AIFS seminar series
2010
- Tuesday 9 November 2010, AIFS Seminar Room, Melbourne
Fractured families, fragmented responsibilities: Responding to family violence in a federal system
Professor Croucher was appointed to the Australian Law Reform Commission in February 2007, and in December 2009 as President. Prior to this she was Dean of Law at Macquarie University (Nov 1999-Feb 2007), where she still holds a Chair. Professor Croucher has lectured and published extensively, principally in the fields of equity, trusts, property, inheritance and legal history. At the ALRC, her most recent work was to oversee the family violence inquiry. Professor Croucher also continues her academic writing where she can, around the exigencies and demands of ALRC inquiries.ABSTRACT
In 2002, the Family Law Council considered that "there is no greater problem in family law today than the problems of adequately addressing child protection concerns in proceedings under the Family Law". In October 2010, the ALRC and NSWLRC concluded a joint inquiry into the interaction of laws responding to family violence across this federal–state divide. A recurring theme in the inquiry was that families may be involved in proceedings in more than one jurisdiction and often bounced between them—with the potential of falling into the gaps between the systems.
The problems of the division of responsibility between the Commonwealth and the states and territories are considerable—and the greatest impact is in relation to children.
This presentation explores the challenges for responding to family violence in a federal system within the constraints of a law reform body.
View Croucher presentation (PDF 15.2 MB)
- 13 October 2010, AIFS Seminar Room, Melbourne
Safeguarding and Protecting Children Across the United Kingdom
Dr Sharon Vincent has been involved in research relating to child protection and child welfare in the UK for more than 10 years. She worked as a researcher in the Social Work Services Inspectorate for more than four years, where she was a member of the team that undertook the National Audit and Review of Child Protection in Scotland. She also worked as a Senior Research Officer in the Scottish Executive, where she had responsibility for research on child poverty, and as a researcher at Barnardo's, where she worked on a number of research projects relating to child protection and children's mental health and wellbeing.Since joining the University of Edinburgh/NSPCC Centre for UK-wide Learning in Child Protection (CLiCP) in 2007, Dr Vincent has undertaken a programme of work on child deaths and serious abuse. She is the author of Learning from Child Deaths and Serious Abuse in Scotland, and is currently undertaking a study of child death review processes in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada. She has also undertaken research on resilience and comparison of child protection processes across the UK in the context of devolution.
ABSTRACT
The University of Edinburgh/NSPCC Centre for UK-wide Learning in Child Protection (CLiCP) was set up three years ago to track and monitor developments in child protection policy across the UK, amid growing awareness that devolution was creating new possibilities for divergent policy development across the UK in relation to safeguarding and protecting children. While the possibility of divergence existed, the extent to which this had happened in practice was not well understood. And while policy-makers, practitioners and academics had detailed information about the system in which they were working, they had scant knowledge of other UK systems and little oversight of developments across the UK as a whole.
As a Senior Research Fellow at CLiCP, Dr Sharon Vincent will provide an overview of developments in policy to safeguard and protect children across the UK. She will also consider the similarities and differences between the different systems in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and draw out some broad themes and potential learning.
View Vincent presentation (PDF 786 KB)
- 8 September 2010, State Library of Victoria Conference Centre, Melbourne
Current Trends in child abuse and neglect in the United States: What might Australians learn and disregard from this evidence base?
Professor Marianne Berry, the recently appointed Director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection, is an international leader in child and family welfare. Professor Berry, who has visited Australia a number of times to give keynote addresses at major conferences, has extensive experience across the spectrum of child welfare policy, practice and research, with a particular interest in program and practice evaluation, family preservation and adoption.She began her career as a social worker, working in schools, child protection services and as a policy analyst before moving into research and teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where she gained her PhD. As co-founder and Director of the Centre for Child Welfare at the University of Texas, Professor Berry led a major study of adoptive children and their families and developed a certification process for child welfare workers.
Up until her most recent appointment, Professor Berry has been based at the University of Kansas School of Social Welfare since 1998, spearheading a number of major research projects and training contracts to improve child and family welfare policy and practice in the United States.
ABSTRACT
Having been the director of the Australian Centre for Child Protection for four weeks, this presenter will not pretend to explicate the causes and consequences of child maltreatment in Australia. She will also not make the common blunder of educating Australians in the correct, that is, American, evidence base for effective interventions to prevent and treat child abuse and neglect. This presentation will instead review the American evidence base, with a discussion of the practices and policies that might and might not be effective within the diverse cultures and policy frameworks in Australia.
The Institute presents this seminar as a partner of the National Association for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect, the coordinator of National Child Protection Week, 5-12 September 2010
View Berry presentation (PDF 348 KB)
- 11 May 2010, AIFS Seminar Room, Melbourne
The recent transformation of the American family: Witnessing and exploring social change
Frank F. Furstenberg's interest in the American family began at Columbia University where he received his PhD. in 1967. His recent books include: Destinies of the Disadvantaged: The Politics of Teen Childbearing (2007), On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy, with Richard A. Settersten, Jr., and Ruben G. Rumbaut, (2005), Managing to Make It: Urban Families in High-Risk Neighborhoods with Thomas Cook, Jacquelynne Eccles, Glen Elder, and Arnold Sameroff (1999). His current research projects focus on the family in the context of disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods, adolescent sexual behaviour, cross national research on children’s well-being, urban education and the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
He is current Chair of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood and has received numerous honors for his contributions to research on adolescence and public policy. He was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation. He was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bocconi, Milan, Italy.ABSTRACT
This paper provides a broad overview of the changes that have taken place in American families over the past four decades, roughly the span of my professional career. It provides a modest theory of how and why certain changes have occurred, and their consequences for the form and functioning of the family. Specifically, I focus on controversies regarding the institution of marriage, parenthood, and kinship more broadly. In outlining the changes that have occurred, I weave my way through the arguments that the family is in decline vs. the family is merely adapting to current conditions - a venerable debate that has occurred for at least a century. In the conclusion, I suggest a few themes or tensions that might suggest directions of change in the future. Along the way, I take note of unresolved issues and attractive areas for further research.
View Furstenberg presentation (PDF 11 MB)
Listen to Furstenberg presentation (MP3 12.6 MB)
Seminar cancelled due to travel restrictions resulting from the volcanic eruption in Iceland. We apologise for any inconvenience and hope to host Professor Joshi in the near future.
27 April 2010, AIFS Seminar Room, MelbourneChildren of the 21st Century: An overview of the first five years of the UK Millennium Cohort
Heather Joshi is Professor of Economic and Development Demography at the Institute of Education, University of London. She is Director of the UK Millennium Cohort Study, and was the Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies from 2003 to 2010, its Deputy Director from 1994. She is also the Co-Chair of the European Child Cohort Network fostering international collaboration and comparison between cohort studies. Heather is an economic demographer who has used a number of British longitudinal datasets. Her research has been mainly concerned with the family, the labour market, gender, child development, and also includes spatial issues. She is keen to promote comparative work with Australian data.
ABSTRACT
The Millennium Cohort is the fourth national birth cohort study in Britain. Like its predecessors, it has many purposes and spans many domains of a child’s life. It is a research resource for many users. Unlike them it has a complex survey design enabling a focus on ethnic minorities and families living in areas of high child poverty.
The evolving structure and content of the study’s first four waves (to age 7) will be described.
Some themes emerging in the results of the first 3 sweeps will be reviewed (Children of the 21ist Century, the first 5 years ,eds Hansen, Joshi and Dex, Policy Press, Bristol, 2010): these include:
• Poverty dynamics (family structure and employment);
• Family resources, parenting, and other predictors of child development at 5;
• Diminishing ethnic differentials;
• The intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage; and
• The protection of child well being by public policy in a polarizing society.
Future data collection will be outlined, along with the scope for further analysis including international comparison.- 20 April 2010, AIFS Seminar Room, Melbourne
Early childhood experiences and school achievement: Do trajectories start earlier than we think?
Linda J. Harrison is Associate Professor of Early Childhood Education at Charles Sturt University. She holds a number of large, longitudinal research grants that are investigating infant, toddler and preschoolers' experiences of child care/early education and the determinants of childhood socio-emotional, cognitive and speech-language development.
Linda is the lead author of the Child Care and Early Education in Australia report, released by the Minister for Early Childhood Education and Child Care, the Honourable Kate Ellis, in January 2010.ABSTRACT
Recognition of the critical importance of children’s early years has underpinned a new and “ambitious package of reforms to help children start out on positive pathways in life” (DEEWR, 2009, p. 1). This includes a series of initiatives to improve access to quality early childhood education and child care: the National Quality Standard (COAG, 2009), the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (DEEWR, 2009), and (by 2013) universal access to a play-based education program delivered by a university-trained early childhood teacher for 15 hours per week for 40 weeks in the year before starting school. A focus of these and other educational reforms is to build positive attitudes and competencies in literacy and numeracy – the essential “foundation for success in all learning areas” (MCEETYA, 2008, p. 8). In this context, school achievement is largely seen as being driven by children’s early literacy and numeracy abilities. What is yet to be determined, however, are the factors that contribute to these abilities, particularly in the early childhood years.In this presentation, I review emerging evidence from two Australian studies (Child Care Choices, a 7-year NSW-based study; and The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children – K cohort Waves 1 and 2, a national study) to examine the predictors and sequelae of children’s early literacy and numeracy abilities. What are the dimensions of quality in early childhood programs? Do these dimensions of quality contribute to literacy and numeracy outcomes? Can we determine when the effects of quality are most influential? And if so, when is the best time to intervene? These and other related questions will be explored in this talk, to uncover unanswered questions in research and flag new directions for policy and practice in early childhood.
View Harrison presentation (PDF 684 KB)
- 25 March 2010, AIFS Seminar Room, Melbourne
Why do English-speaking countries have relatively high fertility?
ABSTRACT
In broad terms, the division in Europe between countries with very low fertility and countries with sustainable fertility matches Esping-Anderson’s classification of the same countries into ‘conservative’ and ‘social democratic’ (Esping-Anderson, 1990). A central difference between these two types relates to their preferred models of the family. The conservative countries hold more to the ‘breadwinner’ model of the family while the social democratic countries seek higher levels of gender equity within the family and in the workplace. State support in both conservative and social democratic countries is designed to be consistent with these differing views of the family. Would we then not expect fertility to be very low in Esping-Anderson’s third group of countries, the ‘liberal’ countries, essentially English-speaking countries? By the Esping-Anderson definition, liberal countries are notable for their lack of support for families from public sources. Instead, according to Esping-Anderson, families must rely upon market provision for the services that they may need to combine work and family and they must rely on market employment to generate the income they need to support their children. Contrary to this theory, whether measured by contemporary cross-sectional fertility or completed cohort fertility, with the exception of Canada, English-speaking countries now have the highest fertility rates among the countries that were classified by Esping-Anderson. Given the strength of theoretical explanation that arises from comparative studies of fertility in Europe, the paper examines why fertility in English-speaking countries seems not to follow expectation.
- 23 February 2010, AIFS Seminar Room, Melbourne
Return on investment: Where is the community sector making the biggest change?
Clare Martin is the CEO of the Australian Council of Social Service, the peak council of the community services and welfare sector, and the national voice of low income and disadvantaged Australians. ACOSS’ national membership links a broad spectrum of community welfare services across Australia. Clare was appointed CEO of ACOSS in November 2008. Clare was the Northern Territory’s Chief Minister for over six years, leading the Territory’s first ever Labor Government. Clare was the Labor Member for the electorate of Fannie Bay for 13 years and was Opposition Leader in the Northern Territory Parliament from 1999 to 2001. Clare is a Director of the National Roundtable of Not for Profit Organisations; and has been appointed to the Federal Government’s Community Response Task Force. She is also a Board member of: The Climate Institute, Griffith Institute for social and behavioral research, Somerville Board, NT Cricket and Woolworths limited corporate responsibility panel. Before her parliamentary career, Clare was a journalist and broadcaster with the ABC for 17 years, working in Sydney, Canberra and Darwin in both radio and television. Clare was raised in Sydney in a large Catholic family and is a graduate of Sydney University. Her partner, David Alderman, is a barrister in Darwin, and they have two children, both students, studying in Queensland.
ABSTRACT
Tens of millions of dollars are spent each year by the community services sector to assist low income and disadvantaged Australians tackle some of the diverse problems they are facing...from unemployment through to homelessness. Those dollars come from Government or from private sources. So what results do we, as a country, get from that investment and, more importantly, what positive changes are there for individual Australians? This presentation tracks the pathway of some of those dollars.
View Martin presentation (PDF 384 KB)
Listen to Martin presentation (MP3 10.7 MB)