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. 2019 Dec 4;14(12):e0226031.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0226031. eCollection 2019.

Child protection, domestic violence, and ethnic minorities: Narrative results from a mixed methods study in Australia

Pooja Sawrikar  1
Affiliations

Child protection, domestic violence, and ethnic minorities: Narrative results from a mixed methods study in Australia

Pooja Sawrikar. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Objective: To help address a long-standing gap in research and knowledge, this paper explores the issue of what service providers need to be aware of to best meet the needs of ethnic minority children and families who have come to the attention of child protection authorities and have substantiated reports of domestic violence.

Method: The results are written in narrative form, combining informed insider perspectives with a small subset of data drawn from a larger rigorous mixed methods study in Australia, that involved an exhaustive literature review, review of 120 randomly selected case files, and in-depth qualitative interviews with 29 ethnic minority families involved in the child protection system and 17 child protection caseworkers.

Results and significance: Three issues for ethnic minorities relating to the nexus of child protection and domestic violence are identified: (i) being in the child protection system tarnishes family name, which is greatly valued, leading to a preference for child maltreatment and family violence to remain private, and for compliance with Apprehended Violence Orders (AVOs) and service uptake/engagement to be low, (ii) family cohesion is also highly valued, so family violence victims may sacrifice their own personal safety to protect the family unity and cultural safety of their children, and (iii) family violence interacts with cultural factors for ethnic minorities but does occur in all families; attributing it to race or culture would be racism. Several implications for practice are identified, falling under a broad umbrella approach that asks for child protection authorities and family violence agencies to work collaboratively. A call for empirically rigorous future research is also made to ensure practice is evidence-based.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

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References

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Publication types

Grants and funding

I would like to thank NSW FaCS and SPRC UNSW for jointly funding the Postdoctoral Fellowship (2007–2010) on which this article is based. The author was responsible for all stages of the study including proposal design, ethics approval, data collection, data analysis, and writing up and dissemination. It draws original data from reports written for the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Family and Community Services (FaCS), co-funded under a three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship (2007–2010) with the Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). It also draws on a brief discussion of the interaction between domestic violence (DV) and culture in child protection matters in a recently published book [5]. However, this article has expanded on this discussion, making it overall different from the reports and book. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.