The wicked balancing act called child protection

From Australia

"The national children’s commissioner, Megan Mitchell, has called for stronger support to help parents raise their children, with new figures released on Thursday showing one in 33 children receives child protection services."

"In the year to 2016, child protection investigated 162,175 children under the age of 18, a rise of 20% in the past four years, the data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare found. Of those children, 73% were repeat clients..."

"Mitchell described decisions being made by courts and child protection departments as `a wicked balancing act` between giving parents opportunities to get help and keeping children safe by placing them elsewhere long-term."

"`It’s not a science,` Mitchell said. `What we must have in place are really excellent assessments of the situation and the ability to engage deeply with the children and their family. In many cases where children have come to the attention of authorities, there’s not a deep enough engagement because some families are hard to reach`."

"We need to put extra effort into those families. We need to encourage help-seeking and we don’t want them disengaging further and further until there’s no oversight of what’s happening to children at all."

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/mar/16/call-for-more-support-for-parents-as-data-shows-one-in-33-children-in-protective-services

Megan Mitchell is quite correct in saying that child protection is NOT a science. Neither will be the excellent assessments she calls for, because they will be based on somebody`s opinion, and that is not science either.

We have to ask why is there a rise in children being taken into care in the developed world?  Parenting is no worse - probably better than it has ever been before. I remember being skelped as a form of `Don`t do that` from my parents but I certainly do not approve of it myself and I am not the only one. So what accounts for the rise in child protection cases?

You know, I think that rests with what our governments are doing while they pretend to be so concerned about children`s wellbeing. They are now controlling larger and larger sections of the population through child protection and some people are making a nice living for themselves while the government does that. This is not happening randomly.