‘Hanging on by a thread’: Child safety officers leaving job daily
By Cloe Read
Several Queensland child safety and youth justice workers quit the job each day, with many others “hanging on by a thread” under extreme stress and low pay, a union says.
Retention issues had long plagued both departments, but the situation had reached boiling point.
Child safety officers are leaving their job amid increasing levels of stress and abuse.
Workers were subjected to an increasing level of abuse each shift, and were unable to help children more than the bare minimum, the Together union said.
The union, representing workers across the state, said staff were also struggling under poor pay conditions, with private child protection agencies offering more money, affecting the department’s ability to attract workers and retain them.
Workers who are members of the union have planned a protest outside the offices of politicians and service centres on Thursday next week in a bid to have their concerns addressed by the Queensland government.
Together branch secretary Alex Scott said workers rejected the government’s recent bargaining offer because it had not addressed key issues of retention, workloads and cultural safety.
“Review after review has recognised that excessive workloads and high staff turnover have negative outcomes for the children, young people and families that our members support,” Scott said.
“Queenslanders know that more is desperately needed to support children and young people known to both the youth justice and child protection systems.
“But many of the workers in those systems are hanging on by a thread.”
The union said every day they heard of stressed workers, particularly child safety officers, leaving their job.
Workers were struggling to do more than the bare minimum to ensure a child was not in immediate danger in the next 24 hours, with officers wanting to help more but being unable to because of inadequate resourcing and insufficient pay and conditions, the union said.
Staff have also been subjected to an increase in abuse across the workforce, with a number of children known to both Youth Justice and Child Safety departments.
Workers in youth detention centres have also been affected and last month almost 100 staff protested outside the Brisbane and West Moreton Youth Detention Centres after a Brisbane staff member was allegedly punched in the face.
Earlier this year, Queensland ranked the worst state for youth detention capacity pressure, with an average nightly detention centre population of 275 across the 2021-22 financial year.
A spate of serious crime, including the death of Emma Lovell, also prompted the state Labor government to introduce tougher penalties for juvenile criminals, but the main detention centres have been at capacity for years, with children often housed in police watchhouses to manage overflow.
Scott said the union would call on the government to make workers an offer that addressed the issues they were facing.
“The alternative is a system where workers continue to walk out the door, leaving Queensland’s children and vulnerable youth without support,” he said.
“At the moment, workers in child safety and youth justice are forced to forfeit tens of thousands of hours that they have already worked due to workload pressures.
“In 2022, Child Safety Officers alone ‘donated’ 405 working weeks of accrued time that they were not able to access.”