“PARENTS WITH DISABILITIES AND CHILD PROTECTION REFORM”

“We want to be parents, just like everyone else”

One key means of addressing the systemic, and in many ways overt, discrimination faced by parents with disability throughout their engagement with child protection systems is through statutory, policy and funding reforms.

Such reforms should align with and reflect Australia’s obligations as signatory to several international human rights instruments, including, but not limited to, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the ‘CRPD’), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (the ‘CRC’) and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (the ‘UNDRIP’).

As scholars and advocates have argued, a first step is to amend contemporary legislation and policies to explicitly remove any equation between disability, parenting incapacity and risk. We would also argue that, given the seemingly entrenched perception of a tension between the best interests of children and the best interests and rights of their parents, a relational approach should be adopted. This would require a significant rethink of funding, policy and practice.

The focus on children as saveable and parents as undeserving and blameworthy is an entrenched by-product of the emphasis on individual rather than systemic drivers of child protection issues. Child protection legislation and policy should be amended to include a stated presumption that the best interests of children are served by providing inclusive – and thereby disability and culturally responsive – supports to parents.

As others have argued, legislation and policy should also include an inclusive definition of disability that also acknowledges that many people live with multiple disabilities. This would thereby work towards ensuring that anti-discrimination provisions recognise and can be accessed as a protective and remedial measure by all parents with disability.

The purpose of identifying parents with disability must be to provide appropriate support and to collect data which enables planning and funding of services in accordance with needs. Explicit protections should be in place to prevent this data from being used for surveillance purposes. By doing so, child protection legislation and policy at the very least would begin to align with Australian human rights obligations under the CRPD and CRC respectively.

Given the political and social failure to ensure disability-appropriate, culturally responsive and inclusive services are available to parents with disability, the literature highlights an urgent need to develop and fund both specialist disability services that specifically address the intersectional support needs of people with disability who are parents and inclusive parenting services that provide culturally and disability safe and accessible support.