I've had it with this place

I'm fed up with work. Sometimes it seems that all my job is is to write down bad things that are happening to children. Sometimes once I've written these things down, we will all have a meeting and agree that these things are bad. Sometimes after these meetings we will come up with a plan to talk to someone about something in the hope that these bad incidences might reduce. But really all i seem to do is keep lists of bad things happening to really quite nice kids.

In this country a child cannot be removed from their parents until something really bad has actually happened to them. And this i understand as the incident has to stand up in the court of law. However, this can result in unhappy and unsteady situations continuing in terrible conditions until an ultimate bad thing will give social services the power to remove a child. In Australia you can remove a child if there is strong evidence that significant harm will happen to the child. Here we literally wait for SIGNIFICANT harm to happen to a child before we will consider removing it.

Similarly, if the parent is doing very little for the child, or is emotionally abusive but the child is not deemed to be being harmed significantly, ie not being sent to school and being out down all the time is not significant abuse, then they will continue on a Child Protection Plan for at least 2 years before a consideration for removal will be given, at this time then, the point will be considered that the child has now adapted in these two years and will no longer engage with social workers, nor is capable of significant change due to over two entrenched years of this living, so the situation continues. Where is the hope?

Do we hope for the harm or do we hope for the adaptation? Either way the out come is a significantly harmed adolescent.