are raised, we are obligated to report these matters to the police.
“Under the Safer Children, Safer Communities initiative, we have introduced new services to recruit more foster carers and a professional foster care pilot to help transition children with disabilities and complex needs out of residential care and to move children under the age of five out of residential care into family-based arrangements.
“The Queensland Government is currently considering its response to recommendations from the Commission of Inquiry into Child Safety.”
