In a secret meeting as Victoria’s budget was being announced, the full scale of the historical abuse of children in state care – and its impact on the government’s finances – was being laid bare.

This interim report based in Australia focuses on hearing the lived experiences of children and young people in alternative care arrangements and lifts up the voices of those who have participated in private hearings as part of this Special Inquiry to date.

The goal of this research was to map and identify service and social policy needs, gaps, barriers, and enablers for Western Australian custodial grandparent carers.

This study offers an updated review and analysis of policy reforms across both the child protection and youth justice systems in jurisdictions such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, targeting researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in the field.

The 1997 Bringing Them Home report into the removal of Aboriginal children from their families was a turning point in Australia’s history. The inquiry rejected past government policies of assimilation and endorsed the importance of keeping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children with their families.

This article focuses on how institutional and government authorities communicated and displayed techniques of reformative learning in New South Wales and Queensland. It examines how this learning was displayed to local communities, arguing that the work of demonstrating that the incarcerated boys in their care were learning to be good citizens was an important part of institutional governance.

This paper reveals insights into how professionals working in the Australian child protection system understand and are supported in child-centered case note recording and recordkeeping practices. It also identifies the possibilities for the crucial role that interdisciplinary collaboration and alignment between social work and recordkeeping informatics can play in transforming and supporting recordkeeping approaches and practices that prioritise and uphold the rights and dignity of the child.

The objective of this study was to determine if an Indigenous-led, multi-agency, partnership redesign of maternity services at a maternity hospital in Brisbane, New Zealand would decrease the likelihood of Indigenous babies being removed at birth and being placed in out-of-home care..

This study explored the experiences of children and young people in the community-based support model of the Mockingbird Family, in South Australia, during implementation and roll-out. The study involved semi-structured interviews with a diverse group of 54 participants, including 21 children and young people, 12 foster carers, and 14 agency workers.

The aim of this study was to examine whether different subtypes of homelessness risk exist among young people transitioning from care in Australia and whether these trajectories of homelessness are associated with mental health and substance use disorders.