There are so many things we *could* do as a collective, but does that mean we *can*? One thing that struck me about this report on the Victorian child protection system was that while the demand for services, and by extension funding, is increasing all the time, the involvement of the general population is decreasing - in the sense that the number of people willing to take on foster care is significantly less than it was 10 years ago - and that as a result the report even went so far as to talk about "professionalising" foster care.

And ok, maybe that's a reflection of an attitude that we expect government to do social interventions on our behalf rather than do them ourselves. That seems to be a reasonable way to operate, as long as we are honest about paying the taxes we are obliged to pay and we believe that the government is providing value for money.

However if this approach to service delivery is going to continue then we need to put more power into the hands of the people making the decisions. We need to support government to decide to implement more extensive early intervention services to prevent child abuse before it happens, and to access those "lifetime cost" savings that this approach suggests are there - and if this implementation is going to cost more in the short term we have to be willing to pay more tax to enable it.

Because if we don't then we are not just opting not to address child abuse and neglec - we are actively contributing to it.

[cont]

But how do we go about this? I'd like to suggest, unlike the author, that this is more than just a "no-brainer", because in order to achieve gains in funding for child protection then we need more people to care about it, especially in our increasingly fragmented, community-less public sphere activities. And so essentially I think that what the report is suggesting is that we have lost touch with what child abuse really is, and about how damiging it is for those who suffer from it, and that this needs to be rectified. So I would hope that the Vic government, and organisations like Connections UnitingCare, don't shy away from producing public campaigns alerting people to what child abuse really is about - because it is only a society which doesn't know about child abuse (and through know fault of its own I might add, because the aim is to eradicate it completely after all) which would fail to care enough to do more to stop it.