Ms Siobhan Greene:

Adding to what everybody has said, I agree with my colleagues. In the family support services within Barnardos, which is different to this service, we do a lot of work around supporting parents whose children are at risk of coming into care. It is the very early stages, before this point where it enters the care system or even the legal system. We experience the parents who are very traumatised. Most parents of children who come into care have experienced adversity and trauma in their own lives and are very easily triggered by systems and bureaucracy and the way things are set up. One of the things we would like to see in changes to the system is for it to become more trauma informed, that is, to see the parent and consider what has happened to this parent rather than what is wrong with them, and what the system needs to do to be able to respond in a different way and in a more open way to really help to bring about change. Some of those things are about creating safety for the parent, being really clear in our expectations of what the parents need to do in order to be able to keep their children living with them, or to have the children returned home, and offering them the right support passage package to be able to do that. In Barnardos we do a lot of work around strengthening the parent-child relationship and the attachment to make sure that if the children do go into care, there would be that continued quality access. Parents of children in care are the most important people in those children's lives and will continue to be so. It is very important they have that continued relationship, even if the children are in care. We spend a lot of time doing that,and also working to strengthen the parent's capacity be able to parent and hopefully prevent the children from going into care. We need to think about that earlier piece as well as very much focusing on what the system needs to do to change once we are in that legal system. I totally appreciate the Senator's questions about trying to make that more informed. Trying to take some of the trauma-informed thinking and applying it to childcare and court system would be a good first step.