After years and YEARS of enduring family violence, witnessing horrific domestic abuse, neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse and sexual abuse by my own care givers, I left home on my own accord the day after my 13th birthday.
After a year surviving on my own on the streets, I found myself as a foster child in the Northern Territory care system. Between emergency short term placements, over crowding, my own behavioural issues and school instability, I went through 27 foster placements in just two short years.
In regards to the deep sadness we’ve all collectively felt recently and the anger we’re all still feeling about the failures and obvious lapse in the duty of care, of kumanjayi little baby in Alice Springs, I feel as I know we all do, as community, something needs to change..
I know my personal opinion may not be needed, yet I feel the need to get some thoughts off my chest. So please let’s have an open discussion.
People should be angry.
I believe most Australians outside the Territory do not fully understand how deep and longstanding these systemic failures really are. I am not talking about race or religion or a minority in a social deficit. I’m speaking on where the buck ends.
It ends at the place we all should be able to count on -
The NT government, the Australia wide Government. Us and all of us.
The Northern Territory has always been operating under conditions very different to the rest of Australia. In many ways, it has historically lagged behind the eastern states in infrastructure, services, funding, workforce capacity and long-term social investment.
Yet despite this, child protection legislation and policy often follows a broad national “blanket approach” that assumes all communities function the same way.
They absolutely do not.
The NT child protection system does not adequately cater to the realities of entrenched poverty, overcrowding, intergenerational trauma, addiction, remote isolation, family violence and severe workforce shortages that exist across many parts of the Territory.
The result is a system that is permanently overwhelmed. Always has been and currently still is.
After growing up in care myself, I became a volunteer youth advocate for children in care in the NT.
Later, when I turned 18, I worked part-time as a Community Facilitator for The CREATE Foundation, the peak advocacy body for children and young people in out-of-home care.
As part of that role, I travelled throughout the Territory, to Alice Springs, Katherine, Groote Eylandt and Oenpelli, delivering updated training to case workers, foster carers and kinship carers, the training was built by foster kids, for foster kids.
This invaluable training was compiled first hand from the wants and needs of the children in care.
I was involved in the very first Charter for Children’s Rights in Foster Care developed in Australia. We interviewed children across the Territory and Australia through an independent non-government organisation.
We gathered testimony directly from abused and neglected children and worked alongside respected professionals, including the NT Children’s Commissioner, to develop structural recommendations aimed at reforming the system.
At the time, many of us genuinely believed this would be a turning point.
We thought that finally the government had enough evidence, enough lived experience, enough frontline insight to create meaningful long-term change.
I genuinely believed at the time that if people followed the mandatory reporting processes properly, if concerns were documented correctly, and if reports of abuse were escalated through the appropriate channels, then children would ultimately be protected.
But over time, I realised something devastating.
The reports were being made.
The concerns were being raised.
People were trying.
And still, children remained in dangerous environments.
Throughout my work, I witnessed neglect, emotional abuse, physical abuse, and at times received disclosures of sexual abuse from children themselves. Like many others working in the sector, I believed the system would respond if enough evidence was gathered and enough people advocated strongly enough.
But within only a few years, despite new recommendations, new frameworks and new charters, very little changed in practice.
Children were still being left in unsafe homes.
Workers were still sounding alarms.
Reports were still being filed.
And frontline staff still had their hands tied by policy, procedure, funding limitations and legal thresholds that prevented intervention until situations became catastrophic or became mainstream news worthy.
What many people outside the system and outside the NT don’t understand is that a huge number of workers inside it were struggling to the most dire extents to hold it all together.
The Northern Territory government’s own case workers were often doing everything within their power to help keep kids safe, but were constrained by red tape, impossible caseloads and policies that made removing children extraordinarily difficult unless strict thresholds were met.
Police repeatedly attended the same homes, reporting the same violence and abuse over and over again. Paramedics got to know the same injured children and traumatised families by name.
Everyone was documenting the harm.
Very few people had the authority, resources or legislative flexibility to stop it.
And the emotional toll on workers became enormous.
At the time, FACS workers, or Family and Children’s Services workers as they were then known, began taking their own lives.
From memory, there were around six suicides of FACs workers in a single year that i was working as a child advocate in the NT.
I’d previously known 2 of these workers from the Palmerston FACs branch. Good people, people with families and lives otherwise worth living, that I believe had tried their very best.
These were people carrying impossible emotional loads while constantly feeling powerless to create real safety for the very children they were entrusted.
That was when I realised I could not continue doing the work I loved.
The hopelessness of witnessing abuse, reporting it properly, advocating relentlessly, and still seeing children left in harm’s way became psychologically crushing.
Even within NGOs, many of us felt the same despair as government workers. There was a shared feeling across the sector that everyone was patching holes in a sinking ship.
Some people eventually left the sector entirely.
Some left the Territory because the emotional weight became unbearable.
And tragically, some lost their lives.
Others are still there today, case workers, youth workers, foster carers, police, nurses, paramedics, advocates, trying every day to protect children in a system that often feels fundamentally unequipped to deal with the scale of trauma and disadvantage it faces.
I don’t have the answers. I don’t pretend to.
But I do know this:
The failures we are seeing today did not appear overnight. They are the result of decades of systemic overload, chronic under-resourcing, bureaucratic paralysis and governments repeatedly attempting to apply one-size-fits-all solutions to some of the most complex social conditions and areas in the country.
We absolutely deserve accountability. Children deserve safety.
I also think it is important as Australians, we realise and understand that many people inside this system have been fighting for these children for decades, often at enormous personal cost, and many of those warnings went, and continue to go unheard.
We need answers, we need funding, we need accountability and we need change.
WE NEED REAL GENERATIONAL CHANGE!